When is a Coup not a Coup?

Last Sunday the Honduran army bundled up President Manuel Zelaya and dropped him off in neighboring Costa Rica, telling him his services were no longer needed. The backstory is that Pres. Zelaya was planning, that very Sunday, to hold a controversial referendum about changing the Honduran constitution to allow him to run for a second term - this despite the fact that the Honduran constitution very clearly states that the part about the president's term in office can't be amended.

The military's move has drawn a lot of international criticism from the likes of Barack Obama, the Organization of American States and the United Nation, just to name a few, all of whom branded the event a "coup" and called for the immediate return of Mr. Zelaya to the presidency (RealClearWorld provided a nice roundup of commentary on what's going on in Honduras here).

But is it really a coup? Former Honduran Presidential adviser Octavio Sánchez makes a fairly compelling argument that rather than staging a coup, the Honduran military was in fact upholding the constitution. The core of his argument is Article 239 of the Honduran constitution, which limits the president to one term in office. It goes on to say: "whoever violates this law or proposes its reform...will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years." Sánchez says that Zelaya's trying to hold a referendum on amending the constitution to allow him to run for a second term was a direct violation of Article 239, and that under law the military had to step in and remove him from power.

Since I'm not fluent in Spanish, I'll have to take Sánchez's word on the text of Article 239, but assuming it is as described, he makes a good case that what happened in Honduras as less of a coup, and more - like Sánchez says - a proper exercise of the rule of law.