Wow — talk about your nostalgia boom. First Jacko has everyone digging out Off The Wall, his best album, then Farrah has everyone misremembering how great 70s TV was(n’t) — and now a central American coup!

The leftist president of Honduras Manuel Zelaya, has been not only deposed by the military, but kidnapped and hustled out of the country, as have the ambassadors from Cuba and Venezuela.

The coup — the first successful one in Latin America since the end of the Cold War, unless you believe, as is possible, that the Colombian Right stole the last election — arises from a complex constitutional stand-off between President Zelaya, the Supreme Court and the Congress.

Zelaya wanted to run a non-binding referendum that would gauge support for an end to the rather tight term limits in the country and allow him to run for a further term in the upcoming elections. The Supreme Court struck this down. Zelaya disputed that ruling, and argued that he had executive powers sufficient to proceed with the distribution of materials for the election — or to order the army to do so.

When the army refused — problematically, they are charged with running election logistics in Honduras, something about which future presidents should probably write themselves a stern post-it reminder — Zelaya sacked their commander and his supporters began distributing the materials themselves. The Supreme Court then ordered Zelaya to reinstate the armed forces’ head. When they didn’t, the army arrested him, and cut off communications within the country for a while.

Zelaya may or may not have acted unconstitutionally, but the army’s actions are undoubtedly a coup — pretty much running as 1975 would have run if Whitlam had told Kerr to go f-ck himself — and they’ve been condemned to varying degrees by everyone in the Americas, save for isolated conservative redoubts Colombia and Canada. Hillary Clinton and Obama have done the old one-two, with Clinton affirming that Zelaya is still President as far as they’re concerned, and Obama urging everyone to observe the rule of law, play nice (a little late, Barry).

The headache for Obama will be if the further left in Latin America — specifically Hugo Chavez — make good on threats to intervene militarily should the result stand. Venezuela’s ambassador was reportedly beaten up, which would give a casus belli, tenuous though it be, and Venezuela’s oil-funded armed forces wouldn’t have much trouble subduing Honduras’s tinpot army — though it would be no cakewalk neither — and Chavez would see a coup like this, not inaccurately, as the return of the juntas.

Indeed the Venezuelan government has pointed the finger at Otto Reich, a shadowy figure who was Dubya’s undersecretary for the Banana Republics, and who endorsed the 2002 coup against Chavez — having held meetings with the coup plotters prior to the act. Reich taught at the US’s bind-torture-kill ‘School of the Americas’ where some of the Honduran military trained, and he now runs a political consultancy and a couple of front NGOs with activities in Honduras.

If Reich is helping foment the coup, he would appear to be doing it off his own bat. But his activities may still give Venezuela and others a chance to ramp up anti-American rhetoric even though, following the recent restoration of ambassadors between the two countries, Hugo appears to be going out of his way to not accuse the US government per se.

We will wait to see if John McCain and the neocon crowd bang the drum for democracy in this case, and declare “we are all Hondurans now” etc. Since McCain’s Latin American advisor is a man named — fancy that! — Otto Reich, one suspects that uprising in the republic of bananas, will get the big manana.