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Honduran leader forced into exile

Troops in Honduras have detained the president and flown him out of the country after a power struggle over plans to change the constitution.

President Manuel Zelaya was flown to Costa Rica from an air force base outside the capital, Tegucigalpa.

Mr Zelaya, elected for a non-renewable four-year term in January 2006, wanted a vote to extend his time in office.

His arrest came just before the start of a referendum ruled illegal by the Supreme Court and opposed by Congress.

There was also resistance within Mr Zelaya's own party to the plan to hold the vote.

Reuters news agency reports that police fired teargas at about 500 supporters of Mr Zelaya who had gathered outside the presidential palace.

'Arrested in pyjamas'

Protesters reportedly hurled rocks at the soldiers, shouting "Traitors", AP news agency reports, as tanks rolled through the streets and air force jets flew over the capital.

“ This was a plot by a very voracious elite, which wants to keep this country in an extreme level of poverty ”
President Manuel Zelaya

Early on Sunday, witnesses saw dozens of troops surround Mr Zelaya's residence.

In other developments:

• At an emergency meeting in Washington, the Organization of American States condemned what it called a "coup" in Honduras

• Mr Zelaya's ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, blamed "the Yankee empire"

• US President Barack Obama called on Honduras to "respect democratic norms, the rule of law"; the EU condemned Mr Zelaya's arrest

From Costa Rica, Mr Zelaya told Venezuelan TV that Honduran soldiers had arrested him in his pyjamas.

"I'm in San Jose in Costa Rica," he said. "I've been the victim of a kidnapping by a group of Honduran soldiers.

"This was a plot by a very voracious elite, an elite which wants only to keep this country isolated, in an extreme level of poverty. It doesn't care about the people, it's not sensitive to them."

The military's dramatic move came after President Zelaya defied a court order that he should re-instate the chief of the army, Gen Romeo Vasquez.

The president sacked Gen Vasquez late on Wednesday for refusing to help him organise the referendum.

Mr Zelaya, who under current regulations leaves office next January, also accepted the resignation of the defence minister.

'US opposed coup'

The referendum was to ask the population if they approved of a formal vote next November on whether to rewrite the Honduran constitution.

MANUEL ZELAYA
# Elected for Liberal Party in Nov 2005; beat ruling National Party candidate
# Has moved Honduras away from its traditional ally the US
# Enjoys the support of Venezuela's leftist President, Hugo Chavez
# A civil engineer and rancher by profession

On Thursday, the Honduran Congress approved plans to investigate whether the president should be declared unfit to rule.

In an interview with Spain's El Pais newspaper published on Sunday, Mr Zelaya said a planned coup against him had been thwarted after the US refused to back it.

"Everything was in place for the coup and if the US embassy had approved it, it would have happened. But they did not," Mr Zelaya said.

The arrest of Mr Zelaya took place an hour before polls were due to open.

Ballot boxes and other voting materials had been distributed by Mr Zelaya's supporters and government employees throughout the Central American country.

The president has vowed to transform Honduras, saying the system currently favours the wealthy elite. But his opponents accused him of seeking to rule indefinitely.

Honduras - an impoverished coffee and banana-exporting nation of more than 7 million people - has experienced military coups in the past.

Soldiers overthrew elected presidents in 1963 and again in 1975; the military did not turn the government over to civilians until 1981.

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New Honduran leader sworn in

A new president has been sworn into office in Honduras, hours after the ousting of President Manuel Zelaya.

Congress speaker Roberto Micheletti will serve as interim president until polls are held, Congress said.

The removal of Mr Zelaya by the army came amid a power struggle over his plans for constitutional change.

Mr Zelaya, who had been in power since 2006, wanted to hold a referendum that could have led to an extension of his non-renewable four-year term.

Polls for the referendum had been due to open early on Sunday - but troops instead took him from the presidential palace and flew him to Costa Rica.

The ousting of Manuel Zelaya has been criticised by regional neighbours, the US and the United Nations.

