BOSTON ---- Nations should beware what they ask for, because they might get it. Brazil has been aspiring to be the leader in Latin America and now finds itself way out in front regarding Honduras.

So far, the Brazilians haven't shown they know what they are doing. Deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, hunkered in the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa, makes pronouncements inciting violence in the streets outside. He sneaked back into the country with apparent Venezuelan and possibly Brazilian complicity in an operation more akin to what the CIA used to do.

Zelaya's standoff now with the de facto Honduran government is unsustainable and may turn bloody, for which Brazilians would bear some responsibility.

As Eric Farnsworth of the Council of the Americas put it, "Brazil is quickly discovering that claiming leadership is more difficult than doing it."

For the United States, there is a certain relief in not being the one holding the hornet's nest, though this is unlikely to last. As the Brazilians fumble the situation, a moment of truth may be arriving for the United States. The Obama administration has generally followed the lead of other Latin American countries, cutting aid and withdrawing visas for Honduran officials.

Yet the Brazilian solution is to up the ante by using the pressure of a Honduran civil war on the government of Roberto Micheletti ---- a remarkable break from Brazil's historical noninterventionism and a role now being questioned by opposition parties in Brasilia.

Zelaya's provocations have made Micheletti and many other Hondurans firmer in their opposition to reinstating him. Fear of the sorts of violence seen this week outside the Brazilian Embassy is precisely why the Honduran army, however wrongfully, sent Zelaya into exile after the Honduran Supreme Court ordered his arrest.

The Brazilians claim that they didn't know of Zelaya's return until less than an hour before he showed up on their doorstep. Brazil ---- and all Latin America, for that matter ---- has a tradition of giving asylum to deposed leaders, but usually to allow them to get safely out of their country. This was a case of one sneaking back in, raising questions of how far diplomatic immunity can be stretched. Few of the many informed Brazilians with whom I have talked in recent days, moreover, believe the official account.

President Mauricio Funes of El Salvador acknowledged that a plane carrying Zelaya made an unauthorized stop in his country the night before Zelaya showed up in Honduras. El Salvador borders Honduras and the plane was a Venezuelan military one, according to a Salvadoran press account. Venezuela is the major supporter of Zelaya.

Meanwhile, Funes' wife, Vanda Pignato, is Brazilian, a member of that nation's president's leftist Workers Party sent in the 1990s to represent the party in Central America, and also a friend of the president. It is hard to believe that Zelaya would risk returning to Honduras without a secured destination such as the Brazilian Embassy. Going to the Venezuelan Embassy in Tegucigalpa would have been too provocative.

The Brazilian government has been divided internally between the cautious, highly professional diplomats in the foreign ministry and the more leftist activist advisers from sectors of the Workers' Party. Among the latter is Marco Aurelio Garcia, Lula's special assistant for Latin America, who from the presidential palace is the government's main sympathizer for, and political conduit to, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. For many years, Garcia was an organizer of the Foro de Sao Paulo, an annual international meeting of regional leftists that included Chavez, Colombia's FARC guerrillas and others.

Even Brazil's professional diplomats support Zelaya's claim to the presidency. For them, the primordial issue has been the Honduran army's role in bundling Zelaya into exile, and not the fact that the army never took power and that the Supreme Court had ordered his arrest.

But if the Brazilians really want to lead, notes Susan Purcell of the University of Miami, they are going to have to drop their knee-jerk anti-military views and dirty their hands in calming the constitutional conflicts within Honduran institutions, however unpopular that would be with friends. Then they might be able to exercise real influence with the Micheletti government. Or else get ready to send in the Brazilian marines.

EDWARD SCHUMACHER-MATOS writes for the Washington Post Writers Group. Comment online at nctimes.com or contact him at edward.schumachermatos@yahoo.com.