(CNSNews.com) – Ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya’s ill-fated attempt to fly home early this week was a mission masterminded by his Venezuelan ally, President Hugo Chavez, who painted it as a success despite Zelaya’s failure to land and the death of a supporter during protests on the ground.
The plane used to fly Zelaya from Washington to the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, on Sunday belonged to the Venezuelan state-run oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PdVSA), and was flown by Venezuelan Air Force pilots.
The only two journalists onboard were from the Venezuelan-based television network Telesur, set up by Chavez in 2005 as a Latin American answer to “hegemonic” Western media. Also on the plane was U.N. General Assembly president Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, a former foreign minister in Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.
Honduran authorities blocked the airport runway and refused to allow the plane to land, and it diverted to the Nicaraguan capital, Managua, about 150 miles to the south-east. Zelaya later returned to Washington for a series of meetings, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton among others.
Earlier, a number of Organization of American States (OAS) member states’ representatives had advised Zelaya against making the return attempt, voicing fears of an escalation that were borne out when a 19-year-old was shot and killed by troops fended off Zelaya supporters converging on the airport.
A senior U.S. administration official told a briefing on Sunday that several countries had spoken “in quite forceful fashion” at the OAS meeting the previous evening, questioning the wisdom of Zelaya’s plan. The official said they included Canada, Costa Rica and Caribbean countries. The U.S. had delivered the same message privately to Zelaya.
Zelaya’s partners in the left-wing Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) were not among those who tried to dissuade him.
On the contrary, a review of reports in Spanish-language media indicates that Chavez coordinated Sunday’s flight and viewed it as an ALBA military-type operation. Spain’s
El Mundo carried a report on the flight headlined “An operation designed in Caracas.”
Chavez remarked afterwards to Telesur that at one stage he had Cuba’s Fidel Castro on one telephone line, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega on another, and Zelaya – in the plane trying to land – on a third.
Chavez, whose own abortive attempt to topple an elected president in a coup landed him in prison in 1992 – he won election six years later – heads the nine-nation ALBA, a leftist alternative to the Free Trade Area of the Americas and a vehicle for his “21st century socialism” program. Zelaya took Honduras into the bloc last year – a decision not popular with his own Liberal Party.
Zelaya was ousted and deported on June 28 in a move which he, the OAS, and broader international community are calling a “coup.” The Honduran judiciary, congress and military insist it was a legitimate succession after the president broke the law by trying to change the constitution to extend presidential term limits.
(Article 239 of Honduras’
constitution limits the presidency to a single term, and adds: “Anyone who violates this provision or who proposes its reform, as well as those who support that violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease to hold their respective positions, and will be disqualified from any public post for 10 years.”)