I know absolutely nothing about this guy, and I don't know enough of the Honduran constitution to know if what he was doing was actually illegal or not, but even if it was, surely there is some constitutional provision for removing a crooked or overreaching First Executive, involving something like constitutionally drawn-up formal charges and a trial. But a midnight raid and a sudden exile by sunrise sounds pretty hastily improvised to me. My guess is that if the slightest resistance had been offered, a bloodbath would have resulted. It would have been Allende all over again. Of course, just a whisper of "Comunista" is all that's usually necessary to suspend the rules and initiate "un golpe de estado".

If the circumstances had been exactly the same, but the President had been a rightist, I'm sure the conservatives on this board would be screaming at the top of their lungs and pointing this out to us in tedious and annoying detail. As always, when South America is concerned, left wing dictators are defined by different criteria, judged with different standards, and face different fates when they lose, than right wing dictators do. And the army always seems to be the one who decides which is which.