Washington Post

The ousting of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya could not have been better scripted for another Latin American leader who has taken center stage: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The populist firebrand has been Zelaya's most forceful advocate and could win international accolades if the Honduran leader eventually succeeds in regaining power. Ever since Zelaya was hustled into exile on Sunday by the military, Chavez has been a flurry of activity. Using Venezuela's oil-fueled influence to organize summits where he has been the central speaker, he is spreading his vision of Latin America and calling for Hondurans to rise up against those who deposed Zelaya. "I just cannot stay here with my arms crossed," he declared in one of many speeches calling for the new Honduran government to step aside.

"This is perfect for him. Why? Because he's not defending a tyrant, he's defending an elected president who was overthrown," said Luis Vicente Leon, a pollster and political analyst in Caracas. "It's show time for the showman."
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Indeed, Zelaya, 56, is on the surface an unlikely benefactor of Venezuela's support. He is a rancher and logger from Honduras's upper classes who came late to Chavez's alliance of left-leaning nations, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, which includes Nicaragua, Bolivia, Cuba and others.

But Chavez has characterized Zelaya as a leftist fighting for the poor -- and said those who overthrew him hail from an oligarchy intent on maintaining the status quo. He has even taken to mockingly calling Roberto Micheletti, the lawmaker who replaced Zelaya as president, a "gorilla."

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Sydney Morning Herald

Officials ordered the arrest of ousted President Manuel Zelaya if he returns to Honduras after being expelled in an army-backed coup, as thousands of protesters took to the streets here.

And as the United Nations backed international calls for Zelaya to return to power, the ousted leader said in New York that he would not seek a second term in office -- a key concern in the tense political showdown.

Zelaya, 57, was removed in his pajamas by Honduran troops Sunday and put on a plane to Costa Rica amid a dispute with the military and courts over plans to change the constitution, including to allow him to run for a second term.

Attorney General Luis Alberto Rubi said Tuesday that Zelaya would "immediately" be arrested if he returned to Honduras, where legal officials have accused him of 18 crimes including "treason" and "abuse of authority."

Zelaya has vowed to return on Thursday, which many fear could spark clashes between his supporters and opponents.

But he apparently sought to defuse the tensions Tuesday by making clear he would not seek to extend his non-renewable four-year term to which he was elected in 2005.

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School of the Americas Watch

The situation in Honduras turned violent when over 10,000 people gathered in the streets to protest the coup Monday evening. Using tear gas, high-powered water and guns (it is still not clear whether soldiers were armed with rubber bullets or otherwise) many people were wounded and there has been one confirmed death in the capital, Tegucigalpa. In the capital, pro-coup marches are occurring, defended by the police and national guard. As of Tuesday morning, the resistance movement to the coup is gathering in Tegucigalpa, to determine how and where to take to the streets. Therefore, there is anticipation of violence today, as soldiers are expected to react violently today to protesters as they did yesterday.

Violence has also broken out outside of Tegucigalpa. In the interior of the country, especially in the state of Olancho, the military has been conducting home invasions in order to capture and detain youth. Many youth have fled to the mountains, and their whereabouts are unknown. The military is violently disbursing pro-Zelaya marches, and many protesters are missing. The local media is refusing to air any comments about the violence and human rights abuses taking place in the country, insisting that nothing is amiss. An international news crew from TeleSur was detained and beaten while broadcasting the oppression of protesters by the military.

Yesterday in a meeting of the Rio Group, President Zelaya reiterated that he is the only president of Honduras, and that he has not stepped down. He declared his plans to return to Honduras on Thursday, mostly likely accompanied by the Secretary-General of the Organization of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza. Argentine president Cristina Fernandez also plans to accompany Zelaya on Thursday. The coup in Honduras has been unanimously condemned throughout the Western Hemisphere, and has also been condemned by the United Nations and European Union. Zelaya spoke on Tuesday in front of the United Nations.

Notably, two army battalions have refused orders from the coup government. They are the Fourth Infantry Battalion in the city of Tela and the Tenth Infantry Battalion in La Ceiba (the second largest city in Honduras), both located in the state of Atlantida.

