Honduras had a new kind of coup

TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS — On Saturday, June 27, the order came down: Arrest the president.

That night, Honduran military officers stopped taking calls from U.S. officials.

At sunrise Sunday, army commanders firing warning shots into the air marched through the back door of the president's home, rousted him from bed and took him away, still in his pajamas.

It was over in 15 minutes. But the coup that toppled President Manuel Zelaya was a slow boil, over many months, of an increasingly arbitrary and provocative leader, the often-exaggerated fears of a hidebound elite and a military with divided loyalties.

That simmering crisis exploded into one of the most serious challenges facing Latin America in a decade. In some ways, it was a throwback to the old Latin America, when coups and men in uniform more often than not decided who ruled. But it was also emblematic of a struggle underway today on the continent, where a crop of leftist leaders with authoritarian tendencies have risen to power through elections, defied the status quo and tested the bounds of democracy.

The following account is based on interviews with numerous Hondurans and foreigners involved in the coup or the events that led to it. Some details are still in dispute.

::

When he won the presidential election in 2005 by a narrow margin, Zelaya was something of an outsider -- gruff, not fully part of the elite that had always governed. Even Hondurans who admire him, however, say he became enamored of the power he thought he had.

His ticket, he soon decided, was to align himself with the emerging bloc in the region headed by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, an erratic, charismatic populist who evokes passionate extremes of admiration and hatred. Zelaya adopted Chavez's socialist rhetoric, his bluster, even the gimmicky dress. (He started wearing a white cowboy hat as his symbol.)

Zelaya managed to push through legislation that helped the poor and ruffled the elite, including a huge raise in the minimum wage, in a country where 40% of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. But power was more important to him than solid ideology.

"For him, it was all about becoming a big figure," said Juan Ramon Martinez, a historian and political analyst who had many dealings with Zelaya. "If he had to dance the cha-cha-cha, he'd do it. If he had to spout Marxist rhetoric, he'd do it."