Thirty years ago, 13 of Latin America’s 20 republics were run by generals, gorilla-ism ostensibly justified by the threat of guerrilla-ism in a typical cold war rationalisation of tyranny. Jeane Kirkpatrick, later a fixture in the Reagan administration, gave the set-up a doctrinal veneer, arguing that an authoritarian (our son of a bitch) could change and should be supported whereas totalitarians (theirs) were immutable.

Since the cold war ended, there had been no successful coups in Latin America until last week’s army putsch against President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras, who was bundled on to a plane to Costa Rica. Are those bad old days creeping back? Not really. First, it is worth recalling quite how bad they were. The US invaded Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989, behaving like the freebooters of the 19th century. Then there were the civil wars in Central America – in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala – with industrial-scale killing and the Reagan administration backing its local proxies.