The United Nations General Assembly passed a one-page resolution on Tuesday, with sponsors including the United States and Venezuela, among others, condemning the coup against deposed Honduran leader Manuel Zelaya and demanding his reinstatement. After speaking to the 192 member international body, Zelaya then flew on to Washington, the New York Times reports, where he was to meet with both the Organization of American States and the U.S. Ass’t Sec. for Western Hemisphere Affairs. For its part, the OAS said Honduras has three days to reinstate Zelaya before being suspended from the organization. At a news conference in New York, Zelaya said a number of international leaders, including OAS Sec. General José Miguel Insulza, UN Gen. Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto of Nicaragua, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa have all offered to accompany Zelaya back to his home country this week. Meanwhile, the illegitimate interim President, parliamentary leader Roberto Micheletti, again vowed to arrest Zelaya if he returned. The AP reports early this morning that Micheletti has now gone so far as to say the only way Zelaya will be restored as president is through a foreign invasion. The AP also notes that President Zelaya backed down from his earlier position on a controversial, non-binding referendum that his opponents say was the beginning of an attempt to remove term limits in the country. I’m not going to hold a constitutional assembly. And if I’m offered the chance to stay in power, I won't. I'm going to serve my four year,” Zelaya said on Tuesday. Spain became the latest country to recall its ambassador from Honduras while Micheletti’s new foreign minister trumped up charges against Zelaya in an interview with CNN yesterday, saying Zelaya not only defied the Honduran constitution but also was allowing drug traffickers to use the country as a transit point from Venezuela to the U.S. [The DEA said it could neither confirm nor deny an investigation into the allegations.] And, the Honduran military continued its blustery rhetoric against Hugo Chávez. “If Honduras falls, Central America falls and then Mexico. I'm ready to put my uniform back on if it means defending my country from Hugo Chavez,” said one retired Honduran colonel interviewed in the LA Times. A piece of analysis by Simon Romero in the NYT writes that President Obama’s swift condemnation of the coup has headed off the fiery rhetoric of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Indeed, in Latin America, it was the efforts of Obama to restore Zelaya, not Chávez, which were drawing headlines. In Brazil’s Estado de Sao Paulo, for example, the front page yesterday read “Obama Leads the Reaction to the Coup in Honduras.” Nevertheless, as the Washington Post reports, Zelaya was denied a high level meeting in Washington. A State Dept. spokesman insisted this was because Sec. of State Clinton was away from work recuperating from her fractured elbow. But, according to the Post, this is also probably a piece of diplomatic maneuvering by the U.S.—showing the United States is working with regional leaders, rather than alone, to resolve the crisis.
In other news this morning, the Miami Herald reports this morning that Haiti finally received $1.2 billion in debt relief from the World Bank and IMF. Announced Thursday, the debt forgiveness by the two international financial institutions will now likely clear the path for Haiti to receive $353 million in pledges made at the April donor’s conference in Washington. “This will significantly reduce Haiti's debt burden and effectively free resources for growth and poverty reduction,” said Yvonne Tsikata, the World Bank's director for the Caribbean.
In Argentina, both the AP and Wall Street Journal write that Buenos Aires is in the midst of a health emergency, succumbing to the H1N1 virus that caused a health crisis in Mexico and beyond just two months ago. The Argentine Health Ministry reported 26 confirmed swine flu-related deaths, and two weeks were added to July holidays in hopes of stemming the disease’s spread. The swine flu outbreak hits Argentina after a serious dengue outbreak, and the WSJ says the combination of emergencies has “laid bare inadequacies of the national health system,” strapped for cash in a time of economic crisis.
After meeting with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe on Monday, President Obama said he was “confident” that the U.S. could agree to a free trade deal with Colombia, but cited violence and union intimidation as lingering worries. The WSJ reports the President saying “there remains work to be done,” adding USTR Ron Kirk would lead U.S. efforts to figure out how a deal could be reached.
And, finally for the third day in a row, the WSJ offers an opinion on matters in Honduras, once again showing its tacit support for the military coup that ousted Manuel Zelaya. Using a pair of quotation marks to describe the “coup,” the paper says this weekend in Honduras was “strangely democratic.” The military didn’t oust Zelaya on its own, it goes on to say, arguing it simply took its orders from the Supreme Court and handed over power to the Honduran Congress shortly thereafter. The editorial does admit that the proper route would have been to impeach Zelaya and then arrest him for violating the Honduran constitution but insists that the events in Honduras can only be understood through the lens of “chavismo,” saying Chávez has “exported his brand of one-man-one-vote-once democracy throughout the region.”
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