Who really rejected the Arias Plan? Two perspectives.

http://hondurascoup2009.blogspot.com/2009/07/who-really-rejected-arias-plan.html

And below the L.A. Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-honduras23-2009jul23,0,7778270.story


First the BLOG hondurascoup2009

Who Really Rejected the Arias Plan

Here in the real world of Costa Rica, I watched, live, as the Micheletti negotiating team in Tegucigalpa obfuscated what the final proposed "San Jose Accord" was, and misrepresented what parts of it meant.

How do I know they were lying? because earlier, I had watched the Zelaya team's statement as well as that of Arias.

What I heard the Micheletti team say was that President Zelaya could not return to office under any proposal, clearly a rejection of a non-negotiable element of the plan.

So why does the LA Times headline their article "Zelaya rejects mediator's new Honduras proposal"?

This is the position the Micheletti team wanted to place President Zelaya in. It is what their press conference claimed had happened, and the LA Times article is datelined Tegucigalpa. So, effectively, the LA Times is doing propaganda work for the de facto regime.

In a discussion among a group of Central American scholars, the consensus was that the Arias mediation was flawed from the outset. First, they note that Arias was compromised by being tapped by Hillary Clinton, thus was not an independent agent. Second, as also noted in editorials by Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, treating Micheletti as if he had an equal right to bargain gave him a degree of legitimacy he did not merit. Tonight, in the press conference by the Micheletti group, that decision came home to roost as they cited various proposed points in Arias' plan, and argued that these points proved that Oscar Arias agreed with their views of Zelaya's actions before the coup.

Meanwhile, the Micheletti negotiators at the last moment stated that they had no authority to agree to anything, and while not giving a clear yes or no, stated they would go back to Honduras and consult virtually every branch of the de facto government about individual points. This is a transparent delaying tactic, especially since they simultaneously reiterated that there was no way they could agree to Zelaya's returning as president, because, they claim, he left the country already as a private citizen. So to let him return as president would, the Micheletti crowd argued, be installing a president who was not elected.

These are not the positions of anyone who actually was negotiating anything. What these negotiations have been about, transparently, is holding on in the belief that eventually the world community would lose interest and perhaps, if the de facto regime makes it to election day, they can pass off a president elected in a country where basic civil liberties have been suspended as legitimate.

The scholars I spent the evening with noted that Arias also made the mistake of getting involved in "negotiating" issues that are strictly internal-- such as including a requirement that the budget passed by the de facto regime would be left stand for the remainder of Zelaya's presidency. This was a red herring thrown in by the Micheletti crowd, and adding it to the plan simply showed them that Arias would include anything they wanted. And then they held a press conference and used him rhetorically as a prop.

As Rixi Moncada, spokesperson for the Zelaya government, actually said: the Arias mediation has failed. It was, she said, a fracaso-- which can politely be translated as failure.

But I prefer the more colorful "flop".

And so was the LA Times coverage.
Posted by RAJ at 9:51 PM


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Zelaya rejects mediator's new Honduras proposal
Jose Cabezas / AFP/Getty Images
A protester’s sign shows a crossed-out caricature of ousted President Manuel Zelaya at a rally in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
The ousted president dismisses the 12-point plan because of conditions it attaches to his return to office. The de facto government's foreign minister says Zelaya may not return as president.
By Tracy Wilkinson
July 23, 2009
Reporting from Tegucigalpa, Honduras -- The chief mediator in the Honduran coup crisis offered a 12-point proposal Wednesday that calls for the reinstatement of ousted President Manuel Zelaya as early as Friday.

But Zelaya's delegation immediately rejected the plan because of the conditions it attached to his return to office.



The Times:
Coup in Honduras: Full coverage

U.S. increases pressure on Honduras' de facto
Honduras had a new kind of coup

Representatives of the de facto government that deposed Zelaya said they would submit the proposal to the Honduran Supreme Court and attorney general's office for consideration. Both institutions, however, already have rejected Zelaya's return to power.

"The San Jose Accord," named for the Costa Rican capital where it was drafted, "has failed," said Rixi Moncada, head of Zelaya's delegation.

Zelaya has vowed to return to Honduras this weekend, saying, "Only God can stop me." He has called on supporters to flood Honduras' borders to greet him.

Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, designated mediator by the U.S. and other regional powers, read his new proposal in a news conference Wednesday in San Jose. An initial round of talks over the weekend collapsed when the delegation representing de facto President Roberto Micheletti rejected Arias' first proposal. Arias asked for 72 more hours, a period that saw intensified U.S. diplomatic pressure before it expired Wednesday.

