TEGUCIGALPA, (Reuters) – Honduran interim leader Roberto Micheletti said yesterday ousted president Manuel Zelaya would not be allowed to return to power under any conditions but could be granted an amnesty if he comes home quietly to face justice.
“If he comes peacefully first to appear before the authorities … I don’t have any problem (with an amnesty for him),” Micheletti told Reuters in an interview at the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa in a room guarded by five heavily armed soldiers.
But the interim president, installed by Honduras’ Congress after the June 28 military coup that deposed Zelaya, repeated his position that Zelaya would not be reinstated as president “under any conditions.”
This signalled Micheletti’s continuing defiance of international condemnation of the coup and calls from the Organization of American States, the United States and the United Nations General Assembly for Zelaya to be restored to office.
Honduras’ Congress and Supreme Court ordered the army to remove Zelaya last month, arguing he had violated the country’s constitution by attempting to lift presidential term limits.
Zelaya, who has been travelling in the Americas to shore up his support, also ran afoul of his political base and ruling elites in the conservative country by allying himself with Venezuela’s firebrand leftist president, Hugo Chavez.
Micheletti blamed Chavez for the political crisis.
“Chavez is the great damage that democracy in Honduras has suffered. We hold him responsible for any incident or any invasion that might come against Honduras from any country,” he said.
Micheletti’s interim government is holding talks with Zelaya’s representatives under the auspices of Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. The meetings have resulted in little apparent progress, aside from an agreement to keep talking.
Micheletti said Arias was due to call his negotiating team in the next 8-10 days to organize the next round of talks and that he was very satisfied with Arias’ impartiality.
This coup have an interesting side to it-If the congress and the supreme court ask the army to remove him then it can be said that this in reality is not a coup since the country was not taken over by the army instead the army followed orders from the court and maybe their constitution provides for that since i assume the police could not do so.Do u noticed that Uncle SAM is at the sideline., in reality doing little if nothing to reinstate him,.
Guyana should offer Zelaya amnesty.
ZELAYA ouster is NOT a “military” coup
The Zelaya ouster was NOT a “military” coup. It was the removal of a constitutional usurper by lawful judicial authority.
The Zelaya movement relies on naive, unsophisticated individuals with no knowledge of Constitutional law and of how it functions. And that is particularly true of the so-called “journalists” pretending to cover it.
The Supreme Court of Honduras was bound by law to protect the Constitution, it did the RIGHT thing. The world press and media, and the UN and its lackeys, are misrepresenting domestic Constitutional fact and law in attacking Honduras.
For more detail on the constitutional law involved, read this blog:
http://honduras-not-a-military-coup.blogspot.com/
Kathleen Moore
Montreal, Canada
MY VIDEOS: http://hccvideocatalog.blogspot.com/