In the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, groups of Zelaya supporters were said to have set up barricades, while troops were at key sites.

Mr Micheletti told a press conference that a nationwide curfew was being imposed for Sunday and Monday, running from 2100 (0300 GMT) to 0600 (1200 GMT) on each night.

Days of tension

The swearing in of Roberto Micheletti - constitutionally second in line for the presidency - was greeted with applause in Congress.
“ This was a plot by a very voracious elite, which wants to keep this country in an extreme level of poverty ”
President Manuel Zelaya

"My slogan will be the reconciliation of the grand family of Hondurans... and a grand national dialogue," he said.

Congress said he would serve until 27 January, when Mr Zelaya's term was due to expire. Presidential elections are planned for 29 November.

Both Congress and the courts had opposed Mr Zelaya's referendum, which asked Hondurans to endorse a vote on unspecified constitutional changes alongside the November elections.

Tensions over the issue had been escalating for several days, with the army refusing to help with preparations for the referendum.

Just before dawn on Sunday, troops stormed the president's residence. There was confusion over his whereabouts for several hours before he turned up in Costa Rica.

Mr Zelaya urged Hondurans to resist those who had removed him, calling his ouster "a plot by a very voracious elite, an elite which wants only to keep this country isolated, in an extreme level of poverty".

But Congress said it had voted to remove him because of his "repeated violations of the constitution and the law and disregard of orders and judgments of the institutions".

In Tegucigalpa, groups of Zelaya supporters were setting up roadblocks around the presidential palace, Reuters said.

One man told the BBC that he had been in the city's main square all day, along with 2,000 Zelaya supporters. Jeronimo Pastor described the situation as tense and called on the international community to get involved.

But another resident of the capital said people were relieved at Mr Zelaya's removal. "Now we have a new president and will have elections and things will go back to normal," Kenneth Bustillo told the BBC.

The removal of Mr Zelaya has drawn criticism across Latin America and the wide world.

The Organization of American States held an emergency meeting, while UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for "the reinstatement of the democratically elected representatives of the country".

US President Barack Obama urged Honduras to "respect the rule of law" and a State Department official said America recognised Mr Zelaya as the duly elected president. The European Union called for "a swift return to constitutional normality".

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, meanwhile, blamed "the Yankee empire", and threatened military action should the Venezuelan ambassador to Honduras be attacked.
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Chavez threatens to invade as Honduran army stages coup

Venezuelan leader vows to 'act militarily' after leftist ally Manuel Zelaya is overthrown and exiled to Costa Rica

By David Usborne

Monday, 29 June 2009

Honduras was plunged into a political crisis that threatened to spill across the region hours after President Manuel Zelaya was thrown out by the army and exiled to Costa Rica prompting his leftist ally in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, to threaten military intervention.

In the first successful military coup in Central America since the end of the Cold War, the army sent masked soldiers into the presidential palace before dawn. The President, who was in dispute with his military about a planned constitutional referendum, was then escorted to a military plane which took him into exile.

Mr Chavez went on state television later in the day claiming that the coup leaders had taken away the Cuban ambassador to Honduras and left the Venezuelan ambassador by the road in the capital, Tegucigalpa, after beating him. He said that if troops enter his embassy "that military junta would be entering a de facto state of war," and "we would have to act militarily".
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The Congress in Honduras said later that it had received a letter of resignation from Mr Zelaya, purportedly signed on Friday. In a show of hands, representatives accepted that he had stepped down from office.

The country's Supreme Court said it supported the coup. The court had been opposed to the non-binding referendum which was an effort to legitimise a re-writing of the constitution to allow Mr Zelaya to overcome term limits and seek re-election as president. Mr Chavez and the leaders of Bolivia and Ecuador have similarly moved to end restrictions on how long they can stay in office.

The Honduran ambassador to the Organisation of American States said the military was planning to swear in the Congressional President, Roberto Micheletti, next in line to the presidency according to the constitution, to replace Mr Zelaya, who came into office in 2006 and would have had to stand down in 2010 under the existing constitution.