The new plan incorporated most of the seven points Arias proposed over the weekend but added concessions sought by the Micheletti delegation, including a promise that economic and political sanctions imposed on Honduras in the wake of the coup would be lifted, sources said.

Arias said the reinstallation of Zelaya as president remained the "key point," but that the new proposal was "more balanced, with more bridges."

In addition to Zelaya's return, the accord called for moving up by one month presidential elections slated for late November, amnesty for political crimes related to the coup, the formation of a "national reconciliation" government and establishment of a verification commission to monitor compliance by all parties. Zelaya would have to refrain from his efforts to revise the constitution, the issue that his opponents cited in removing him.

Mauricio Villeda, the son of a Honduran president overthrown in a bloody coup several decades ago, spoke on behalf of the Micheletti delegation and said Arias' plan would be taken under advisement.

But Carlos Lopez Contreras, whom Micheletti named as his foreign minister, said late Wednesday that Zelaya's return wasn't negotiable because the Supreme Court had spoken. "The return of this gentleman as president is impossible," Lopez told CNN's Spanish-language service. "If he wants to come back as a private citizen to face the courts, that's possible."

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that Zelaya had broken the law and been removed from office legally, and therefore could not assume the post again. The court has insisted that the June 28 coup was legal because army officers who seized Zelaya from his home were executing an arrest warrant. The army has since acknowledged that it erred in deporting Zelaya.

The Supreme Court ruling against reinstatement shot down a last-minute counter-proposal from the Micheletti delegation that contained the "possible" reinstatement of Zelaya under very tight restrictions, much as Arias had sought, two sources said. It was the first time the interim government had budged from its insistence that Zelaya not be allowed to finish his term.

The Micheletti government is under increasing pressure from the United States, Latin American countries and Europe to allow Zelaya back into the presidential palace and resolve an increasingly volatile standoff. Honduras, one of the hemisphere's poorest countries, is losing millions of dollars in trade and aid while the crisis simmers.

Opinion is divided within the de facto government over what concessions to make, according to a businessman who advises the regime.

Some members of the government believed they could offer to let Zelaya return under conditions he would find so distasteful that he would refuse. Others decided it would be better to have Zelaya back in the country, as the international community has demanded, and then neutralize him.

Success in the talks is crucial for Arias, who was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize for his work to end Central America's wars and who prides himself on his mediation skills. It's also crucial for the Obama administration, which has sought to make a fresh start in U.S. policy in Latin America after years of negligence and hostility.

"This has to be seen not just as the specific case of Honduras, but as a dangerous regional precedent," said Victor Meza, who served as Zelaya's interior minister and is one of the few members of the deposed Cabinet not in hiding. "A failure for Arias is a failure for U.S. policy."

wilkinson@latimes.com

By Al Giordano

“It is the people of Honduras who are going to resolve this crisis… The conscience of the Honduran people has awakened. We continue in our peaceful resistance.”

- Rafael Alegría, July 21, 2009

Today the clock counts down to zero on the 72-hour extension that official mediator and Costa Rican President Oscar Arias had announced for Honduran peace talks. There is nothing that indicates any breakthrough or agreement is possible.

When announcing that extension, Arias asked aloud, "What happens if one of those arms shoots a soldier? Or if a soldier shoots an armed civilian? There could be a civil war and bloodshed that the Honduran people do not deserve." That was a terribly naïve and distracting statement because, the fact is, a soldier has already shot and killed an unarmed civilian (Isis Obed Murillo on July 5). Arias has the scenario bass-ackwards.

Reuters reporters Simon Gardner and Esteban Israel filed a story on Monday titled, “Pressure grows on Honduras, violence feared.”

Threats of violence may temporarily keep violence invisible and in the realm of intimidation, censorship, and depravation of basic democratic rights (the coup regime has openly suspended the constitutional rights to free assembly, association, transit, due process and freedom from unwarranted invasion of one’s home, as its military occupied TV and radio stations), but violence, in latent form, is still violence.

The challenge should never be – as seems to be the priority of some up above – how to keep violence bottled up and hidden from view but, rather, how to disarm it.

The social movements that foment the civil resistance in Honduras against the coup – organizations of workers, farmers, students, ethnic and racial minorities, and for human rights – have demonstrated over the past 25 days that they “get” it.

