Word: leftists
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That's been most apparent in Honduras, where the country's congress this week refused to reinstate democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, a leftist who was ousted in a June 28 military coup. The Obama Administration condemned Zelaya's overthrow as an affront to Latin America's fledgling democracies. But conservatives led by GOP South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint - who blocked Valenzuela's confirmation to protest Obama's stance - and Bush Administration holdovers such as the U.S.'s ambassador to the Organization of American States, Lewis Amselem (who was finally replaced this week), pushed Obama into brokering a deal...
...latest example of how little progress Central America has made since the coups, civil wars and corruption of the past. The institutional rot that spawned those Cold War conflicts remains, not just in Honduras but in nearby countries such as Guatemala, Nicaragua and Panama. In Nicaragua, for example, leftist President Daniel Ortega last month had Supreme Court justices loyal to him summarily lift a constitutional ban on presidential re-election so he can run again in 2011, even though most Nicaraguans oppose the change. In Panama, members of the powerful Arias family have so far been able to block...
...sure, Central America has shed some of its banana-republic baggage. Democratic elections have replaced right-wing death squads and Marxist guerrillas. This year, Salvadorans for the first time elected a President, Mauricio Funes, from the party of El Salvador's erstwhile leftist rebels. But life after elections remains as dysfunctional as the ubiquitous tangles of pirated electrical lines that hang above Tegucigalpa's streets. "The region has a greater understanding of the rule of law today," says Mark Rosenberg, president of Florida International University in Miami and an expert on Honduras and Central America. "But it's very incomplete...
...fair vote is impossible, Zelaya argues. "This is the first time in history that the executioners are being allowed to oversee a so-called transition back to democracy," he told TIME by telephone from inside the embassy. (Soldiers surrounding the building stop journalists from going in.) The Stetson-wearing leftist said he was especially disappointed with the Obama administration for recognizing the ballot, after previously condemning the coup. "The United States had a good position and then it weakened," he said. "It lost...
...Detractors also claim that Sarkozy's true motivation for bringing leftist figures like Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner into his Cabinet is to make it easier for him to pursue hard-right objectives such as choking off immigration and passing harsher law-and-order statutes. Critics say that if Sarkozy's initiatives don't receive a reaction from the progressive members of his government, he uses that as proof that his policies are not as right wing as his political opponents claim. "Sarkozy cites Jean Jaurès here to better apply National Front [a far-right French party] ideas there...