Honduras: What Now?

TEGUCIGALPA, Dec 3 (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 favor. 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, antagonized 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 recognize 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 center-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 recognize 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 recognized Lobo's victory.

The issue will face a trial by fire Friday in Washington, when the Permanent Council of the Organization 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 favor 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.