HONDURAS: Negotiators Announce Collapse of Talks
The negotiators for ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and de facto leader Roberto Micheletti announced that talks to solve the political crisis triggered by the Jun. 28 coup had broken down.
The three-week talks sponsored by the Organisation of American States (OAS) collapsed Friday over the question of the reinstatement of Zelaya to complete his term, which ends in January.
The issue was the last sticking point in the negotiations, which had reached agreement on '95 percent' of the items in the San José Accord put forth by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias when he tried to broker a deal in July.
Micheletti's negotiating team said he would step down if Zelaya did so as well. The proposal, which the de facto government had already set forth shortly after the coup, would involve the selection of a 'third person' to head a coalition government until January, when the new president to emerge from the Nov. 29 elections is to take office.
Former Supreme Court President Vilma Morales, a member of Micheletti's team, said in a news briefing that Zelaya's negotiators were showing 'intransigence and intolerance' by rejecting the proposal for a coalition government.
She said Micheletti's negotiators were still open to dialogue.
Zelaya, meanwhile, said it was impossible for him to agree to the proposal because 'the problem is not going to be solved by finding someone else to assume my post. The solution is my reinstatement, period.'
He said Micheletti must step down, 'give me back my position, and respect the will of the people who voted me, and no one else, president.'
Until there is a proposal that includes his reinstatement, he said, 'the dialogue will not continue; I won't play along with the coup-mongers.'
Zelaya, who was pulled out of bed at gunpoint by the military and sent into exile on a plane to Costa Rica on Jun. 28, secretly returned to Honduras on Sept. 21. Since then, he has been holed up in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa along with around 30 of the 300 people originally accompanying him, most of whom have gradually left the compound over the last few weeks.
Honduran political scientist Ernesto Paz said 'the dialogue has failed because radical and intransigent positions won out on both sides, although it must be noted that on Micheletti's side, the most conservative sectors of the country have closed ranks with the military to refuse to accept Zelaya's reinstatement.
'The most conservative hard-line economic, political and religious sectors surrounding Micheletti have stood firm in their refusal to allow Zelaya to return, and have given this coup a very particular conservative, anti-communist and nationalist character of a kind that had not been seen in today's globalised world. They are going for broke,' the analyst told IPS.
'The only thing left now is to salvage some kind of possible scenario, one of which would involve the coming elections, which are going to take place no matter what,' he said. 'The so-called Resistance Front (against the coup), which supports Zelaya, may throw some kind of wrench into the process, but they don't have the power to block the elections; they are very fragmented now.'
The Front, a broad coalition of trade unions and civil society groups, has held street protests since the coup, some of which have been violently broken up by the security forces.
Paz said another possibility was for Zelaya to wait and negotiate with the presidential candidate with the best chance of winning in November: 'Porfirio Lobo, of the National Party (the main opposition force), with whom he says he has had informal conversations.
'It would be easier for Zelaya to negotiate once Porfirio Lobo won, than now, when he is totally hemmed in, although it is important to note that the National Party candidate faces strong internal opposition in favour of a settlement with Zelaya. The question is: how long can he hold out?'
Honduras' two dominant political parties, the governing Liberal Party (to which both Zelaya and Micheletti belong) and the National Party, have governed the country for most of the last century.
The coup has eroded the party structures, but without yet causing any drastic splits.
The analyst said the international pressure would increase for a solution to the political crisis, particularly from the United States, which once again cancelled the visas of de facto government officials last week.
'Above and beyond the suspension of visas, I think it is unlikely that Washington will do anything else, because free trade agreements and domestic U.S. legislation make it difficult for it to do something like freeze bank accounts or assets,' Paz said.
OAS special adviser to the talks John Biehl said he was returning to Washington Saturday to consult with OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza.
Biehl, who refused to say the talks had broken down, because 'there is always hope,' said recent opinion polls show that a majority of Hondurans want a negotiated solution, and that 'most of the people believe the 'third person' option would be the best solution to the crisis.'
Saying he was taking the suspension of the dialogue as a 'break,' he added that he would return to the country when he was invited back or instructed to do so by the secretary general.
In the view of the OAS, the only possible route is talks, he said, adding that the conflict cannot be resolved with threats, by saying there will be violence in Honduras if this or that does not happen.
U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said he was disappointed, and urged the two sides to 'seal the deal,' after saying he did not believe the talks had failed.
© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service