The World

The news of the military coup in Honduras provides an unplesant flash-back to the period when Central America was one of the world’s most unstable and war-torn regions. Not so long ago, really – the 1980s.

But in one respect things are very different from the Cold War era. Back then the dividing lines were clear. The Reagan administration was supporting rightist forces, like Nicaragua’s Contras, against the radical left – right across the region. This time things are, mercifully, much less clear-cut. Yesterday Hugo Chavez fiercely condemned rhe coup – and Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president of Honduras, appeared alongside Chavez and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua at an emergency summit in Managua. In the old days, appearing as part of a line-up like that would have been enough to condemn Zelaya out of hand in Washington, DC. But not now. President Obama has also condemned the coup as illegal and as setting a “terrible precedent”. And Zelaya even credited the US with discouraging the coup plotters.

So far, so encouraging. But just because Central America may not slip back into the old style Cold War era conflicts does not mean that it cannot be destabilised in new, more modern ways. The combination of a massive recession, organised crime and the war on drugs is creating a new sort of crisis. And the uneasy alliance of opinion between Chavez and the US over Honduras does not look terribly stable to me, either.