Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Zelaya given okay to leave Honduras

Honduran president-elect Porifirio Lobo and Dominican president Leonel Fernandez worked out a deal allowing the exit of ousted leader Manuel Zelaya. The pact would permit Zelaya safe passage out of the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa and to the Dominican Republic after Lobo takes office next Tuesday.

"We must all forgive,” said Lobo earlier today while adding his hope that the agreement would quell Honduras’ political crisis. Zelaya, meanwhile, told local radio that the accord “is a goodwill gesture by Porfirio Lobo” and is also evidence that Lobo is "distancing himself from the dictatorship" of de facto president Roberto Micheletti.

Why hasn’t Zelaya left the Brazilian embassy and how did Honduras’ political crisis develop? BBC News gave a helpful summary of events:
Honduras' interim government has so far refused to allow Mr. Zelaya to travel without fear of arrest.

He has taken refuge in the Brazilian embassy in Honduras since his return to the country in September.

Mr. Zelaya was forced into exile on 28 June after trying to hold a vote on whether a constituent assembly should be set up to look at rewriting the constitution.

His critics said the vote, which was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, aimed to remove the current one-term limit on serving as president and pave the way for his possible re-election.

Mr. Zelaya has repeatedly denied this and pointed out that it would have been impossible to change the constitution before his term in office was up.
Image- The Independent (Ousted Honduran leader Manuel Zelaya has been holed up at the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa since last September).
Online Sources- New York Times, MSNBC, BBC News, AFP

3 comments:

Boehmaya said...

What Zelaya says is true. It is virtually IMPOSSIBLE to change the constitution if you only make a QUESTION to the peoples asking whether they would like it to be changed or not and then it has to go through many processes to be changed. It would have had to be right now, during Lobo's election, that this fourth ballot was possible for people, a National Constituent was set up for Lobo's term to change it, and I don't see how from there, according to speculators or to any extreme hypothesis it would have to implicate Zelaya's reelection and the direct ammendment of the "reelection restriction law". If so, Zelaya would have had to wait til 2014 to run for the next election, but no-one can assure this is the National Constituent Assembly's goal, which is to get rid of those paradisiac "free" maquila zones in Honduras amongst many other things and we will acquire it with or without Zelaya.


Question: why do you echo what the media says? will you go on echoing forever the fallacies about Zelaya wanting to reelect himself? That's as stupid as saying that just because I ask someone if i can help out writing out the rules of their factory and make a survey to everyone asking them if they want this change, having to go first through the factory's president election, and then i get accused of wanting to steal all the factory just because of that question.

It just serves to neutralize general public opinion and to justify the coup and the repression.

If you love so much Latin America, why don't you start talking about the new CIDH report on human rights violations in Honduras during the coup, which was released just a little while ago? Do you have any interest in the human rights of latin americans or do you just have this blog to serve interests of your government and enterprises? Obviously you are neither latinos nor latino loving. you probably call us "yours" for other reasons....

Anonymous said...

if you look closely, you will see all the things you mentioned have been covered on this blog ad nauseum.

Slave Revolt said...

The bottom-line, Boehmaya, is that much of the middle and upper classes in Latin America support class oppression, and they really despise democracy if it threatens to infringe on their privileges.

Therefore, it is no surprise that people that support oppression, no matter their liberal-progressive public face, have reported falsehoods and under-reported outright oppression on the part of the dictatorship in Honduras.

I just returned from Honduras, and I noted the extreme fear, and the way that the upper-classes engage in all manner of lies to avoid the fact that they support outright military fascism.

The good news is that the people of the entire region are becoming less willing to live in permanent impoverishment. This scares the crap out of the so-called intellectuals in the Americas.

About the Latin American, deathsquad rightwing: Let them hang from ropes if they don´t make it to Miami first. This is what fascist escualidos deserve as their fate. They are mere parasites.