Around dawn on June 28, 2009, two hundred soldiers entered the Casa Presidencial in Tegucigalpa and pulled Manuel Zelaya, the president, out of bed at gunpoint. Zelaya was a businessman from the Liberal Party, who wore cowboy hats and had a thick mustache. His manner was blustery and self-aggrandizing. When he had entered office, three years before, everyone had expected the conventional politician he’d always been: pro-business and inoffensive to the country’s elites. But as president, Zelaya discovered a passion for being a reformer unbothered by legal strictures and bureaucratic politesse.
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