The de facto president of Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, was out Tuesday urging his fellow Hondurans to vote in November elections as presidential campaigning began this week in the Central American country. “This process will serve to categorically show that we appreciate democracy, that we are a people who want to live in harmony,” said Micheletti. Meanwhile, other Latin American countries, at the current moment, still maintain they will not recognize the outcome of the elections unless ousted leader Mel Zelaya is restored first. And the AP, AFP, and and Reuters write that Zelaya will be meeting with U.S. Sec. of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday in yet another attempt to end the standoff in Honduras (or in DOS’s words find “the best way forward”). On Tuesday, Zelaya appeared before the OAS where he says he received assurances from the permanent council that November elections would not be recognized under the de facto administration of Mr. Micheletti. And this morning, at 9:30am, Zelaya will speak at George Washington Univ. at an event sponsored by the university and the D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research. CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot will offer an introduction while GWU’s Director of Latin American and Hemispheric Studies, Prof. Cynthia McClintock, will moderate the discussion. Zelaya hopes that his latest D.C. visit will come at the same time the U.S. follows through with the implementation of stiffer sanctions against the Micheletti government by qualifying the events of June 28 as a “military coup.” About $135 million in MCC aid would be put in jeopardy if such a categorization was made while AFP says $35 million in military aid would have to be cut as well.
From Colombia, both the AP and Bloomberg are reporting that Colombia’s lower house has followed the lead of the Senate in approving a bill for a referendum on whether or not to alter the constitution to allow President Alvaro Uribe a third term in office. Legislators voted 85-5, with 75 abstentions, in favor of the bill which now goes to the Colombian constitutional court. While Uribe has yet to issue a public statement on whether or not he desires a third term, the constitution has already been amended once before, allowing for re-election. Backers of the President maintain his re-election would be very likely should he be allowed to run again. “Momentum is now building and it would be a fool who suggests that Uribe, the man who has done the most for Colombia since Simon Bolivar restored independence in the 1800s, can’t triumph again,” says financial broker Rupert Stebbings. But, as Eurasia Group’s Patrick Esteruelas notes, “As much as Uribe’s mix of hard-line security policies and pro-market economic policies has been very successful, his bid for a third term poses a growing risk to Colombia’s institutional checks and balances and the quality and autonomy of the decision-making process.” Uribe has until the end of November to declare himself a candidate.
After the PRI-led Congress demanded that President Calderon provide a written copy of his state of the nation address to them, before publicly delivering the message, the president submitted a report Tuesday outlining how the president’s drug war strategy has “weakened the structures of organized crime and achieved record numbers in terms of seizures.” This reports the LA Times which adds that Mr. Calderon claims such efforts have also “strengthened the rule of law and advanced the recovery of public security.” While many remain skeptical, poll numbers indicate Calderon may slowly be winning over the Mexican public. A survey published Tuesday in the daily “Reforma” newspaper found new public support of Calderon’s drug war, with “50% of respondents saying they approved of the job Calderon was doing against drug traffickers, compared with 41% a year earlier.” However, more Mexicans still believe organized crime groups are winning the war. The release of the report came as U.S. Ass’t Sec. of State for Narcotics and Law Enforcement, David Johnson, was in Mexico. Mr. Johnson said the U.S. had already released $214 million of anti-drug aid to Mexico through the Mérida Initiative, including money for five helicopters, the first to be sent to Mexico since the three-year, $1.4 billion plan began. “We greatly admire the strong efforts made by the government of Mexico ... to confront the extreme rise in violence fueled by drugs,” Mr. Johnson told Mexican officials. But “in early August, U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, delayed the release of the State Department report over concerns of torture and other abuse allegations against the Mexican military,” notes the AP. [Also this morning, see an editorial in the LAT on two new measures in the region—one in Mexico and one in Argentina—to decriminalize small time drug possession. The paper cites the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy as setting “a new paradigm for the war on drugs,” while saying “it makes sense to shift law enforcement, courts and prisons away from small fry and concentrate instead on disrupting violent cartels.”]
In other news, justice is still being served for events from Latin America’s violent past. In Chile the AP says 129 former security officers under the regime of Augusto Pinochet were ordered to be arrested this week for dirty war disappearances of the 1970s and 1980s. The judge in the case said the arrests were some of the last in investigations into human rights abuses committed during the Pinochet era, but they constituted the “largest number of arrests ever ordered” in the investigation. Meanwhile, in Guatemala, a former paramilitary was sentenced to 150 years in prison this week for his part in the forced disappearances of six individuals during that country’s bloody civil war. Human rights activists called the sentencing against Felipe Cusanero “a landmark ruling.” Cusanero was part of a paramilitary network “who gave information about suspected leftists living in their villages to the army during Guatemala's counterinsurgency campaign.” The AP notes that he is the first paramilitary to be tried for a forced disappearance during a dirty war in which some 200,000 Guatemalans were killed.
Finally, from the Caribbean region, the AP says the U.S. and Cuba will begin talks this month to restart direct mail services between the two countries. There has been no direct mail service since 1963. “The idea of postal service is in keeping with what appears to be an administration policy of moving ahead in a measured way and to try to engage with the government of Cuba,” says Peter DeShazo of CSIS. And in the Miami Herald an opinion from the paper urges the Haitian government to take care of disabled children in the country. Earlier reporting by the Herald’s Jacqueline Charles shows that such children are increasingly being neglected in the country’s orphanages and “Abandoned Baby Unit.”
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