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CENTRAL AMERICA |
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Honduran Lawmakers to Debate Zelaya
Reinstatement After Election
TEGUCIGALPA – The Honduran Congress has
scheduled a debate on the reinstatement of
ousted President Mel Zelaya for three days
after the Nov. 29 presidential election,
ignoring threats from the international
community not to recognize the balloting as
legitimate unless the deposed leader is
restored beforehand.
“We have decided, along with the rest of my
comrades in the leadership, from today to
formalize the convocation for a Dec. 2
session of the full legislature to analyze
the issue,” congressional speaker Alfredo
Saavedra told the media on Tuesday.
By then, he said, Congress will have
received the advisory opinions lawmakers
have requested from several institutions,
including the Supreme Court, which has
played a leading role in trying to give the
June 28 coup a veneer of legality.
A U.S.-brokered accord between Zelaya and
the de facto regime led by Roberto
Micheletti collapsed early this month when
the latter pressed ahead with formation of
national unity government – mandated by the
pact – before Congress addressed the matter
of restoring the legitimate president.
Zelaya said last Friday that the Obama
administration effectively abandoned
opponents of the June 28 coup by signaling
it will not insist on his reinstatement as a
condition for recognizing the winner of the
Nov. 29 election to choose his successor.
“They have left us in the middle of the
river, saying now that their priority is the
elections and not the restoration of
democracy,” Zelaya told Costa Rica’s ADN
Radio from Tegucigalpa, where he remains
holed up at the Brazilian Embassy.
Critics say the de facto regime was
emboldened when senior U.S. diplomat Thomas
Shannon said Washington would recognize the
winner of the Nov. 29 election regardless of
whether Zelaya was reinstated for the
roughly two months left in his term.
The head of the Organization of American
States, Chile’s Jose Miguel Insulza, ruled
out sending OAS election observers to
Honduras under the current circumstances.
And most members of the OAS and the Rio
Group, a hemispheric club that excludes the
United States and Canada, have indicated
they will not recognize the elections as
valid without Zelaya’s reinstatement
beforehand.
Zelaya said the coming ballot in Honduras
could not be free because “there are
thousands of citizens repressed” by the de
facto regime, which has killed a dozen coup
opponents and jailed hundreds more.
Micheletti contends Zelaya’s ouster was not
a coup, insisting that the troops who
dragged him out of the presidential palace
and sent him into exile were simply
enforcing a Supreme Court ban on the
president’s planned non-binding plebiscite
on the idea of revising the constitution.
But while the coup plotters and their
foreign apologists accuse Zelaya of seeking
to extend his stay in office, any potential
constitutional change to allow presidential
re-election would not have taken place until
well after the incumbent stepped down in
January. EFE |
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