TEGUCIGALPA, June 30 (Reuters) – Ousted President Manuel Zelaya vowed yesterday to return to Honduras flanked by foreign leaders to serve the rest of his term, defying a warning from a hostile interim leadership that he will be immediately arrested.
Zelaya gathered further international support as he addressed the United Nations and Organization of American States. He said the Argentine and Ecuadorean presidents and the U.N. General Assembly and OAS chiefs would accompany him on a trip back to Honduras yesterday.
Upping the ante in what is already Central America’s biggest political crisis in decades, the interim government set up after Sunday’s military coup said Zelaya would be captured if he returned.
The coup against Zelaya — a timber magnate toppled in a dispute over his push to allow presidential re-election beyond a single four-year term — has been greeted by a tide of condemnation from U.S. President Barack Obama to Zelaya’s leftist allies in Latin America. But he remains a divisive figure in Honduras, an impoverished coffee, textile and banana-exporter of some 7 million people.
Several thousand demonstrators rallied in favor of his ouster in the capital Tegucigalpa on Tuesday, after two days of rowdy anti-Zelaya protests near the presidential palace.
But in a development that could offer an opening for talks on ending the stand-off, the interim government said it would send a delegation of politicians, business leaders and lawyers to Washington on Wednesday for talks on the crisis.
Roberto Micheletti, sworn in as caretaker president by Congress soon after Sunday’s coup, announced the mission after Zelaya traveled to New York and Washington to address the United Nations and Organization of American States yesterday.
U.S. officials said Zelaya would likely meet State Department officials while in Washington.
Zelaya insisted he will return to complete his mandate, which ends in early 2010, and said he did not intend to run for president again.
“I am going back to Honduras on Thursday, I’m going to return as president,” Zelaya said after the U.N. General Assembly urged member states to recognize only his government.
In office since 2006, Zelaya had upset conservative elites with his growing alliance with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a left-wing firebrand who is championing an old-style revolutionary brand of socialism across Latin America.
Central America’s first military coup since the Cold War came after Zelaya angered Congress, courts and the army with a push for constitutional changes to allow presidential re-election.
Enrique Ortez, the interim government’s foreign minister, told CNN’s Spanish-language channel that Zelaya had charges pending against him for violating the constitution, drug trafficking and organized crime.
“As soon as he enters he will be captured. We have the warrants ready so that he stays in jail in Honduras and is judged according to the country’s laws,” Ortez said.
That set the stage for a potential diplomatic stand-off — Zelaya said he would be accompanied tomorrow by U.N. General Assembly head Miguel D’Escoto, OAS chief Jose Miguel Insulza, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa.
Micheletti, who is backed by the country’s business and political elite and has said he plans to stay on until an election in November, told Reuters on Monday that the coup had saved Honduras from swinging to radical socialism.
In Tegucigalpa, anti-Zelaya protesters waving blue-and-white Honduran flags packed a square to back Micheletti and protest against the return of a leader they say wants to follow the socialist model of Venezuela’s Chavez.
