http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2010/enero/juev28/zelaya-honduras-ing.html
Havana. January 28, 2010
HONDURAS
The leaving of its president
PRESIDENT José Manuel/ Mel Zelaya made a dignified and sad exit from his
country, Honduras today, January 27, six months after he was violently deposed
by a coup d'état and transported against his will to Costa Rica, and four
months after he valiantly re-entered Honduras in a clandestine manner - after
two attempts to return by plane and on foot from neighboring Nicaragua - and
was given refuge in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa.
He was given a safe conduct by Porfirio Lobo, inaugurated as president on
the same day in the wake of post-coup and thus an election outside of any
constitutional framework and in the midst of the mass abuse of human rights and
civil liberties. That safe conduct to the Dominican Republic, brokered by its
president, Leonel Fernández, was the final act of whitewashing the
Washington-backed coup on June 28, 2009, after the National Congress announced
an amnesty for all those involved in his dispossession.
He was not able to say goodbye to his mother, and had to ask his
supporters in the National Resistance Front, who have defended him there from
the minute they knew of his return and greeted him there on New Year's Eve, not
to come to the embassy to bid him farewell, as that would complicate matters.
But they were there at Toncontín airport in a "mega-demonstration.
What were the crimes of this president, elected by a right-wing Liberal
Party on January 27, 2006?
Throughout his presidency he related to and moved closer to Honduras'
poor and dispossessed. He established a basic wage - starting with workers on
his own estate - held down oil prices. He consulted with workers and thus
emerged the idea of a constituent assembly for full democratic representation,
to be put to the ballot in the presidential elections at the end of his
mandate, which a high possibility of winning.
In the terrain of foreign relations and particularly those with Latin
America, he took Honduras into ALBA.
Possibly Zelaya's greatest "crime" in the eyes of the empire was his
intention to convert the U.S. Palmerola airbase in Honduras - the same location
from where he was ignominiously deported from his country - into a civilian
airport.
Throughout his exile after June 28, 2009, Zelaya used every democratic
resource in all the forums open to him to revert the situation in which his
country found itself, while the national resistance movement took on the battle
within and developed at an extraordinary and effective pace which cannot be
detained. But he was foiled by those very instruments of so-called democracy,
or the precepts of veiled self-interest.
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