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HONDURAS:
What Now?
By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA (IPS) - "Mr. Zelaya is
history," said Honduras' de facto President
Roberto Micheletti after Congress voted not
to allow the president ousted in the Jun. 28
coup to serve out the last few weeks of his
term.
After deliberating for nearly 10 hours, the
country's lawmakers overwhelmingly voted
just before midnight Wednesday not to
reinstate deposed President Manuel Zelaya,
who was removed from his home at gunpoint
and put on a plane to Costa Rica, still in
his pajamas. His term was to end on Jan. 27.
After watching a video that supposedly
documented the mistakes made by Zelaya and
explained the reasons he was overthrown, 111
legislators voted against the motion to
restore him to power, while only 14 voted in
favour. The remaining three were absent.
It is not clear what Zelaya will do now. The
de facto regime's deputy foreign minister,
Martha Lorena Alvarado, said that "what
happens now with Mr. Zelaya is his and his
family's problem."
"We can't do anything about it," she
remarked to IPS.
There are reports that the Micheletti regime
has offered Zelaya a safe-conduct to
Nicaragua or Spain. The ousted leader is
accompanied by only around a dozen of the
hundreds of supporters originally with him
in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa,
where he has been holed up since sneaking
back into the country on Sept. 21.
Zelaya, a rich landowner who alienated his
own party and the rest of the country's
wealthy conservative elites after taking a
turn to the left and attempting to adopt
mild reforms like a raise in the minimum
wage, antagonised the other branches of
government, including Congress and the
Supreme Court, by trying to hold a
non-binding referendum on the possibility of
amending the constitution.
The legal authorities and parliament
declared the informal ballot
unconstitutional, which precipitated a
series of events that culminated in the coup
on Jun. 28, the day the non-binding vote was
to be held.
Virtually the entire international community
had refused to recognise the results of last
Sunday's elections unless Zelaya was
reinstated.
The elections were won by Porfirio Lobo, the
candidate of the right-wing National Party,
which along with nearly all of the leaders
of the centre-right Liberal Party - to which
both Zelaya and Micheletti belong - voted to
back the coup on Jun. 28.
After Wednesday's vote in the legislature,
it will be even more difficult for the new
government elected on Sunday to gain
international legitimacy.
The governments of Brazil, Argentina, Chile,
Uruguay and other Latin American countries
have stated that they will not recognise the
results of the elections until the
constitutional order is restored. The
European Union has taken a similar position.
But the United States, Colombia, Costa Rica
and Panama have already recognised Lobo's
victory.
The issue will face a trial by fire Friday
in Washington, when the Permanent Council of
the Organisation of American States (OAS)
will hold a special meeting on Honduras.
"Today is a dark day in the history of our
country, because we are setting a bad
example for the entire world…by justifying a
coup against the president of the nation,
which is not a good thing," congressman
Óscar Mejía of the leftist Democratic
Unification party told IPS after listening
to the flood of justifications for the coup.
But Liberal Party lawmaker José Azcona, who
voted against Zelaya's reinstatement, said
"it is time to leave this crisis behind once
and for all, and to look towards Honduras'
future. The people's mandate in the
elections was clearly in favour of democracy
and of putting an end to this crisis."
The 14 legislators who backed Zelaya said
that the failure to restore him to power
would aggravate the political crisis, drag
out the country's isolation by the
international community, and complicate
things for Lobo's government.
"The constitutional order must be restored,
and by that I don’t mean that Manuel Zelaya
should necessarily return to power, that's
his problem; I'm talking about coming up
with mechanisms that would ensure that this
never happens again," Liberal Party
congressman Edmundo Orellana, Zelaya's
former defence minister, said in the
parliamentary debate.
Zelaya, meanwhile, reacted furiously to the
legislature's decision, calling the members
of Congress "traitors" who were
"whitewashing" the coup.
"That session and its results are a disgrace
for Honduras; you (legislators) will be
tried by history as traitors, even those who
promised to vote in my favour and now did an
about-face," Zelaya told Globo, a local
radio station.
"The good thing is that the people have seen
who the coup-mongers are, because they
finally took off their masks in Congress,"
he added.
He also said the legislators who "ratified"
the coup were "self-confessed accomplices of
the human rights violations that have been
committed, of the humiliations to which I
have been subjected, and of the
shutting-down of media outlets.
"You have betrayed democracy and have
confirmed that you are in agreement with the
elites in power and the coup-makers who
conspired to oust me," he stated.
Wednesday's vote was part of a 12-point
U.S.-brokered agreement signed Oct. 30 by
Zelaya and Micheletti's negotiators.
But Zelaya had already declared that the
agreement had collapsed, after Micheletti
set up a "unity government" without the
ousted leader's participation, and Congress
delayed the vote until after the elections.
Christian Democratic lawmaker Ramón
Velásquez defended himself from the
accusations leveled by Zelaya and his
supporters, saying "we are not coup-makers;
I have lived through all of this country's
coups, and what happened five months ago was
not even the palest shadow of a
dictatorship."
Velásquez argued that "the world is wrong
about that, and should redefine its concepts
and categories."
"There was no coup," he told IPS. "What
happened here is that a president thought he
was above the law, and what is stipulated by
the constitution was followed in his case,
which means that what was done on Jun. 28
remains valid. Legitimacy does not come from
the international community, it comes from
the people, who expressed themselves at the
polls."
Lobo, for his part, said he respected the
legislature's decision, which he said "is a
product of the agreement signed by Zelaya
and Micheletti, which means the only thing I
can do is support it."
In response, Zelaya told the people to "get
ready for a struggle, because Porfirio Lobo
is a fraud and what lies ahead is a
dictatorship that is certain to take away
your freedom and even your lives, I'm
warning you. But I will always be here, with
my people."
The National Party and Lobo obviously
"joined with the coup d'etat," said the
ousted president.
"I'm sorry for my childhood friend (a
reference to Lobo), but his first action as
president-elect turned out to be a fraud; he
was unable to change his party's line, to
get them to reinstate me," he said.
Micheletti, who returned to his de facto
post Wednesday after stepping aside for a
week to avoid "hindering" the elections,
said the legislature's decision must be
respected by both sides, "as we stated in
the accord we signed."
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