Breaking update: In the midst of a heavy military presence in the Casa Presidencial, a nervous Roberto Micheletti has just read a statement in which he accepted an accord for President Manuel Zelaya's reposition. The accord must be ratified by congress, as Zelaya had insisted, but not by the supreme court, a proposal he had rejected. We don't have Zelaya's response yet, but I'll update once more when we do. This is great news for the Obama administration, if the accord holds.
23:11 p.m. local time (GMT-06:00). Zelaya confirms agreement will be signed. A timeline for restitution must still be negotiated, but the Honduran Resistance is jubilant. Negotiating commissions announce accord has been signed! Everyone giving credit to Assistant Secretary Shannon.
The arrival in Tegucigalpa of a high-level, U.S. delegation including National Security adviser Dan Restrepo may be helping to unblock the standoff in Honduras today, although there are still no definite signs of a shift in the regime’s stance.
Unfortunately, if anything, the Micheletti regime appears to be taking a harder line this week. A day before the delegation’s arrival, Micheletti said he would not discuss Zelaya’s return until after the elections on November 29. Yesterday, the army sent out letters to Honduran mayors requesting information about Resistance members in their towns and announced the discovery of a supposed Resistance plot to assassinate politicians, army officers and businessmen. This morning, police and army agents brutally repressed a peaceful protest with clubs and tear gas, leaving at least four people wounded. The regime also filed an absurd lawsuit against Brazil with the World Court in The Hague, where it has no standing. The U.S. delegation has met with both President Manuel Zelaya and regime leader Micheletti. At its insistence, negotiators resumed talks on Zelaya’s restitution today, but it is unclear whether the regime is finally negotiating in good faith.
The high-level delegation includes Thomas Shannon, assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, his deputy Craig Kelly, and Dan Restrepo, the National Security Council’s senior director for Latin America. Of the three, the presence of Dan Restrepo, who reports directly to President Obama, is by far the most interesting. He is a first-generation American born to Colombian and Spanish parents, and the first person ever to give a White House briefing in Spanish. He was previously director of The Americas Project at the Center for American Progress. During the past four months, his statements on behalf of the White House condemning the coup have been consistent and clear.
The delegation arrived in Tegucigalpa yesterday at noon local time, spent about an hour and half meeting with President Zelaya at the Brazilian embassy and then met with Micheletti. This morning, the delegation members sat at the head of the table as negotiators faced each other for the first time since talks collapsed last week. Shannon, Kelly and Restrepo then left the commissions to their discussions and gave a press conference from the U.S. embassy. The delegation members have decided to remain at least through Friday, in the hopes that an agreement will be signed before returning to the U.S.
During the press conference, Shannon said:
In our view, an agreement within the national dialogue opens a large space for members of the international community to assist Honduras in this election process, to observe the elections and to have a process that is peaceful and which produces a leadership that is widely recognized throughout the hemisphere as legitimate. This will be important as a way of creating pathway for Honduras to reintegrate itself into the inter-American community.
During questions, Shannon was asked to address yet more statements contradicting the US and OAS position on elections, made yesterday by acting U.S. ambassador to the OAS, Lewis Amselem, who seems determined to undermine the Honduras talks.
"For the OAS to discard the results of the coming election without examining conditions under which they will take place abuses Hondurans’ right to self-determination," Amselem said during a meeting of the organizations’ Permanent Council in Washington.
As Narco News reminds us, Amselm is the ghoul who propagated a rumor in Guatemala that American nun Diana Ortiz, kidnapped and tortured by state security forces in the presence of a man with an American accent, had received her cigarrette burns in a sado-masochistic, lesbian three-way. Clearly, the Obama administration needs to station this relic somewhere well out of the reach of microphones.
While Republicans have been prevented by the delegation’s presence from rushing to the aid of their regime bedfellows (it would be fun to have the transcript of the desperate phone calls from Micheletti to Jim DeMint right now), they opened a new front in their war against the Obama administration by requesting a GAO report on the embassy’s activities in Honduras from January to the present. Twenty-one Republicans signed the request for information on State Department and embassy communications, meetings and reports, while hinting that they had discovered something awry in Honduras during their visits.
One legislative source who requested anonymity [Ileana Ros- Lehtinen, if you can’t guess] told EFE today that the request to the GAO, the congressional investigative branch, is in response to "concerns" that surfaced in these trips, although no details were given.
