Manuel Zelaya: I Want My Mommy

Manuel Zelaya: "I am the President"
Editorial / The Panama Post
Story by Jorge Ramos


In a telephone interview Monday, Manuel Zelaya insisted: "I am the president of Honduras, here and in Rome." The problem for Zelaya is that "here" is Costa Rica, not Honduras.
Less than a day earlier a group of soldiers had taken him by force from his residence in Tegucigalpa, still in his pajamas, shoved him aboard a Honduran Air Force plane and sent him into exile in San Jose, the Costa Rican capital.
"I was abducted in a brutally violent act, they broke into my home," he told me from San Jose. "I had never seen such exaggerated brutality: They tied up my bodyguards, there was shouting, intimidation, terror and, finally, I was threatened with rifles pointing at my face, at my chest. These people were wearing masks."
Zelaya calculates there were about 200 soldiers around his house.
"My daughter was with me in the house when the shooting began and people started shouting," he described. "It was a terrifying drama at 5:30 in the morning. I ran from my room, just as I was, in my underwear, to my daughter's room."
He was captured there.
When I spoke with Zelaya, the president of the Honduran Congress, Roberto Micheletti, had not yet been appointed acting president of the country. But there were already rumors in the press that Zelaya had allegedly signed a letter of resignation.
"That is a total lie," Zelaya said about the alleged letter. "That makes me think that this is a political mafia plot, a conspiracy.
"I could never resign because the people elected me," he added, "and my term ends next year. I won't be (in office) one day more, but nor will I be one day less."
Zelaya's opponents say it was Zelaya who brought this upon himself when he wouldn't pay attention to admonitions of the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court. Both institutions had declared as "illegal" the public poll that Zelaya wanted to hold last Sunday. Many Hondurans feared that Zelaya would use the results of the survey to, eventually, reform the Constitution and re-elect himself.
The survey, of course, never came about. And the Supreme Court endorsed the army's action against Zelaya.
But Zelaya insists, "There is no such law in Honduras. This has nothing to do with Honduran legislation, it has everything to do with an arbitrary act. How can anyone believe that you can't take a public opinion poll?"
"Do you want to return to Tegucigalpa and be reinstated as president?" I asked.
"I am the president," he answered. "I am president and they cannot create an illegitimate government. The U.S. Embassy in Honduras has just released a communique which says it doesn't recognize any other government than that of Manuel Zelaya Rosales."
Which is true. Until now no government in the world has recognized Micheletti's government as legitimate. But many nations in the hemisphere are now in the uncomfortable position of supporting a president as unpopular and erratic as Zelaya.
Zelaya not only did strange things -- such as eating a melon while being interviewed on international television -- but recently he declared himself a "leftist" and an ally of the Castro brothers' dictatorship in Cuba. Many Hondurans feared that Zelaya would betray his campaign's democratic promises and use the support of his new friends to go against the Constitution and remain permanently in office.
One of the ironic aspects of events in Honduras is that Cuba's regime has publicly come out to defend democracy, even though Cuba has not defended democracy in its own land in the last 50 years. And another contradiction is that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez described the military who commanded the coup against Zelaya as "gorillas," forgetting that he himself headed a failed military coup against a democratically elected president in Venezuela in February 1992.
But the debate about authoritarianism in Cuba and Venezuela will come later. Right now, the news is Honduras. And the consensus among members of the Organization of American States (OAS) and of human rights organizations is that, if they wanted Zelaya out of office (for ignoring Supreme Court orders) or declared him incompetent, they should have enforced Honduran laws to impeach him in Congress, instead of sending soldiers to remove him by force.
Presidential elections in Honduras are slated for November. So, as of today, Honduras has two men who think of themselves as "presidents" of the country -- and of a split democracy.