Speaking from Costa Rica, Mr Zelaya denied he had written a resignation letter calling it "totally false". Insisting he was still the president, he said there was "no way to justify an interruption of democracy, a coup d'etat." He added: "This kidnapping is an extortion of the Honduran democratic system."

Under the government of Mr Zelaya, Honduras was member of Alba, a coalition of leftist Latin American countries that includes Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador and Nicaragua and which is led by Mr Chavez. The organisation was rushing to arrange a summit in Nicaragua to discuss what action to take after the coup.

"We will bring them down. We will bring them down, I tell you," Mr Chavez vowed during yesterday's broadcast, saying, "I have put the armed forces in Venezuela on high alert".

Experts noted, however, that Mr Chavez has a track record of threatening military action but not following through with it. He deployed troops to his border with Colombia last year after that country took action against terrorist bases just inside Ecuador. That crisis eased after a few days, however.

Mr Zelaya said he first realised a coup was under way when he was woken by gunshots inside his palace grounds. He described leaping from his bed and avoiding bullets by hiding, still in his pyjamas, behind an air conditioning unit. He said the palace guard held the soldiers off for more than 20 minutes before he was taken into custody and escorted by eight or nine masked soldiers to the waiting plane.

The streets of Tegucigalpa were reportedly mostly calm last night although main avenues were filled with army tanks in a strong show of force. Roughly 100 supporters of Mr Zelaya had gathered by mid-morning outside the gates to the palace. Some threw stones at hundreds of soldiers surrounding the palace and shouted "Traitors! Traitors!" in protest.

"They kidnapped him like cowards" yelled Melissa Gaitan, 21, who works at the government television station. "We have to rally the people to defend our president."

In Washington, President Barack Obama said he was "deeply concerned" by news of the coup while the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said his expulsion from the country should be condemned. "I call on all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter," Mr Obama said in a statement released by the White House.

Manuel Zelaya: President in exile

*With his moustache and taste for cowboy hats, Manuel Zelaya won the 2005 presidential election in Honduras by a margin of barely 70,000 votes, as a long-time member of the centre-right Liberal Party.

Once in office, however, Zelaya tracked left and moved the country away from its traditional close alliance with the US, forging links instead with Hugo Chavez, the leftist president of Venezuela.

Though he had campaigned on a law-and-order ticket, his country has increasingly been seen as a transit point for drugs to the US, with rising criminal violence and street gangs. He has urged Washington to legalise drugs as the best solution to the problem.

Two years ago, in a dispute with the US about imported Honduran melons that were deemed unsafe, Zelaya went on CNN and ate one on air.

Frustrated by what he considered unfair coverage of his government by Honduran television and radio, he issued an order in 2007 that all stations should carry two hours of government propaganda every day.

Zelaya believes term-expanding referendum can be held in all the Latin American countries but he is wrong, the consequence is serious.. or I guess is it a measure that will be taken by all the countries of ALBA or willing to enter the ALBA?

Chavez threatens to invade? Oh, dear, but he is not omnipotent, even though he may think he is.

IMO, it is not only a "golpe de estado" but also a "golpe de ALBA", I don't know if the oppositions of Venezuela, Brazil and Ecuador will take some actions, too?

the coup was justified based upon what I have read. The president defied the Supreme Court. That cannot happen in a Democracy (though I disagree with the court's decision, since the vote was not a referendum, but a non-binding poll)

Not surprised Chavez is threatening an invasion. Not sure who is more annoying, him, Iran, or the puppet master

LOL ... Invade with what?

They've got six aging frigates and four amphibious landing ships. They're going to sail them a thousand miles through our back yard and stage an amphibious assault?

That's laughable.

they may have allies since most countries have opposed the Coup

I have kinfolk (by way of my wife) in Honduras. So far everything is ok. I sure hope so though.

AP Interview: interim Honduran leader claims only armed invasion will restore ousted president

WILL WEISSERT

Associated Press Writer

8:40 PM CDT, June 30, 2009

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — The interim president of Honduras vowed Tuesday not to resign the post he took over following a military coup and claimed that only an armed invasion would restore his ousted predecessor to power.

