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CENTRAL AMERICA |
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Too Late to Salvage Honduras' Elections,
Zelaya Backers Say
TEGUCIGALPA – Supporters of ousted Honduran
President Mel Zelaya said Monday that they
will boycott the Nov. 29 presidential
election even if the deposed head of state
is restored to office before then.
The only leftist in the presidential
contest, Carlos Reyes, withdrew from the
race, while the anti-coup Resistance Front
said it is already too late to ensure a free
and fair ballot.
To take part in the vote would be “to
legitimize the coup d’etat,” Reyes, who has
been running at only 4 percent in the polls,
told reporters when he arrived at the
Supreme Electoral Court to formally renounce
his candidacy.
“Participation in such a process would give
legitimacy to the coup regime and to its
successor,” the Resistance Front said in a
statement.
Members of the Resistance Front have mounted
daily demonstrations since June 28, when
soldiers dragged Zelaya from the
presidential palace and put him on a plane
to Costa Rica.
Many of those protests have been broken up
violently by soldiers and police on the
orders of the coup regime, with a toll of a
dozen deaths and hundreds injured and
arrested. While the leader of the de facto
regime, Roberto Micheletti, resorted at one
point to a state of siege and has forced
anti-coup media outlets off the air for
weeks at a time.
“The army has its nose in everything, there
is repression throughout the country,” Reyes
said Monday. “All state institutions are run
not only by the military, but by the
putschists.”
But David Matamoros, one of the three
members of the Electoral Tribunal, insisted
“there are more than sufficient factors for
the elections to be considered clean and
transparent.”
Zelaya, who slipped back into the country
Sept. 21 and remains holed up at the
Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa, said
boycotting the election to choose his
successor is the “correct” decision.
The electoral process is “hardly clean,”
given that it is unfolding “under
repression, under dictatorship, with
political persecution, violations of human
rights and suspension of news media,” Zelaya
said.
The U.S. government expressed disappointment
last Friday over the breakdown in
implementation of the accord meant to end
the standoff between Zelaya and the
Micheletti regime.
Signed Oct. 30 by representatives of Zelaya
and Micheletti, the Tegucigalpa-San Jose
Accord called for the formation of a
national unity government by midnight last
Thursday.
The pact also required Congress to vote on
restoring the elected head of state.
But the text did not lay down a timeframe
for that process and the congressional
leadership put off a debate, choosing
instead to first seek an advisory opinion
from the Supreme Court, the very institution
that has sought to give the coup a veneer of
legality.
Zelaya maintains that the installation of
the national unity government and undoing
the putsch are inextricably linked, but the
Micheletti camp insists on treating them as
separate issues.
Soon after last Thursday’s deadline,
Micheletti took to the Honduran airwaves to
unilaterally announce a new administration,
with himself at its head, made up of
candidates proposed by political parties and
other sectors of civil society.
Zelaya responded Friday by pronouncing the
accord dead, prompting U.S. officials to
urge both sides to resume negotiations.
Some members of the Resistance Front have
blamed the United States and the
Organization of American States for failing
to compel the Micheletti regime to comply
with the accord.
“We hold the OAS and the United States
responsible for being accomplices in this
coup d’etat, which, after 131 days, they
have done nothing to resolve,” Juan Barahona
told Efe last week. “They show no interest
in the definitive exit of the putschists
from power.”
His comments followed a statement by the top
U.S. diplomat for the Americas, Thomas
Shannon, that Washington would accept the
Honduran Congress’ decision on whether or
not to restore Zelaya to office for the less
than three months left in his term.
The remark by Shannon, whose presence in
Tegucigalpa two weeks ago was credited with
spurring agreement between Zelaya and
Micheletti, seemed to go back on
Washington’s earlier threat not to recognize
the winner of Honduras’ Nov. 29 presidential
election unless the deposed leader was
reinstated beforehand.
And last week, Shannon told a U.S. senator
that Washington would recognize the election
results regardless of what happened with
Zelaya.
Barahona said that the OAS and Washington
“could have forced the putschists, within 24
to 32 hours, to give back power they
usurped.”
“The United States hasn’t done it because it
is in agreement with the coup d’etat. The
OAS hasn’t done it because that has been its
role forever: to talk and not to do,” he
said.
Micheletti has contended all along that
Zelaya’s ouster was not a coup, insisting
the army was simply enforcing a Supreme
Court ban on the president’s planned
non-binding plebiscite on the idea of
revising the constitution.
But while the coup plotters accuse Zelaya of
seeking to extend his stay in office, any
potential constitutional change to allow
presidential re-election would not have
taken place until well after the incumbent
stepped down in January. EFE
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