Zelaya returns to Honduras

Mr Zelaya addressed his supporters from the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa

BBC News 9/22/09

It looks like the nightmare scenario for the coup leaders.

The Honduran authorities have imposed a round-the-clock curfew and shut down airports after the dramatic return of ousted President Manuel Zelaya.

Mr Zelaya has taken refuge in Brazil’s embassy in Tegucigalpa. Many of his supporters later gathered outside.

He said he had crossed mountains and rivers to return to the capital, where he said he was seeking dialogue.

In a televised address, interim leader Roberto Micheletti demanded that Brazil hand over Mr Zelaya to stand trial.

Mr Micheletti said Brazil would be held responsible for any violence.

“A call to the government of Brazil: respect the judicial order against Mr Zelaya and turn him in to Honduran authorities,” he said.

“The eyes of the world are on Brazil and Honduras.”

Brazil’s Foreign Minister, Celso Amorim, warned that any threat to Mr Zelaya or the Brazilian embassy would be a grave breach of international law.

SIREL Interview with Manuel Zelaya Rosales

At the end of a press conference by the constitutional president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya Rosales, at his country’s embassy in Managua, we caught up with Zelaya in his car, as he was leaving with his chief of staff, Enrique Flores Lanza, on their way to a meeting with international media. President Zelaya, who in just a few days or even hours, will again attempt the journey back to Honduras, agreed to give SIREL an exclusive interview.

-You have announced your intention of going back to Honduras at any cost. Is that a final decision?

-It’s not something aimed at destabilizing the country. On the contrary, it’s a way to stabilize the country. We believe this is the best path towards starting a national dialogue that will solve the conflict and will put an end to the repression that the Honduran people are suffering.

-A dialogue with whom?

-With the people, because in a democracy it is the people who rule. The sectors in power that have taken up arms are repressive groups and must surrender the government to the people, who did not entrust them with that power.

-What has pained you most of this coup staged against you and your government staff?

-It pains me to see that my country is being torn apart, that society is suffering, that everything we’ve accomplished thanks to the efforts of many generations is now being threatened at gunpoint.

-The de facto government has been completely isolated by the international community and is facing a strong and unyielding resistance on the home front led by grassroots movements. But it continues firmly entrenched in an intransigent attitude. Have you asked yourself if this is just recklessness on its part, or if it is confident it has support from sectors abroad?

-They’re like beasts in the wild, desperately holding on to their prey. To them Honduras is like their own personal hacienda. They’re a group of ten families who want to consolidate their economic benefits and privileges. But they’re acting on baseless fears, because no one is threatening to touch their interests. Still, they see democratic development as harmful to them and they can’t stand democracy.

Support democracy in Honduras

Anti-coup protesters in Honduras face lines of cops, troops

 By Gary Grass and Babette Grunow
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 17, 2009
http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/50973492.html

After midnight on June 28, a masked squad ordered by Gen. Romeo Velazquez stormed with guns ablaze the residence of Honduras’ populist president, Manuel Zelaya, and sent him – still bedclothed – into exile. The country’s Supreme Court and elite institutions, dominated by a few wealthy families, cheered.

Millions of ordinary Hondurans reject the coup. A plurality rejected it in a CID-Gallup poll last week, and mass demonstrations denounced it. They resist, despite the government suspending the right to protest, meeting rallies with violence, killing at least five, arresting hundreds and charging many with sedition.

The full scale of the crackdown is unknown. The coup government has closed independent media outlets and arrested, expelled and killed journalists. The country is not awash in U.S. videocameras, and its protests are not centered within the middle-class Twitterverse. Visiting Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu called Honduras a “dark box” isolated from neutral information.

The Honduras Coup: Is Obama Innocent?

By Michael Parenti, July 8, 2009, CommonDreams.org

Is President Obama innocent of the events occurring in Honduras, specifically the coup launched by the Honduran military resulting in the abduction and forced deportation of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya? Obama has denounced the coup and demanded that the rules of democracy be honored. Still, several troubling questions remain.

First, almost all the senior Honduran military officers active in the coup are graduates of the Pentagon’s School of the Americas (known to many of us as “School of the Assassins”). The Honduran military is trained, advised, equipped, indoctrinated, and financed by the United States national security state. The generals would never have dared to move without tacit consent from the White House or the Pentagon and CIA.

Second, if Obama was not directly involved, then he should be faulted for having no firm command over those US operatives who were. The US military must have known about the plot and US military intelligence must have known and must have reported it back to Washington. Why did Obama’s people who had communicated with the coup leaders fail to blow the whistle on them? Why did they not expose and denounce the plot, thereby possibly foiling the entire venture? Instead the US kept quiet about it, a silence that in effect, even if not in intent, served as an act of complicity.

Honduras: The Other 9/11 Has Returned To Stalk Latin America

The ugliest face of the Latin American oligarchy is now standing alone against the world, showing its contempt for democracy and for its own people.

Johann Hari
London Independent, July 2, 2009

The ghost of the other, deadlier 9/11 has returned to stalk Latin America. On Sunday morning, a battalion of soldiers rammed their way into the Presidential Palace in Honduras. They surrounded the bed where the democratically elected President, Manuel Zelaya, was sleeping, and jabbed their machine guns to his chest. They ordered him to get up and marched him onto a military plane. They dumped him in his pyjamas on a landing strip in Costa Rica and told him never to return to the country that freely chose him as their head of state.

Back home, the generals locked down the phone networks, the internet, and international TV channels, and announced their people were in charge now. Only sweet, empty music plays on the radio. Government ministers have been arrested and beaten. If you leave your home after 9pm, the population have been told, you risk being shot. Tanks and tear-gas are ranged against the protesters who have thronged onto the streets.

For the people of Latin America, this is a replay of their September 11th. On that day in Chile in 1973, Salvador Allende – a peaceful democratic socialist who was steadily redistributing wealth to the poor majority – was bombed from office and forced to commit suicide. He was replaced by a self-described “fascist”, General Augusto Pinochet, who went on to “disappear” tens of thousands of innocent people. The coup was plotted in Washington D.C., by Henry Kissinger.

Honduras: Obama’s maiden coup

Military coup in Honduras

World leaders unified in calls for return to power of kidnapped President

From TheRealNews.com

On Sunday, Hondurans were expecting to vote in a first ever nation-wide survey. In stead they woke up to find out that the military had taken control of the streets and their elected President Manuel Zelaya had been kidnapped and flown to Costa Rica. Soon after, an emergency convening of the National Congress appointed Zelaya’s political rival, Roberto Micheletti, as the new President. However, Hondurans were quick to take to the street and world leaders just as fast to denounce the move, demanding the return to power of Manuel Zelaya and refusing to deal with the coup leaders.