Roberto Micheletti said during an interview with The Associated Press that "no one can make me resign," even though the United Nations, the Organization of America States, the Obama administration and governments around the world have condemned the military uprising and refused to recognize his government.

The world has almost universally called for the return of his democratically elected predecessor, Manuel Zelaya, but Micheletti said "he has already committed crimes against the constitution and the law. He can no longer return to the presidency of the republic unless a president from another Latin American country comes and imposes him using guns."

He did not name any specific nations, but earlier Tuesday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said any aggression toward Zelaya from Micheletti's government should prompt a military intervention by the United Nations. Chavez is a close ally of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, which neighbors Honduras.

Micheletti said his government had imposed a nightly curfew "until things get back to normal because they have warned us that some South American countries were going to attack us and the population has to be ready and prepared."

"If there's an invasion against our country," he said, "we will see 7 and a half million Hondurans ready to defend our territory, our laws and our fatherland and government."

Honduras' population is roughly that figure.

Micheletti now occupies the same office in the colonial-style presidential palace that Zelaya did until last weekend. He and his ministers were settling into new offices even as the military continued to control the building: a typical bureaucratic handover except that soldiers wandered the halls.

Micheletti said he had not spoken to a single member of U.S. President Barack Obama's government or any president in Latin America, but he maintained that 80 percent of Hondurans support him.

"I was named by Congress to represent the Honduran people. No one can make me resign if I do not violate the laws of the country," he said.

Zelaya — whose elected term ends in January 2010 — had defied the Supreme Court and called a referendum on constitutional change that opponents worried would lead to Zelaya prolonging his presidency.

Zelaya backed down from the referendum Tuesday, saying at the United Nations that he would no longer push for the constitutional changes he had wanted.

But Micheletti said giving up the constitutional referendum would not be enough for Zelaya to avoid arrest since the former president had "several" arrests warrants issued against him, including some dealing with drug smuggling charges.

Zelaya's opinions rating had sagged at home in recent years and his fiery brand of populism is similar to the kind that often irks the international community. Still, the world has lined up to support him.

Asked if Zelaya could one day return to power strong than ever, Micheletti said "it's not about sympathy, it's not about being a martyr, but simply that we are following the letter of the law which he did not respect."

Micheletti served as president of Congress before Sunday's ouster of Zelaya and both are members of the Liberal Party. He also said Tuesday that he will not "even seek to be a candidate again" for the presidency once his term ends in January.

A 4.9 tremor just impacted northern Honduras.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/rec ... hp#details

IIRC, now that the Sandanistas got back into power through the ballot box, subsequent municipal elections have been judged as not fair by international observers, and Daniel Ortega Saavedra is still a Marxist.


Chavez would only need to fly in troops to Nicaragua and then have no need for a naval landing force at all.

I have no idea how big Honduras military is, but I suspect a combined Marxist assault (Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela) crossing the border would probably be hard to defend against.

Honduras Gets Ultimatum From American Nations
By SHARON OTTERMAN and MARC LACEY

The Organization of American States on Wednesday gave Honduras three days to restore the deposed president, Manuel Zelaya, or face suspension, as the interim leader of the country defied international condemnation of the coup that led to his appointment and said only force could unseat him.

Calling Mr. Zelaya’s overthrow an “old-fashioned coup,” the organization’s secretary general, Miguel Insulza, said: “We need to show clearly that military coups will not be accepted. We thought we were in an era when military coups were no longer possible in this hemisphere,” The Associated Press reported.

Jorge Taiana, the foreign minister of Argentina who presided over the special session in Washington of the 34-nation assembly, said that if the diplomatic approach did not prevail within 72 hours, the organization would “have to take the decision to suspend Honduras in its rights and duties in this organization.”

Mr. Zelaya arrived late Tuesday to address the organization to solidify support for his return to Honduras, which he was forced by the army to leave on Sunday. Earlier, Mr. Zelaya met with leaders in New York, where the United Nations General Assembly denounced his ouster as a coup and demanded his immediate return to office.

