America might refuse to honor the upcoming election results of another democratic nation. But our State Department has taken this hostile posture not toward Venezuela or Iran — where dictatorships thrive through doubtful and fraudulent elections — but toward Honduras, which removed a usurping president this summer in an action supported by the letter of its own constitution. Nothing has changed about the upcoming election in Honduras. The candidates are the same ones who were running before President Manuel Zelaya was ousted, with the approval of the nation’s Congress and Supreme Court. The only difference now is the United States is demanding that the rapacious Zelaya be returned to power. This would punish self-governance and discourage free and credible elections.

Zelaya was not removed from power for his alleged corruption or his alliance with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez or his bullying of the Honduran news media. Rather, by simply campaigning in favor of presidential re-election in Honduras, Zelaya had committed a crime punishable under the constitution by loss of citizenship. A strange law, perhaps, but the law of the land nonetheless in a nation and a region that has suffered bad experiences under previous presidents-for-life like Chavez.