That is because most have tired of his rule, and blame him for the constitutional crisis that preceded the coup. It was precipitated by his attempt to emulate Mr Chávez by organising a referendum to call a constituent assembly, which he seemed to hope would allow him to remain in power beyond January, when his four-year term ends. Under Honduras’s constitution, only Congress can call referendums and it was against one. Mr Zelaya went ahead anyway. When the head of the armed forces refused to carry out an order to distribute the ballot papers, the president sacked him. The Supreme Court reinstated the general, and the electoral tribunal ordered the ballots to be confiscated. In response, Mr Zelaya led a group of supporters to an air force base where they carted off the ballots. He instructed public employees to collect signatures for the constituent assembly. Hours before voting was to begin, the army seized the president.

The army said he was arrested for defying the Supreme Court, though no explanation has been given for why he was not brought before a Honduran judge. The legislature then voted almost unanimously to install Mr Micheletti, a Liberal rival of Mr Zelaya, as his successor. Congress has no constitutional power to remove the president. Mr Micheletti produced a curiously worded resignation letter which Mr Zelaya denies having written or signed.

These events took the region by surprise. Honduras, although poor and ravaged by corruption and violent gangs, had a seemingly stable democracy. But signs of strife were there. Mr Zelaya’s presidency has been marked by a rise in crime, corruption scandals and economic populism. He pushed through big wage increases for teachers and government workers. When money ran short, he turned to Mr Chávez for petrodollars. Despite more than $100m in Venezuelan aid, the government has stopped paying some suppliers.

The deeper and more troubling error in the current rush to judgment on poor Honduras has to do with the philosophical nature of democracy itself. The democracy fundamentalists -- from the right, demanding intervention in Iran, for example; and from the left, demanding intervention in Honduras -- have become so fanatical in their moralism that they have lost sight of the fact that democracy is not the same as legitimacy.

The distinctions are crucial. The threat growing in Latin America, Asia and Africa, according to Freedom House, is not dictatorship but what political theorists call illiberal democracy. Venezuela is the poster case in which a president, Hugo Chávez, is democratically elected and then goes about, through democratic referendums and Congress, constraining freedom by changing laws and institutions. Chávez and others like him create the "tyranny of the majority" that theorists behind the American Constitution warned was the weakness of democracy by itself, without constitutional liberalism protecting the rights of the individual.

The real issue in most of the region's past military coups has been the failure of the political systems that led to them. The dirty secret about the region's history since at least World War II is that most coups were popular, carried out not by an avaricious military seeking power but by civilians banging on the barracks doors demanding intervention to halt political or economic chaos.

Fernández de Kirchner, for example, conveniently ignores that the coups that overthrew Juan Perón in the 1950s and Isabel Perón in 1976 were met by millions of Argentines celebrating in the streets. What gives a coup a bad name is the abuses that usually follow once the military is in power.

Which brings us back to Honduras. Brodi Kemp, a researcher at Harvard's Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, says: "You could argue that Zelaya gave up his claim to moral legitimacy when he went outside the constitution. If you accept that, then what do the other political actors do? . . . Sometimes an act is legitimate even though it proceeded illegitimately."

Polls and the tepid demonstrations in Zelaya's favor indicate that he has little popular support. That is not reason enough for a coup, but the many factors suggest that while his removal should have been better handled, some humility is called for in helping Honduras work through a constitutional crisis.

President Obama was correct in calling Zelaya's ouster illegal, while Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declined to call the action a coup -- in hopes of bringing Zelaya back into government but with wings clipped. In this instance, the U.S. government played the morally right hand.

Mr. Chávez has also exported this brand of one-man-one-vote-once democracy throughout the region. He's succeeded to varying degrees in Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and Nicaragua, where his allies have stretched the law and tried to dominate the media and the courts. Mexico escaped in 2006 when Felipe Calderón linked his leftwing opponent to chavismo and barely won the presidency.

In Honduras Mr. Chávez funneled Veneuzelan oil money to help Mr. Zelaya win in 2005, and Mr. Zelaya has veered increasingly left in his four-year term. The Honduran constitution limits presidents to a single term, which is scheduled to end in January. Mr. Zelaya was using the extralegal referendum as an act of political intimidation to force the Congress to allow a rewrite of the constitution so he could retain power. The opposition had pledged to boycott the vote, which meant that Mr. Zelaya would have won by a landslide.

Such populist intimidation has worked elsewhere in the region, and Hondurans are understandably afraid that, backed by Chávez agents and money, it could lead to similar antidemocratic subversion there. In Tegucigalpa yesterday, thousands demonstrated against Mr. Zelaya, and new deputy foreign minister Marta Lorena Casco told the crowd that "Chávez consumed Venezuela, then Bolivia, after that Ecuador and Nicaragua, but in Honduras that didn't happen."

