One line in one report among the trickle of news items published this week about the military coup in Honduras caught my attention.

It alluded to the idea that military coups in Latin America have become an anachronism; that the last such coup occurred 16 years ago. The heyday of generals replacing presidents by force is long gone, but this recent Honduras situation sparks an eerie feeling of déjà-vu.

There was a time when the United States was heavily involved across Central America. The Cold War was raging and Latin America had become an ideological, political and covert military battleground.

The fact that the United States had deliberately unseen boots on the ground in that part of the world was understood as a given and as needed.

After the Cold War, Latin America came to be seen for its potential as a trade partner with enough strength to ally with the United States and rival the European Union.

And so we got NAFTA and CAFTA and the promise of more trade agreements with more regions in Latin America. Mexico led the trend; its economy was expanding, its middle class growing. Brazil was becoming an economic powerhouse.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks changed everything. Our foreign policy was reactive and simple: circle the wagons, draw a definite line in the sand, and trust no one who was not “on our side.”

Mexico, in particular, went from being our favored trade partner to being a strategic security buffer.

The rest of Latin America was left to its own devices. In that vacuum of inattention, Central and South America began leaning politically left; a series of elections went to declared leftists and socialists, and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela led the pack. It’s safe to say, at this point, that what happened in Honduras last week was a resurrection of old habits.

The president, Manuel Zelaya, proposed a repeal of the constitutionally enacted presidential term limit. He wanted to run for a second term. The Honduran Supreme Court objected and Zelaya called for a nonbinding vote on the matter. The morning the vote was to take place soldiers arrested Zelaya and summarily dumped him in Costa Rica, in his pajamas.

The Latin American left-guard, Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales among them, have called for the return of Zelaya to power and have threatened retaliatory action. And in a surprising pairing of strange bedfellows, the United States has also called for the reinstatement of the exiled president.

It may be nothing more than sport and speculation at this point, but I wonder if any of this would have come to pass had the United States been a little more diligent in its attention to Central America in the very recent past.