Revisiting Manuel Zelaya's switch from the right to the left and other Honduran news

In A right-to-left policy switch? An analysis of the Honduran case under Manuel Zelaya, Clayton M. Cunha Filho, André Luiz Coelho and Fidel I. Pérez Flores argue that while there have been several candidates who ran on leftist-oriented platforms before ruling from the right in Latin America, Zelaya was the first case of someone whose shifted in the other direction. It was a unique policy switch from the right to the left.  

A member of the Honduran elite and elected president with a right-of-center platform in 2005, Manuel Zelaya soon came to be allied with Latin America’s bloc of radical left-wing governments – this being the first case of a post-democratization right-to-left policy switch in the region. The aim of this article is to assess the reasons that could have motivated Zelaya’s ideological turn. After a brief discussion of the Honduran political process, we review the literature about the issue of policy switching and proceed to an empirical analysis of the Honduran case.

We find that the fragility of the country’s energy sector and the alliance with Venezuela in a context of international economic crisis and high oil prices could have triggered a causal mechanism in Honduras similar to the one caused by currency scarcity and international pressure pointed to by the literature as the leading cause for traditional left-to-right switches, which suggests that this case study could serve as a pattern-matching exercise to the general findings of currently accepted switch theory.

Zelaya's tried to solve Honduras' energy crisis by entering into Petrocaribe and ALBA as well as threatening to expropriate Esso, Texaco, and Shell's ports and tanks. The country's economic and political elites had little problem with Honduras' entry into Petrocaribe, many of them lobbied for it, but ALBA was too much.

In other news out of Honduras, Laura Carasik offers US ambassador to Honduras offers tacit support of brutal crackdown at Al Jazeera America, Matthias Schwartz has a Mission Gone Wrong for The New Yorker, and Nina Lakhhani has Honduras and the dirty war fuelled by the west's drive for clean energy for The Guardian.