"De facto government"

Where does this phrase come from?

Or more to the point, does what has become the standard phraseology for the coup plotters and supporters in Honduras betoken a squishiness on the part of American conventional wisdom about the legitimacy of the coup?

True, the Obama Administration has started to take some slightly stronger measures to criticize and oppose the coup. Still, in prior years the people who took over the government after a coup would be reflexively and standardly referred to as a "junta".

This time around? You see references to the Honduran junta mainly in the left-leaning press and blogosphere, where the MSM has been pretty much uniformly using the phrase "de facto government", which also seems to be the term favored by the Administration.

So what do you think? If the ousted president had been a rightist, and the coup plotters all leftists, would we be hearing them called the "de facto government"?

Somehow, I doubt it.