As international condemnation builds, Roberto Micheletti, the interim leader of Honduras appointed by the Congress after the coup, has grown even more insistent that he is the nation’s rightful leader.

Mr. Zelaya “has already committed crimes against the Constitution and the law,” Mr. Micheletti told The Associated Press in an interview late Tuesday. “He can no longer return to the presidency of the republic unless a president from another Latin American country comes and imposes him using guns.”

The remarks set the stage for an expected showdown on Thursday, when Mr. Zelaya has said he will return to reclaim leadership. The presidents of Argentina and Ecuador have said they will accompany Mr. Zelaya, along with officials of the O.A.S. and the United Nations.

The standoff, which began early Sunday when the army seized the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa, the capital, and compelled Mr. Zelaya to board a plane to Costa Rica, continued to build through the early hours of Wednesday, when the O.A.S. condemned the coup in the strongest of terms.

In a sharply worded resolution, concluded after marathon talks that began Tuesday afternoon, the organization called the coup an “unconstitutional alteration of the democratic order.” The envoys demanded Mr. Zelaya’s immediate and safe return to power, and issued an ultimatum to Honduras, saying that it will expel it from the organization if Mr. Zelaya is not returned to power.

The organization “condemns vehemently the coup d’état staged against the constitutionally established government of Honduras, and the arbitrary detention and expulsion from the country of the constitutional president, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales,” the resolution said.

As diplomatic tensions rise, Spain’s Foreign Ministry announced Wednesday that it would recall its ambassador from Honduras to protest the coup. A number of other countries, including France, have already recalled their ambassadors.

Mr. Zelaya was ousted amid a confrontation over his bid to rewrite the constitution so he could run for a second term, a move Mr. Micheletti has said was a bald ploy to hold on to power.

“No one can make me resign if I do not violate the laws of the country,” he said in the A.P. interview. “If there is any invasion against our country, 7.5 million Hondurans will be ready to defend our territory and our laws and our homeland and our government.”

“If he comes back, he will be arrested,” said Mr. Micheletti in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Paìs published on Wednesday.

“He is facing charges. He has exceeded the constitution and called an illegal referendum.”

Alberto Rubí, the Honduran attorney general, said Tuesday that the charges included treason and abuse of authority.

The new foreign minister, Enrique Ortez, went further in a television interview, accusing Mr. Zelaya of permitting drug traffickers to use Honduras as a base to smuggle cocaine from South America to the United States, an accusation that aides to Mr. Zelaya called a tall tale intended to smear him.

At the White House, the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said Tuesday said that while President Obama has condemned the coup, there are no plans to recall the American ambassador.

The United States said it saw no acceptable solution to Mr. Zelaya’s ouster other than returning him to power. The State Department spokesman, Ian C. Kelly, told reporters that Washington was still reviewing whether to cut off aid to Honduras as a result of the crisis.

Sharon Otterman reported from New York, and Marc Lacey from Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

World Bank suspends loans to Honduras

MEXICO CITY, June 30 (Xinhua) -- World Bank (WB) President Robert Zoellick said on Tuesday that the bank would stop disbursing the 270 million U.S. dollars in loan to Honduras until the situation in the Central American country stabilized.

It will not consider new credits to the Central American nation at least for the time being, news reports reaching here quoted the WB chief as saying.

The WB is providing 400 million dollars for a total of 16 development projects in Honduras in interest free loans, 270 million of which are yet to be disbursed. Such loans by the WB are rare for Latin American countries.

The bank has also decided to halt a credit of 80 million dollars for Honduras' new fiscal year starting on Wednesday.

It was still hard to measure the coup's economic impact on the country and its possible influence on Central American integration, said Zoellick. He was referring to the military coup that ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya on Sunday.

The WB would work with the Organization of American States (OAS) and other relevant parties to bring the country back to the track of democracy, which was also the underlying reason for the credit suspension, he said.

