Army
Overthrows Honduras President
By Mica Rosenberg
Tegucigalpa (Reuters) - The Honduran army
ousted and exiled leftist President Manuel Zelaya on Sunday in Central America's first
military coup since the Cold War, triggered
by his bid to make it legal to seek another
term in office.
U.S. President Barack Obama and the European
Union expressed deep concern after troops
came for Zelaya, an ally of socialist
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, around
dawn and took him away from his residence.
He was whisked away to Costa Rica.
Zelaya, who took office in 2006 and is
limited by the constitution to a four-year
term that ends in early 2010, had angered
the army, courts and Congress by pushing for
an unofficial public vote on Sunday to gauge
support for his plan to hold a November
referendum on allowing presidential
re-election.
Speaking on Venezuelan state television,
Chavez -- who has long championed the left
in Latin America -- said he had put his
troops on alert over the Honduran coup and
would do everything necessary to abort the
coup against his close ally.
He said that if the Venezuela ambassador was
killed, or troops entered the Venezuela
embassy, "that military junta would be
entering a defacto state of war, we would
have to act militarily." He said, "I have
put the armed forces of Venezuela on alert."
Chavez, who has in the past threatened
military action in the region but never
followed through, said that if a new
government is sworn in after the coup it
would be defeated.
A military plane flew Zelaya to Costa Rica.
Some 2,000 pro-government protesters, some
armed with shovels and metal poles, burned
tires in front of the presidential palace in
the capital, Tegucigalpa, and two fighter
jets screamed through the sky over the city.
Democracy has taken root in Central America
in recent decades after years of
dictatorships and war, but crime, corruption
and poverty are still major problems. Zelaya
said the coup smacked of an earlier era.
"If holding a poll provokes a coup, the
abduction of the president and expulsion
from his country, then what kind of
democracy are we living in?" Zelaya said in
Costa Rica.
Honduras, an impoverished coffee, textile
and banana exporter with a population of 7
million, had been politically stable since
the end of military rule in the early 1980s.
But Zelaya has moved the country further
left since taking power. His push to change
the constitution drove a rift between his
office and the nation's other institutions.
A former businessman who sports a cowboy hat
and thick mustache, Zelaya fired military
chief Gen. Romeo Vasquez last week for
refusing to help him run Sunday's unofficial
survey on extending the four-year term limit
on Honduran presidents.
Zelaya, 56, told Venezuela-based Telesur
television station that he was "kidnapped"
by soldiers and called on Hondurans to
peacefully resist the coup.
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