Honduras' constitutional President Manuel Zelaya affirmed on Tuesday that what came out of his conversation with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is an agreement to a mediation by Costa Rica's President Oscar Arias to reinstate constitutional order in Honduras.
The goal of the mediation is to plan the abandonment of the country by the coup perpetrators, said Zelaya, who noted that there are issues that will not be negotiated. President Arias was accepted as negotiator and he will deal with things that will not be negotiated. "What is being planned is a return following an agreement with the de facto government," Zelaya said.
“Honduras is paralyzed, there are strikes, peaceful demonstrations going on; even my wife is demonstrating,” said Zelaya and went on to add that the country is suffering from the terrible impact of the break of democracy.
“If presidents are going to be appointed by the military and politicians by using illegitimate authority, we will be moving back some 100 years. We can not return to those times in which the presidents had to sleep in their suits and with their suitcases made, since they could surprisingly be expelled or killed just any in any moment,” he charged.
Zelaya said that last Sunday the Argentinean plane carrying Presidents Cristina Fernandez, from Argentina; Fernando Lugo, from Paraguay, and Rafael Correa from Ecuador, was denied clearance to land. “The pilot was ordered to return or else they would shoot at the plane. I was in the cockpit and we saw two war planes take off that would down our plane, and even under those circumstances the pilots approached the Toncontin airport of Tegucigalpa,” Zelaya recalled.
He said the pilots were determined to land at any cost. “It was a courageous decision and also a patriotic determination” – Zelaya pointed out – because they knew they would be shot at; however they could not leave over 200,000 people waiting down there as they supported Zelaya's return to Tegucigalpa.
The Honduran President thanked Miguel D' Escoto, president of the UN General Assembly; Patricia Rodas, Honduran Foreign Minister and Carlos Sosa Coello, Honduran ambassador at the OAS for their decision to accompany him even risking their own lives.
Referring to the young man murdered by the military that support the coup, Zelaya told his relatives that he would have prefer to have been the target of those bullets in the demonstration.
President Zelaya showed the State Department´s letter dismissing Honduras' ambassador to Washington and appointing a diplomat proposed by the constitutional president. As to the delay of the situation underway in Honduras, he said that the process is about to reach an important end.
“We are neither betraying nor leaving our people alone, on the contrary; we are empowering our people because all countries of the world, with no exception, are supporting this process of legal and juridical reinstatement,” Zelaya pointed out.
