Is Obama in charge of U.S. foreign policy?

President Obama needs to assert control of U.S. policy toward Honduras.

In the immediate aftermath of the coup that removed President Manuel Zelaya from power, Obama took a valiant step toward the reversal of two centuries of American gunboat diplomacy in the hemisphere.

Obama was outspoken in his support for the return of Zelaya and for respecting democracy.

“President Zelaya was democratically elected,” Obama said shortly after the overthrow. “He had not yet completed his term. We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras.”

Perhaps no one was more surprised by the strong condemnation of the coup by the Obama administration than the coup leaders themselves, and the chancellor of the de facto government reacted to the news by saying that “the black boy in the White House doesn’t know anything about anything.”

But Obama took a principled stand: “It would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backwards into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition rather than democratic elections. … We don’t want to go back to a dark past.”

Now it looks like the United States is already going back to that dark past.

The Obama administration is no longer referring to Zelaya’s ouster as a “coup.” If the State Department termed it a coup, that determination would have triggered mandatory sanctions against the Honduran military.

The Obama administration is not recalling our ambassador from Honduras, as other countries in the hemisphere have.

And it is reluctant to step up the pressure on the de facto government to restore the legitimate president.

Far-right forces within the American diplomatic establishment seem to have grabbed the reins from Obama.

Hugo Llorens, the American ambassador to Honduras, was in charge of Venezuelan affairs on President Bush’s National Security Council during the unsuccessful 2002 coup attempt to remove President Hugo Chavez from Venezuela. He was in contact with the Honduran coup leaders in the weeks leading up to the Zelaya overthrow.

The role of Otto Reich, the former deputy secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, is also in question. He worked to discredit and destabilize Zelaya. So vehement were Reich’s attacks on Zelaya that the Honduran leader threatened to sue him for defamation.

In addition, the International Republican Institute, a taxpayer-funded organization headed by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has provided money to Honduran business organizations and other right-wing groups that are among the most vocal supporters of the coup. The coup leaders also recruited lobbyist Lanny Davis, a Clinton loyalist, to brush up their image in Washington.

Right after the coup, Obama’s voice could not have been clearer.

“The United States has not always stood as it should with some of these fledgling democracies,” he said. “We always want to stand with democracy, even if the results don’t always mean that the leaders of those countries are favorable towards the United States. And that is a tradition that we want to continue.”

Unfortunately, right-wing forces inside and outside his Administration are continuing a different tradition — the tradition of overthrowing democratically elected governments.

If Obama wants his words to mean anything, he must step in now and demand the immediate return of Zelaya to power.

Juan Blanco Prada is a writer and activist living in California. He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.