Eight years after a coup, a heated election in Honduras

IN THE early hours of June 28th 2009 a unit of the Honduran army stormed the house of the president, Manuel Zelaya, disarmed his guard and spirited him onto a plane bound for Costa Rica. The army sent tanks onto the streets, silenced radio and television stations and cut off electricity and water to parts of Tegucigalpa, the capital. A fake letter of resignation from Mr Zelaya was read out to Honduras’s congress, which approved his ousting. It was Latin America’s last real coup.

As a general election approaches in November, those events are uppermost in Hondurans’ minds. That is partly because Mr Zelaya has not gone away; his wife, Xiomara Castro, is a presidential candidate. More important, the current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, is breaking a taboo which Mr Zelaya was thrown out of office to protect: he is running for re-election. That, plus Mr Hernández’s authoritarian style, has made the main election issue the fate of democracy itself.