Greg has an interesting post up on the path of Latin American presidents who’ve been removed from office in recent times – Manuel Zelaya in Honduras in 2009 through a coup; Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo through a highly dubious application of impeachment in 2012; and most recently, Dilma Rousseff. As Greg points out, where presidents removed from office were once sent into exile (though Zelaya did spend some time in exile), now, they enter the legislative branch electorally. His tentative conclusions:

On the one hand, we might consider it a good thing. Political competition is taking place within institutions and not, for example, by calling on the military or forming a rebel group.

But on the other, this may just perpetuate the corrupt and largely unchanging political system. Perhaps you can work at the margins, but the same anti-democratic structural forces are in place. Along these lines, we could argue that…