Few people who have watched the Honduran crisis closely expected a deal from the latest round of negotiations. It didn’t help that the State Department torpedoed the talks by leaking statements that it intended to support the November elections, even sending e-mails announcing that position to the de facto regime, according to Time magazine. Regime leader Roberto Micheletti has consistently refused to concede the basic premise of a negotiated settlement: the return of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya to power. Without acceptance of that basic premise, the negotiations, which are supposed to be about the mechanism of return, are a sham and a waste of everyone’s time, as we, not surprisingly, discovered again today. Interestingly, some weeks ago, a group of Honduran academics explored Micheletti’s psychological profile, concluding that he would never accede to a negotiated settlement and would have to be removed by force. Micheletti is enormously unpopular in Honduras, according to a recent poll which shows that 60% of the populace want him to leave while only 22% want him to stay.
State Department Torpedoes Talks
As if on cue, the State Department leaked reports during the most delicate moment of the negotiations that its position on Honduras would be softening with respect to elections. The international community’s threat that it would not recognize November elections was its strongest card in bringing the regime to the table. After the State Department revealed, through back-channel communications and press leaks, that the U.S. would, in fact, support the elections, talks quickly collapsed.
Tim Padgett of Time magazine reported, in an article published on the Internet last Friday afternoon:
The U.S., the Organization of American States (OAS) and every other nation in the world have condemned the June 28 military coup as antidemocratic — and they've warned the installed President, Roberto Micheletti, that they won't recognize the results of Honduras' long-planned Nov. 29 presidential election if Zelaya isn't reinstated beforehand.
But there are growing signs that the U.S. may be willing to abandon that condition. A number of well-placed sources in Honduras and the U.S. tell TIME that officials in the State Department and the U.S.'s OAS delegation have informed them that the Obama Administration is mulling ways to legitimize the election should talks fail to restore Zelaya in time. "We're suddenly hearing from them that the one may no longer be a [precondition] for the other," says a Western diplomat in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, where Zelaya is currently holed up in the Brazilian embassy.
Worse, the State Department actually sent e-mails to Micheletti’s circle announcing its position:
A Latin-American diplomat close to the Zelaya-Micheletti talks says the acting leader's own aides showed him an e-mail last month from a high-level official in the U.S.'s OAS delegation concurring that Zelaya's return should not be a condition for approving the election. What's more, says the diplomat, the missive suggests that insisting on Zelaya's restoration has handed a victory to Chávez and other anti-U.S. leaders in the region.
Time deserves enormous credit for finally nailing down the State Department’s position, which has left a lot of observers scratching their heads as it seemed incapable of formulating a coherent response to the coup. While the talks would probably have failed anyway, the State Department will now, quite rightly, share the blame for that failure, and its chaotic response continues to fuel widespread speculation that the U.S. sponsored the coup. This is botched diplomacy at its worst and I'm done trying to defend the State Department. I have no idea what it's doing any more.
In light of the revelations in the Time article, the Center for Economic and Policy Research has called on the Obama administration to clarify its position:
"The Obama administration should immediately and forcefully clear up any doubts about its position on the November 29 elections," Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) Co-Director Mark Weisbrot said. "The stated position supports democratic institutions, civil liberties, and the rule of law, but some State Department officials seem ready to sacrifice all of this.
In the latest round of negotiations, conducted in Tegucigalpa under the auspices of the OAS, President Zelaya had agreed to a number of important concessions, including the formation of a unity government with the appointment of a new council of ministers and a promise to abandon a referendum on constitutional reform. Micheletti, however, refused to consider Zelaya's reinstatement, proposing that the decision be left to the supreme court. Although the court did not order Zelaya's ouster, it has attempted in various subsequent pronouncements to justify the army's illegal action, going as far as to invent an asinine legal doctrine it called estado de necesidad, or "state of necessity," arguing that illegal actions were permitted in Honduras if they would save lives. It was obvious to everyone that the proposal to turn the decision over to the court was a non-starter and yet another frivolous attempt by Micheletti to run out the clock on negotiations. The regime almost certainly has been empowered to continue its mockery of the negotiations by the State Department's announcement that its threat not to recognize the elections is not serious.
A few moments ago, Zelaya's negotiators announced they would not participate further in the talks until Micheletti's group brings a serious proposal to the table.
International Solidarity
Radio Globo of Honduras has won the prestigious Ondas Iberoamericanos award for "its defense of freedom of expression and for the exemplary exercise of journalism under difficult conditions in this Latin American country." Radio Globo, with the largest listening audience in Honduras, has been a primary target of the Micheletti regime and was forced off the air for 22 days by a decree restricting press freedom and freedom of assembly. During that time, the station’s staff continued broadcasting on the Internet from a safehouse in Tegucigalpa. It returned to the air in Honduras this morning, when a decree restoring constitutional rights was finally published.
The UN High Commissioner of Human Rights sent a delegation to Honduras Sunday to begin a comprehensive investigation of the flagrant human rights abuses occurring since the June 28 coup.
More Honduran Musicians
I’ve been impressed with a number of Honduran musicians, discovered in the course of reading about the crisis. Here are a couple of songs by Honduran trovadora Karla Lara. The first, Es vida decidir, is a song to protest Micheletti’s proposed ban on emergency contraception, with scenes of women outside congress. Women’s groups have been in the forefront of the Resistance, and they are among those most brutally beaten by police. The other is a sweet song called Antes del puente, written by José Yeco, who we’ve met in previous diaries.