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By Scott Wilson Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, July 1, 2009; 12:22 PM

President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras is preparing to return to his country after the military pushed him from office earlier this week.

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But a quick look at recent Latin American and Caribbean history shows that presidents who do return successfully after a coup are rarely the leaders they were when bounced from power -- a consideration that adds a complicating element to the Obama administration's diplomatic calculations.

Zelaya is hoping to land in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, within days. If he does, he'll likely be flanked by human shields, led by the Organization of American States Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza, to prevent the immediate arrest that his unelected successor has promised.

The Obama administration has said it favors Zelaya's return. But the episode highlights, more than anything, the administration's challenge in managing an unarmed left in Latin America that has made huge gains in recent years and is often at odds with many U.S. interests.

In the decades after the successful Cuban revolution, armed Marxist insurgencies in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru and other countries consumed all the political space available for leftist opposition, marginalizing a democratic left that may have emerged from the universities, labor unions and elsewhere.

Each insurgency was different, especially in the domestic support it enjoyed, but all were condemned by successive U.S. administrations for the means they were using to achieve their purported ends of creating more equitable societies in a region twisted by class and economic imbalance. The policy turned many in the region against the "Yanqui imperialists" to the north.

Obama confronted this troubled legacy during his trip to Latin America and the Caribbean in April, but history's hold is strong for many leaders of the region's left. As a young lieutenant colonel in 1993, Hugo ChA!vez tried to overthrow a highly unpopular, if elected, government of Venezuela. He went to jail and emerged at the end of the decade as a self-described democratic revolutionary. He won the presidency in 1998, rewrote the constitution (allowing, among other things, for a second presidential term), then campaigned for its approval by popular vote. He has been a revolutionary by referendum, although his autocratic tendencies have increased the longer he has held power.

There was very little a Bush administration that promoted democracy could say against his "Bolivarian revolution," which quickly drew followers in Ecuador, Bolivia and, more recently, Honduras.

Then came a confused day in April 2002 when ChA!vez, following hours of violent street protests, was forced from office in a military coup. The Bush administration quickly labeled it a voluntary resignation. But within days, ChA!vez was back in Miraflores, the Venezuelan White House, with a chastened pledge to govern with less class-based vitriol and socialist zeal.

That didn't last long, in part because the opposition didn't want it to. By the end of the year, ChA!vez had solidified his hold on power by using a crippling set of private-sector strikes against his government, arrests of the officers responsible for his ouster and a reordering of the military's upper ranks to ensure his place in office. He has been pushing his statist revolution more aggressively ever since -- precisely what the coup leaders and their enablers in Washington sought to prevent.

The Bush administration's tacit endorsement of his removal gave ChA!vez the foil he needed to intimidate an opposition-dominated media and a business class that had favored the coup. (The interim president was the head of the country's Chamber of Commerce, no less.) ChA!vez has never let the country or the region forget that the United States was once -- and, in his view, still is -- out to get him and leftist allies such as Zelaya.

By contrast, Obama quickly called the Zelaya ouster a coup, and he has endorsed his return even though Zelaya is widely unpopular in his country. The principle of democracy is at stake, Obama and Latin American diplomats have said.

But will Zelaya remain a democrat? Others who have returned to power arguably have not. Haiti, for one, never recovered from election, coup and return.

The Clinton administration reinstalled Jean-Bertrand Aristide as Haiti's president in 1994, three years after a military junta kicked the liberation priest out of office just seven months into his term. He languished in angry exile in the United States until the Clinton administration brokered his reinstatement and sent in troops to support it.

By nearly all accounts, Aristide reclaimed office a different person. Always interested in bettering the condition of Haiti's poor, Aristide and his Lavalas movement (which in Creole means a cleansing flood) rolled over the elite-dominated opposition that managed the country's distorted economy and lost faith in democratic institutions. Haiti's politics, long dominated by the carnivorous Duvalier family dictatorship, had always been a winner-take-all enterprise. Even to some of his allies, Aristide appeared to embrace that governing ideal, especially after he was reelected in 2000.

In his second term, he moved swiftly to solidify his hold on the country in part by using gangs of supporters to intimidate any opposition movement. Opposition journalists were killed. Corruption flourished in the presidential palace and beyond.

Drug kingpins, allied with Aristide (and, in some high-profile cases, the CIA), emerged to exert their influence through violence and cash in a country without institutions. In the spring of 2004, Aristide was ousted again by an insurgency led by former military officers. Far from condemning the rebellion, U.S. diplomats escorted Aristide onto a plane for an African exile as the rebels advanced on the capital.

There are reasons to believe the return of Zelaya, a wealthy rancher who has moved toward the ChA!vez left during his time in office, will be different. For one, Honduras is scheduled to hold presidential elections in November, and Zelaya is prohibited from running again ( a restriction he was trying to change before his ouster). And his unpopularity stands in contrast to ChA!vez and Aristide, who both enjoyed enormous support from an ardent group of followers. How the Obama administration intends to ensure Zelaya's return and preserve democracy in Honduras will be apparent in the days ahead.

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OAS Sets Deadline for Honduras to Reinstate Zelaya

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