John Green [Senior Research Fellow, Council on Hemispheric Affairs]: "When Honduran President Porfirio Lobo predictably chose several days ago to pardon the military leaders involved in the June 28, 2009 coup against his predecessor, President Manuel Zelaya, he was staying true to traditional Central American form. Lobo, who supported the coup, was "elected" under conditions that seem to take the region back to the heady Cold War days of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan, Contras, and Honduras' very own death squad, the Battalion 3-16. The majority of Hondurans boycotted the elections, as did reputable international observers. Many candidates for other offices withdrew, and despite State Department insistence that the process was perfectly transparent, the UN declared that conditions for a fair election were not present. And just to further dramatize the scene, there were various political assassinations before and after the contest.

It is also likely that the Lobo administration, along with its backers, is intent on reversing the direction of the Zelaya years. No more talk of social justice, or new terms for debt, or pesky ideas about how to protect the public sector from more IMF sanctioned privatization, or serious proposals to reform a horrific Judiciary. Despite the hundreds of thousands of protesters in a number of marches, the country seems back on track to the past. There are even growing paramilitary protest squads back in place to deal with the dissenters. Meet the new Honduras, the quintessential "Banana Republic."

While the Obama administration originally stood with the rest of the international community in condemning the coup and called for a restoration of democracy, it has seemingly begun to challenge the spirits of its forerunners. It has been pushing other presidents in the hemisphere to recognize the Lobo government, while Secretary of State Clinton cited questionable figures from the illegally-appointed Honduran Supreme Electoral Tribunal to justify the election. By breaking ranks with the bulk of Latin America's democratically-elected governments on confronting the Honduran crisis with democratic substance and not just form, Barrack Obama's administration had squandered whatever hope was left for a progressive turn in US-Latin American relations. The White House seems to be telling the world that nothing new on this score will be coming out of Washington D.C."