New street protests planned in Honduras
Agence France-Presse | 07/01/2009 12:56 AM
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TEGUCIGALPA - Tensions were running high in Honduras Tuesday with new street protests planned as deposed President Manuel Zelaya vowed to return only days after being ousted in an army-backed coup.
A day after demonstrators defied a 48-hour curfew triggering violent clashes on the streets of the capital, new protests were called here in support of Zelaya who had been bundled from his bed by troops on Sunday and flown to Costa Rica.
The deposed 57-year-old president, who was elected to a non-renewable four-year term in November 2005, was due to address the United Nations Tuesday as international leaders pressed for him to be returned to power.
"I go to Tegucigalpa on Thursday," Zelaya told regional leaders in Nicaragua Monday setting up a showdown with the newly installed Honduran administration of interim leader Roberto Micheletti.
Zelaya left Managua Tuesday heading for New York, airport sources there said, adding he was accompanied by his Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas.
Argentine President Cristina Kirchner is also set to accompany Zelaya on his return Thursday, government sources said in Buenos Aires.
"The president (Kirchner) will be part of the delegation of the Organization of American States which will travel on Thursday to Honduras with Zelaya," the source said asking to remain anonymous.
On Monday in Tegucigalpa, hundreds of angry Zelaya supporters, defying a government order to stay inside, erected barricades near the presidential palace.
They threw rocks and Molotov cocktails and used pipes and metal bars against shield-bearing riot police. The security forces cracked down with tear gas and gunfire, an AFP photographer said.
The violence, the most serious unrest in years in this impoverished Central American country of 7.5 million people, left several demonstrators and security forces injured.
The coup was triggered after Zelaya determined to press ahead with a referendum seeking to ask the people's support to run for a second term in November elections.
The vote had been deemed illegal by the Supreme Court which said Sunday it had authorized Zelaya's removal from power.
Just hours after Zelaya was flown out of the country, the Honduran Congress swore in its speaker Micheletti as the interim president until January.
Politicians, business leaders, most communications media and a good part of the population have applauded Zelaya's overthrow, despite the violent street protests.
Micheletti brushed off international condemnation of the takeover, insisting he "had come to the presidency not by a coup d'etat but by a completely legal process as set out in our laws."
But Zelaya insists he remains the elected leader, and the coup -- the first in a South American nation since the 1980s -- triggered international outrage.
US President Barack Obama said Washington believed Zelaya "remains the president of Honduras."
"It would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backwards into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition rather than democratic elections," Obama said.
Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said Tuesday that Madrid, the former colonial power, wanted the European Union to recall its ambassadors.
Moratinos told a news conference he was trying to contact the EU's Czech presidency to suggest "that concerted European mechanisms are put in place to seek the recall of European ambassadors posted in Tegucigalpa."
The Organization of American States was set to meet in Washington later Tuesday. And Zelaya could pass through the US capital on Wednesday on his way back to Honduras.
Honduras' neighbors in Central America have also agreed to isolate Tegucigalpa politically and economically, ordering the regional bank to suspend loans and payments to Honduras.
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