by Ambassador Robert E. White, CIP President

With the calculated daring of a master poker player, Mel Zelaya has called the bluff of the coup makers, and they have no alternative but to fold.

The de facto president, Rob Micheletti, must now either accept Zelaya’s return to the presidency, under the conditions outlined in the plan negotiated by President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, or take a long vacation in Miami, where so many of the rich Hondurans who financed the coup maintain their seaside mansions.

Like all Latin Americans, Hondurans love and admire courage, valor and the bold, clean stroke. For the first time in the country’s history, the common people have a champion and the economic and military elites have suffered a crushing setback. Not a defeat, but a stunning reversal of fortune that will slowly but inexorably reorder the politics of Honduras.

As Fernanda Lopez, a Honduran student at Yale, has written, the consistent message of the powerful Honduran business community to every recent president upon taking office has been, “you are only temporary, while we are permanent.” The message was very clear: if you challenge us you will loose.

It will now be up to the Honduran people to demand a constituent assembly, and perhaps rewrite the constitution to permit reelection of a first-term president. This will go a long way towards establishing a democracy where political power has a fighting chance against the concentration of economic power that for too long has dominated Honduras.