Zelaya at U.N., but is jeered at home
Exiled president faces arrest in Honduras, official warns
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya on Tuesday continued to build support for his return home, but the country’s de facto rulers said he’d be arrested the minute he set foot on national territory.
As Zelaya addressed a supportive U.N. audience in New York, Hondurans in Tegucigalpa were demonstrating against and, in smaller numbers, in favor of the deposed leftist leader. Zelaya was flown to Costa Rica in exile early Sunday after soldiers removed him from his home.
Honduran attorney general Luis Alberto Rubi, who clashed frequently with Zelaya, said Tuesday arrest warrants had been issued accusing Zelaya of 18 crimes, including treason and abuse of authority. Rubi said Honduran authorities would ask Interpol to detain Zelaya, who has said he plans to return to Honduras on Thursday with a delegation of regional heads of state and other officials.
“The justice tribunals of my country have issued orders to capture (Zelaya) because he broke laws,” said Roberto Micheletti, the former head of Congress whom legislators chose to replace Zelaya after the army deposed him.
In Washington, where the Obama administration has joined regional leaders in condemning the coup, U.S. officials said Tuesday they had severed contacts with the Honduran military, with which they maintained close ties for decades. The U.S. also will consider cutting off hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, officials said.
In Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, several thousand opponents of Zelaya filled a downtown square waving blue-and-white Honduran flags and denouncing Zelaya’s ties to Latin leftists like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
Repeatedly invoking God and fatherland, Micheletti thanked his followers “united here to protect democracy” and pledged to go ahead with presidential elections scheduled for the end of November.
He clasped the hand of Gen. Romeo Vasquez, the jowly, camouflage-clad army chief whom Zelaya had tried to fire, and raised their arms overhead in a sign of victory. Micheletti said army officers were the “heroes” of the moment for having seized Zelaya from his bedroom Sunday morning and bundled him off into exile, still in his pajamas.
“It wasn’t a coup!” the crowd chanted. “Democracy, yes! Communism, no!”
Most of the wrath seemed directed more at Chavez than at Zelaya. Chavez is seen as a heavy-handed bully by many here and in other parts of the region, and his growing alliance with Zelaya made many Hondurans fear their country was being pulled to the radical left.