It's no accident that Mr. Chávez is now leading the charge to have Mr. Zelaya reinstated, and on Monday the Honduran traveled to a leftwing summit in Managua in one of Mr. Chávez's planes. The U.N. and Organization of American States are also threatening the tiny nation with ostracism and other punishment if it doesn't readmit him. Meanwhile, the new Honduran government is saying it will arrest Mr. Zelaya if he returns. This may be the best legal outcome, but it also runs the risk of destabilizing the country. We recall when the Clinton Administration restored Bertrand Aristide to Haiti, only to have the country descend into anarchy.

As for the Obama Administration, it seems eager to "meddle" in Honduras in a way Mr. Obama claimed was counterproductive in Iran. Yet the stolen election in Iran was a far clearer subversion of democracy than the coup in Honduras. As a candidate, Mr. Obama often scored George W. Bush's foreign policy by saying democracy requires more than an election -- a free press, for example, civil society and the rule of law rather than rule by the mob. It's a point worth recalling before Mr. Obama hands a political victory to the forces of chavismo in Latin America.

Honduras' interim government announced Friday that the country decided to quit from the Organization of American States (OAS).

In a letter to the OAS read by Honduras' Vice Minister of International Relations Martha Lorena de Casco, it said "This government believes that inside the organization (of the OAS), there is no room for Honduras, for the states that love its freedom and defend its sovereignty."

The government in Tegulcigalpa says they will not negotiate Honduran sovereignty. That comes at a price, though. The poor nation relies on OAS aid as well as OAS-influenced support from other nations. By withdrawing from the regional assembly, Honduras will lose hundreds of millions of dollars they desperately need, especially in this economy.

However, it seems more than odd that the OAS has made such a fetish out of Zelaya while they’re preparing to admit Cuba, with its military junta firmly in place for the last 50 years. After all, even if the Hondurans botched the removal of Zelaya — and they did — the legislature and the courts have solid grounds on which to remove him. And while the military conducted the arrest and the extra-legal expulsion of Zelaya from his country, they did not seize power and install a military junta. Instead, they followed the orders of the civilian government, which retained political power all along.

If Cuba belongs in the OAS, then Honduras belongs as well, and on their own terms. If the OAS and the Obama administration want to defend democracy, they should stop isolating the democracy that fumbled the legal and justifiable removal of a renegade executive and focus on the dictatorship in Havana.

Democracy is the cornerstone of the OAS — a necessary condition for countries’ participation and a foundation for all of its activities. The Inter-American Democratic Charter sets out a simple, clear declaration: “The peoples of the Americas have a right to democracy and their governments have an obligation to promote and defend it.”

I have not seen the ballots printed in Venezuela that were to be used in last Sunday’s referendum that Mel Zelaya had contrived, however, Honduran daily La Prensa reports the referendum question,

¿Está de acuerdo que en las elecciones generales de 2009 se instale una cuarta urna en la cual el pueblo decida la convocatoria a una asamblea nacional constituyente? = Sí…….ó………..No.

(my translation: If you quote it, please credit me and link to this post)
Do you agree that a fourth ballot box be installed through which the people will decide to convene a constitutional assembly? Yes…….or………..No.

This is in direct violation of the country’s Constitution, which forbids the President from calling for changes to the Constitution. Articles 373 and 374 of the Honduran Constitution specifically state that amendments to the Constitution be approved by 2/3 of the votes in Congress AND specifically forbid any President of the country from extending term limits. The Constitution also says these two articles can not be amended.

The same article at La Prensa states that Zelaya prepared a decree ordering all institutions of the State to bring about the project, which Zelaya deemed "an official activity of the Government of the Republic". This means that the notion that Zelaya’s referendum was non-binding is false. Zelaya clearly meant to make his Sunday referendum official and binding. La Prensa says the decree, dated June 26, was published Saturday June 27.

Title VII
Of the Reform and the Immunity of the Constitution
Chapter I
Of the Reform of the Constitution
Article 373: Constitutional reform can only be declared by the National Congress, in regular sessions, with a 2/3s vote of its members. The decree to be voted on will specify the article or articles to be reformed, and it must be concurred by the subsequent session of Congress by a 2/3s vote before it takes effect.

Article 374: It can not be reformed, under any circumstances, the previous article, this article, the Constitutional articles related to the form of government, the national territory, Presidential term-limits, the prohibition of a President to be re-elected, and the requirements and prohibitions on who can and can not be President.