The 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis was a political crisis in Honduras over plans by President Manuel Zelaya to hold a popular referendum to either rewrite the Constitution of Honduras or write a new one.
Zelaya's planned vote to change the constitution faced opposition from a majority of the government, including the Supreme Court of Honduras and prominent members of Zelaya's Liberal Party, as it could lead to the re-election of Presidents which is permanently outlawed by the Honduran constitution. The Supreme Court upheld a lower court injunction against the referendum. A crisis occurred as the Constitution of Honduras had no process for dealing with this situation, and there were no clear procedures for removing or prosecuting a sitting President.
On the morning of 28 June 2009, Zelaya was removed in a coup d’état by the Honduran Armed Forces, when approximately 100 soldiers stormed the President's residence in Tegucigalpa and exiled him to Costa Rica. The National Congress voted to remove Zelaya as President, having read without objection a purported letter of resignation, which Zelaya stated was forged. Roberto Micheletti, the President of Congress and next in the presidential line of succession, was sworn in as interim president. Micheletti declared a "state of exception" on 1 July, suspending civil liberties and various curfews were imposed.
On 21 September 2009, Zelaya returned in secret to Honduras, after several attempts to return had been rebuffed. It was announced that he was in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. The next day, the Micheletti government declared a state of emergency and suspended five constitutional rights for 45 days, specifically:
personal liberty (Article 69),
freedom of expression (Article 72),
freedom of movement (Article 81),
freedom of association and assembly.
The decree suspending human rights was officially revoked on 19 October 2009 in La Gaceta.
These events garnered widespread condemnation as a coup d’état. The United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the European Union condemned the removal of Zelaya as a military coup, and some of these condemnations may still remain unretracted. The OAS rejected an attempt by Honduras to withdraw from the organisation and then suspended the membership of Honduras the following day. Domestic opinion remained very much divided, with demonstrations both for and against Zelaya.
Efforts by Costa Rican President Óscar Arias and the United States to effect a diplomatic solution between Micheletti and Zelaya initially resulted in a proposal by President Arias calling for Zelaya's return to the presidency, albeit with curtailed powers. Arias's proposal also stipulated political amnesty and moved the Honduran general elections up by a month, pushing them to take place in October. The US supported the San José Accord, but negotiations ultimately broke down. The two parties were unwilling to come to any lasting agreement.
Zelaya (elected in January 2006) insisted that the elections of 29 November should not be a precondition to his return to power.
Honduran leaders refused to reinstate Zelaya, pending the elections, but international support for the elections remained scant leading up to the polls. Many Hondurans sought to move past the crisis with the elections, which had been scheduled previous to Zelaya's ouster. Zelaya urged a boycott of the vote.
Initial returns indicated a larger than usual turnout, around 60%, a figure subsequently revised downward to 49%. Zelaya also disputed those figures at the time. Some Honduran activists ended their daily protests demanding the reinstatement of Zelaya because he was ousted in a coup, since Congress voted to keep Manuel Zelaya out of office.
The crisis drew to a close with the inauguration of the newly elected president, Porfirio Lobo, on 27 January 2010. A deal allowed Zelaya to leave the Brazilian embassy and go into exile in the Dominican Republic.
Political and socioeconomic divide in Honduras
Two-thirds of Honduras citizens live below the poverty line, and unemployment is estimated at 28%. It has one of Latin America's most unequal distribution of wealth: the poorest 10% of the population receives just 1.2% of the country's wealth, while the richest 10% collect 42%. Approximately twenty per cent of the nation's GDP comes from remittances of workers from abroad. The BBC called the huge wealth gap in a poor country as one of the reasons why the relations between the president and the other institutions were so strained and that his leftward movement alarmed certain sectors.
Zelaya pushed for a referendum, insisting that Honduras' grinding poverty stemmed from a constitution written in 1982 at the height of that country's brutal repression of leftists – that rigs the game for the most powerful families and interests.