As Jonathan Treat reported for Narco News from the highway blockade last Thursday, south of Tegucigalpa:

“The nonviolent action at the southern entrance to the city began as it did yesterday, with people gathering in the morning until several hundred people had convened. They then marched to a key spot on the highway where they will halt traffic. On the way, some bystanders shout insults at the marchers. One protestor responds by bending down and picking up some rocks. He is quickly surrounded with several leaders of the march, who remind him that the march was peaceful and insist that he puts down the stones…”

In other words, when they speak of “insurrection” – the right that is guaranteed by Article 3 of the Honduran Constitution against an “usurper government” that seizes the government by “force of weapons,” a legal definition that exactly describes the coup regime – the widespread interpretation by those organizing the insurrection is that it can and will be accomplished through nonviolent means. Considering that Honduran history has no great story or figure yet that casts the shadow of a Gandhi or a King or Cesar Chávez, this is a very huge development, historically speaking.

One North American native with more than two decades residing and raising his Honduran family in Honduras told Narco News yesterday, “I have NEVER seen so many people fired up in my 23 years in Honduras - I think a social revolution has been born – at last!”

Statements like those of US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley yesterday that seek to discourage the planned return of legitimate President Manuel Zelaya to his country (ask not for whom the woodshed tolls, Phil, it tolls for thee), are no more than transparent efforts to maintain a state of violence as long as it does not prick consciences. The fear is not of violence but that it becomes more visible.

There would obviously be nothing violent about a citizen walking across a border, or a bridge, or docking a boat, or landing in aircraft in Honduran territory. The only possibility for violence is if the coup regime commits it first, by attacking or otherwise attempting to deprive that citizen – in this case, the elected president of the nation – of his liberty.

The fear from above is that such an act by the coup regime would make the latent violence, in all its brutality, visible for the world to see. The psychological power of that elected president entering his homeland against the illegitimate regime’s objection – whether he arrives safely at the capital, or at his ranch in Olancho, or whether he is quickly kidnapped again and put in a prison cell – would of course galvanize the civil resistance and swell its ranks and thus its ability to more permanently shut down highways, factories and plantations, as well as the halls of the coup government.

The “fears” and preoccupations expressed from above – whether from Arias or from the State Department - are not that violence could occur: the entire foundation of the coup regime is rule by violence and threat of it. That is a classic developed world liberal misconception, as in Phil Ochs' song Love Me I’m a Liberal: “I’m all for the blacks and Hispanics, as long as they don’t move next door,” and they’re all for nonviolence as long as they don’t have to watch the sacrifice – and the repression it historically makes visible - that disarms the time bomb of violence.

A coup d’etat is violence incarnate, an atrocity and a crime against humanity. The only thing democratic about the Honduras coup, in a sense, is that it has democratized the violence and repression, now distributed across the board to every Honduran citizen.

The social movements in Honduras have demonstrated over the past 25 days that they have an actual plan to disarm the coup, more potent and pragmatic than that of external sanctions against a regime that can more than make up the shortfall through its dealings with narco-trafficking and ex-Cuban organized crime and terrorist networks (thus, Gorilla-in-Chief Micheletti’s public scoff at Secretary Clinton’s phone call threatening more sanctions on Monday). The Gallup poll and other indications have demonstrated that a plurality of Honduran citizens – 46 percent - opposes the coup and that only a small minority – 30 percent - approves of its regime. And those numbers, too - measured at the peak of the coup's control over information flow in the country - are suppressed by the shutdown of all critical media in Honduras during the days in early July when the survey was taken: an accurate poll today – now that Channel 36, Radio Globo, Radio Progreso and other independent media have retaken the airwaves through their own civil resistance - would very likely show greater opposition to the coup and shrunken support for it.

The hour approaches when international solidarity against the coup can best help the resistance by simply getting out of the way, allowing the Honduran people to reassert their democracy, and by accurately reporting and translating each step of their emerging history so that it does not occur in darkness.

Democracy can never be imposed from the outside or from above, not even by sanctions. The regular suggestions from some that if only full external sanctions would be applied “the coup would fall in a day” are naïve and inaccurate for the many reasons I’ve outlined and repeated already in previous posts. That’s a lesson I thought we all had learned already, but apparently not.

Democracy, however, can always be asserted from below, when an organized people stand up. That is the next chapter in Honduras, its best - and probably its only - hope.

Update: Arias' efforts to convene, today, eleventh hour last chance "talks," are officially not happening.