The coup leaders include several well-known human rights abusers, such as the retired Captain Billy Fernando Joya Amendola, who was a member of the CIA-trained 3-16 batallion from 1984-91, one of the most notorious battalions noted for human rights abuses during that time.. Bertha Olivar, of COFADEH, calls the coup advisers a line-up of the "Galley of Terror". Furthermore, two coup leaders, Air Force Commander General Luis Javier Prince Suazo and Army General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, were trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC, Formerly known as the School of the Americas--SOA), a US army school located in Fort Benning, GA, whose graduates have been linked to some of the largest human rights atrocities in Latin America's history.

COFADEH (Comité de Familiares de Detenidos y Desaparecidos en Honduras or the Honduran Committee of Families of the Disappeared or Detained), a leading Human Rights group in Honduras, has gone hospital to hospital attempting to document the cases of violence and human rights abuses. They are conducting this documentation work because the national Human Rights Commission, headed by Ramon Custodio and the Fiscal (Attorney General), Sandra Ponce, have thus far refused to document and denounce human rights abuses since the coup began Monday morning and are fully supporting the coup government.

One of the first moves of the the army and de facto government was to cut electricity and telephone lines throughout most of the country. Later Monday two television channels were re-established, both of which maintained that Zelaya had voluntary resigned, the change of power was constitutionally legitimate and that the new President had the support of the majority of the Honduran people. Through TeleSur, a transnational South American television news station, the public in South America has been able to see on the ground footage of protests in Honduras as well as streamed footage from the Honduran pro-coup news stations. Hondurans within their country are much less informed than larger Latin America because the coup government has been able to stop TeleSur from broadcasting. Information is arriving to Honduran people about the whereabouts of President Manuel Zelaya and the vast international support he has by way of people from outside Honduras calling to cell phones of friends and family inside who are inside the country. The biggest issue now are human rights abuses inside the country.

COFADEH calls on the international human rights community to denounce the blatant disregard of human rights abuses by Ramon Custodio and Sandra Ponce.

New York Times
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras—Flipping through a stack of legal opinions and holding up a detention order signed by a Supreme Court judge, the chief lawyer of the Honduran armed forces insisted that what soldiers carried out over the weekend when they detained President Manuel Zelaya was no coup d’état.

“A coup is a political move,” the lawyer, Col. Herberth Bayardo Inestroza Membreño, said Tuesday night in an interview. “It requires the armed forces to assume power over the country, which didn’t happen, and it has to break the rule of law, which didn’t happen either.”

Governments around the world have decided differently, labeling Mr. Zelaya’s removal an illegal act and calling for his prompt return to power. On Monday, the day after the coup, President Obama said: “We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there.”

Colonel Bayardo, dressed in green camouflage and wearing a blue beret, described a behind-the-scenes struggle between the armed forces and Mr. Zelaya that played out over the weeks before the decision to grab the president from his home, shuttle him to a military base and fly him out of the country.

The army had resisted participating in a nonbinding referendum on constitutional changes that Mr. Zelaya continued to push after both Congress and the courts had labeled the president’s move unconstitutional. Army lawyers were convinced that Mr. Zelaya was moving to lift a provision limiting presidents to a single term in office, Colonel Bayardo said.

When the army refused an order to help organize the referendum, the president fired the commander of the armed forces, Gen. Romeo Vásquez. He was reinstated by the Supreme Court, which found his removal illegal.

The detention order, signed June 26 by a Supreme Court judge, ordered the armed forces to detain the president, identified by his full name of José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, at his home in the Tres Caminos area of the capital. It accused him of treason and abuse of authority, among other charges.

“It was a clean operation,” Colonel Bayardo said, dismissing Mr. Zelaya’s remarks before the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday in which he described the arrest as a brutal coup. “It was a fast operation. It was over in minutes, and there were no injuries, no deaths. We said, ‘Sir, we have a judicial order to detain you.’ We did it with respect.”

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