Demonstrations continued for and against Zelaya in Honduras on Tuesday. Two people have died in protests against the coup, and hundreds more injured or jailed.

The interim leadership has decided to extend the curfew for 72 hours on top of that on Sunday and Monday nights.

I got the impression Zelaya wanted to change the Constitution so he could do a Chavez or Castro and be President for Life, and both the legislature and Supreme Court ordered the military to remove him.


If that is true, people may be too quick to jump on "military coup"...

Ed Mahmoud wrote:I got the impression Zelaya wanted to change the Constitution so he could do a Chavez or Castro and be President for Life, and both the legislature and Supreme Court ordered the military to remove him.


If that is true, people may be too quick to jump on "military coup"...

Unfortunately, to explain why Obama and the US would do nothing should Chavez invade Honduras and other aspects of our response would require a Political post which, of course, is verböten. Just suffice it to say that Birds of a Feather Flock together.

Steve

I'm at a loss as to why we've taken this stance as a country. Why we would want to have another Chaves is just beyond me.....

An old-fashioned coup in Honduras?

In the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, Stephen Gibbs finds out what people think of last weekend's coup, which exiled President Manuel Zelaya.

Fashions from the 1970s are much in evidence in Central America.

Go into any shopping mall from San Salvador to Panama City and you will see tie-dye T-shirts and flower-print trousers, even sunglasses of the type last seen on Jackie Onassis.

And this week, it seemed another vogue from that decade, the military coup, was back.

Journalists who were working in those heady years and have not succumbed to alcoholism or corporate cutbacks, can still bore colleagues with tales of long-forgotten takeovers in one or other of the seven Central American states.

So it did feel like a bit of a throwback as I approached the border between El Salvador and Honduras the day President Manuel Zelaya had been woken at dawn by soldiers and told he was out of a job.

Relaxed atmosphere

I had decided to travel with the correspondent from the New York Times by car.

In the hours following the coup, the airport in the capital Tegucigalpa had been closed. It was a few minutes before nine in the evening when we arrived at the frontier.

I was not convinced that we would be able to cross.

We had heard that a curfew would soon be imposed across the whole country. And El Salvador had just weeks ago elected a left-wing government.

I suspected that relations with the soldiers who had just thrown out Honduras's leftist leader would be tense. How wrong I was.

Two affable men from El Salvador's immigration, and their female Honduran counterpart, came out of their apparently shared office, all smiles, to check our passports.

"You might be better not driving at night," said the Honduran. "Apparently there is a curfew".

The "apparently" struck me as odd. I thought the whole point of military rule was that everyone knew the rules.

Lack of information

We crossed the border and looked for somewhere to stay.

MANUEL ZELAYA
# Won the Honduran presidential election for the Liberal Party in November 2005, beating the ruling National Party's candidate
# Has moved Honduras away from its traditional ally the US
# Enjoys the support of Venezuela's leftist President, Hugo Chavez
# A civil engineer and rancher by profession

There was only one option: The Mandarin Hotel, an unpretentious truckers' hostel with nylon sheets and cold beer.

"There's been no information at all," said the owner of the hostel, as he looked at the television above us. "They've put on children's cartoons instead of the news".

"But I think the president's gone," he murmured.

He looked at the floor. He had nothing more to say.

Presumably he, like millions of other Hondurans, had been told four years ago how important their vote was, how whoever won that presidential election would change their lives. And now there had been a change of government and all he was offered was Tom and Jerry.

The curfew was lifted at six the next morning and we headed for the capital.

"It will take around two hours," our good-humoured taxi driver said.

I assumed that was optimistic and that we would come across several military checkpoints. President Zelaya - who had been flown in his pyjamas to Costa Rica - had already hinted that he would return.

We saw no checkpoints, and not a single soldier. By eight in the morning we were joining the morning rush hour into Tegucigalpa.

Extraordinary events

At the hotel reception there, I was offered a view of either the capital's largest shopping mall, or the presidential palace. Both gave something away about what had happened the night before.

