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CENTRAL AMERICA |
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Progress Reported in Honduras Talks
TEGUCIGALPA – The delegations representing
the de facto leader of Honduras, Roberto
Micheletti, and ousted President Mel Zelaya
said at the end of their first three days of
dialogue that they have managed to reach
agreement on a majority of the issues on the
table, including the goal of creating a
national-unity government.
“We’ve advanced on many important points, at
least on the (matter of forming a) national
unity government, which is a point that
cannot be avoided in the dialogue,” Vilma
Morales, a member of Micheletti’s delegation
and former Supreme Court chief justice, told
reporters Friday.
Zelaya’s labor minister and a member of his
delegation, Mayra Mejia, confirmed that “the
progress was significant,” although she did
not give specifics.
It was not clear if mention of progress on
the national-unity government issue meant
that the “interim” government was prepared
to allow Zelaya to return to office ahead of
elections scheduled for late next month.
“If we go about revealing each advance,
(talking about) on what points (agreement
was reached), then a controversy erupts,
which we don’t want to provoke at this time,
until we’ve reached agreement on all the
points,” Mejia said.
In their separate statements, Mejia and
Morales told reporters that over the three
days of dialogue progress was made on 60
percent of the points in the San Jose
Accord, the plan laid out by Costa Rican
President Oscar Arias to resolve the crisis
triggered by the June 28 coup.
Among other aspects, Arias’ proposal calls
for Zelaya to return to office, a
“guarantee” that he won’t press for an
assembly to rewrite the Honduran
constitution, formation of a national unity
government, a political amnesty for Zelaya
and the coup leaders and mechanisms for
international supervision to ensure the pact
is honored.
Both Morales and Mejia confirmed that the
meetings will resume on Tuesday at the same
Tegucigalpa hotel where they began on
Wednesday.
Mejia was adamant that her delegation will
not compromise on its key demand: the
reinstatement of Zelaya, who made a surprise
return to the country on Sept. 21 and is
currently holed up at the Brazilian Embassy
with dozens of supporters.
Zelaya claims the embassy, which has been
surrounded by troops and police, has been
sporadically bombarded with acoustic weapons
and gases and on Friday he said that snipers
were pointing their guns at the diplomatic
mission.
Micheletti, meanwhile, said that Zelaya can
remain at the embassy as long as he wants,
backing down from earlier demands that
Brazil either hand Zelaya over or grant him
political asylum.
The two sides in the talks were brought
together by a delegation from the
Organization of American States that urged
the parties to forge a consensus based on
the San Jose Accord.
Zelaya accepted the terms of that proposal
weeks ago, but Micheletti has been adamant
in rejecting the reinstatement of the
elected president, whose term ends in
January.
Micheletti contends Zelaya’s ouster was not
a coup, insisting that the soldiers who
dragged him from the presidential palace
were simply enforcing a Supreme Court ban on
the president’s planned non-binding
plebiscite on the idea of revising the
constitution.
While the coup leaders 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.
Time is running out before the Nov. 29
presidential elections, as both the European
Union and Washington have said they will not
recognize the winner of that balloting
unless Zelaya is restored to office
beforehand.
The Committee of Relatives of Disappeared
Detainees, or Cofadeh, a human rights group
founded when death squads stalked the
Central American country in the 1980s said
earlier this month that 14 politically
motivated killings have occurred since
Zelaya’s ouster and that some people
arrested for their opposition to the coup
have been tortured.
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