"We just want to get to the bottom of what happened. We don’t want to jump to premature conclusions and that’s why we’re requesting that the GAO investigate. We want this taken to its ultimate consequences," [Ros-Lehtinen] added.
Vicki Gass, of the Washington Office on Latin America, has called the Republican request a "witch hunt."
She said that, in her opinion, "this is a witch hunt because the real issue is not Honduras but an effort by the Republican party to attack the Obama administration’s policy however it can."
Personally, I think the Republicans are still mad the regime had to fire its racist "foreign minister" who called Obama a "little black sugar plantation worker," but I’ll go them one better. Let’s have a GAO report on the U.S. embassy actions in Honduras for the past 30 years, uncensored and released in full to the public, available in both English and Spanish, with mandatory paid publication in Honduran newspapers and copies sent to the UN, OAS and the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights.
Lest we get our hopes up about talks, it’s worth remembering that Micheletti’s behavior to date has been eerily in line with a psychological profile Honduran academics constructed a month ago. They concluded, based on an analysis of multiple personality disorders, that he would not step down in a negotiated settlement and would have to be removed by force.
Update: I'll just add this brief note, which appeared a few moments ago in a Honduran coup newspaper, to illustrate Micheletti's psychological imbalance. Even when he was president of congress, he was convinced there were plots to assassinate him. The authors of the psychological profile suggest he suffers from three personality disorders: sociopathy, borderline personality and paranoia. They also believe he has a messiah complex.
Roberto Micheletti, interim Honduran president, blamed deposed president Manuel Zelaya for constant death threats he has received.
He said he and several of his officials are the object of intimidation.
Nevertheless, the leader affirmed that he would not give in to such threats, that he is not afraid and that he will continue to lead the country's administration, because since the National Congress swore him in as president, it was God who placed him in this position.
The report continues with a delirious account of someone trying to recruit Colombians in the Honduran jungle to assassinate him. This is entirely in keeping with his profile and we should now expect a sociopathic reaction from stimulation of his paranoia disorder, probably by tomorrow.
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Today was D-Day in Honduras, the date the army was placed at the disposal of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to assist with the electoral process. All signs indicate that it will use this mandate to step up repression of Resistance leaders and politicians calling for an election boycott.
Finally, I’m reposting a table of human rights violations reported since the coup by Honduran rights group Cofadeh. (It’s not that easy putting a table on Daily Kos, and I hate to see the effort wasted. By all means, cut and paste it to your own blogs if you want.)
Table: Summary of Human Rights Violations Registered by Cofadeh, in the Framework of the Coup D'état. June 28 to October 10, 2009.
Type of Rights Violation | Period 28/06 to 15/07/09 | Period 16/7 to 20/09/09 | Period 21/09 to 15/10/09 | Total |
Right to life | | | | |
Executions (violent deaths and assassinations) | 4 | 5 | 12 | 21 |
Attacks against persons | -- | -- | 3 | 3 |
Death threats | 13 | 6 | 89 | 108 |
Right to personal integrity | | | | |
Cruel, degrading and inhumane treatment | -- | 90 | 43 | 133 |
Serious lesions | 6 | 5 | 10 | 21 |
Lesions and injuries | 59 | 78 | 316 | 453 |
Affected by non-conventional weapons | -- | -- | 211 | 211 |
Right to liberty | | | | |
Illegal detentions | 1,046 | 783 | 1,204 | 3,033 |
Kidnapping attempts | | | 2 | 2 |
Political prisoners | | 27 | 87 | 114 |
Right to inviolability of the home | | | | |
Searches | -- | 4 | 6 | 10 |
Right to defend human rights | | | | |
Persecution of social leaders and HHRR defenders | -- | 7 | 6 | 13 |
Attacks against organizations | -- | 4 | -- | 4 |
Freedom of expression | | | | |
Communications media | 13 | 7 | 7 | 27 |
Aggression against journalists | 14 | 9 | 3 | 26 |
Social organizations | 3 | -- | -- | 3 |
Freedom of movement | | | | |
Military and police roadblocks | -- | 52 | -- | 52 |
TOTAL | 1,158 | 1,077 | 1,999 | 4,234 |