It was business as usual at the mall, as many Hondurans continued to shop - appearing untroubled - even unaware of their change of government.

But outside the forbidding grey-stoned presidential palace, there was proof of the extraordinary events that were taking place.

Perhaps 1,000 soldiers, looking like Roman legionnaires behind their rows of riot shields, were stationed in front of the building.

The road that runs alongside the palace had been occupied by masked protesters. They had been there all night, and were now jeering at the soldiers.

As I walked towards the building, a man - his face obscured by a mask - with a metal bar in his hand, approached me.

"Are you an American?" he shouted. It sounded like a threat.

I wondered whether telling him I was British would make matters better or worse.

"I am not American," I replied. He waved me on.

And there in front of me was the palace.

No more blind eyes

Looking at it made me think that some things really have not changed since the heyday of Latin American coups in the 1970s and 1980s.

You really can take over a country by seizing control of a few key buildings. If the soldiers are on your side, or if you are the army, it is relatively easy.

But something has changed, which is going to make the ousting of President Zelaya difficult to sustain.

A global consensus has been reached, that military coups of any form are unacceptable.

Forty years ago, plenty of blind eyes would be turned in the White House, when the telex arrived announcing that another Central American leader had been forced from power. Those days it seems, are over.

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mf_dolphin wrote:I'm at a loss as to why we've taken this stance as a country. Why we would want to have another Chaves is just beyond me.....

I think that because Zelaya was elected democratically we can't approve a coup. Still, behind the curtains everyone is happy because it's true that Zelaya was another leftist.

Honduran court defiant on Zelaya

The Supreme Court of Honduras has rejected a demand by the Organization of American States to reinstate the ousted President, Manuel Zelaya.

OAS chief Miguel Insulza was told that the court's position was "irreversible" when he met its president for two hours in the capital Tegulcigalpa.

Mr Insulza, who arrived in Honduras on a mission to have Mr Zelaya reinstated, left the meeting without comment.

Troops forced President Zelaya out of the country on Sunday.

“ No coup took place here ”
Roberto Micheletti head of interim government

The interim government formed after his removal says Mr Zelaya's attempts to change the Honduran constitution, and possibly extend his power, justified the army's actions.

It can now expect expulsion from the OAS, diplomatic isolation and likely international sanctions, the BBC's Stephen Gibbs reports from Tegulcigalpa.

Mr Zelaya is expected to return from exile to the country on Sunday, accompanied by OAS officials and Argentine President Cristina Kirchner.

The new Honduran government says he will be arrested.

'Despotic ambitions'

Before arriving in the Central American state, Mr Insulza said he would meet the heads of the institutions that approved Mr Zelaya's removal and ask them to review their actions.

"We are not going to Honduras to negotiate," he said.

He acknowledged that it would be difficult to persuade the interim government to take back Mr Zelaya.

Mr Zelaya wanted to hold a referendum that could have removed the current one-term limit on serving as president, paving the way for his possible re-election.

Instead troops - backed by Congress and the courts - took him from the presidential palace and put him on a plane to Costa Rica.

The new leadership enjoys the support of a substantial proportion of the population and says it stands for democracy, our correspondent reports.

It suggests that Mr Zelaya had despotic ambitions, and therefore the extreme action of removing him from power was justified.

But governments around the world disagree, and believe that a clear message should be sent to Honduras that using the army to depose a president is not acceptable, our correspondent says.

Saturday deadline

The OAS has said it will suspend Honduras if Mr Zelaya is not reinstated by Saturday.

Mr Zelaya himself insists that he remains the country's democratically elected leader.

The interim government - led by Roberto Micheletti, previously the speaker of Congress - says it may bring elections forward from their scheduled date of 29 November.

On Friday, Mr Micheletti told thousands of supporters at a rally in Tegucigalpa that he was "the president of all Hondurans".

"We are asking Hondurans to communicate with their relatives throughout the world to tell them that no coup took place here," he said.

Thousands of Zelaya supporters demonstrated at a separate rally across town.
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