Zelaya fans flames of discontent in Honduras

Honduras is holding their national elections today, which has the potential of settling the dispute between the Honduran Constitution and deposed president Manuel Zelaya. Since Zelaya isn’t allowed to run again, why does he feel that a boycott would settle anything? Well, of course, it wouldn’t.

Latin American countries including Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela have said they won’t recognize the results because the former leader hasn’t been restored to power. The International Monetary Fund froze Honduras’s access to $163 million in special drawing rights after Zelaya’s ouster.

Zelaya, who isn’t a candidate, has said the vote is illegitimate and urged Hondurans to stay home. In September, he had said that the vote should take place.

Bloomberg fails to mention that the reason Zelaya isn’t a candidate is because Honduran presidents are term-limited to a single stint in office. That’s why he booted from office in June – because he tried to undermine the Constitution.

In RealClearWorld, Fausta Wertz of Fausta’s Blog reports that the current candidate from Zelaya’s party is not calling for a boycott;

While Zelaya’s been asking his followers to boycott the election, zelayista candidate César Ham is still running and is not promoting a boycott. Candidate Pepe Lobo is ahead in the opinion polls.

So, when Zelaya’s supporters are left out of the election by their boycott, they’ll revolt, and there will be no peace in Honduras – and it’ll ultimately be the result of Zelaya’s massive ego.

DeMint reports on Honduras

South Carolina’s Senator Jim DeMint went on a fact-finding trip to Honduras despite John Kerry’s opposition and writes about it today in the Wall Street Journal;

In a day packed with meetings, we met only one person in Honduras who opposed Mr. Zelaya’s ouster, who wishes his return, and who mystifyingly rejects the legitimacy of the November elections: U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens.

When I asked Ambassador Llorens why the U.S. government insists on labeling what appears to the entire country to be the constitutional removal of Mr. Zelaya a “coup,” he urged me to read the legal opinion drafted by the State Department’s top lawyer, Harold Koh. As it happens, I have asked to see Mr. Koh’s report before and since my trip, but all requests to publicly disclose it have been denied.

Now, we’ve seen how huffy the Democrats get when a Republican Administration won’t publicize a legal opinion – why the hypocrisy? We can only assume that the opinion which the Obama Administraion is hiding from us is legally vacuous. The Obama Administration decided to back Zelaya (read that: Chavez) before the opinion was written.

Honduras is scheduled to have presidential elections is just six weeks and the whole problem will be resolved – unless the kiss-asses at the US State Department and the OAS find a way to screw it up. Of course, they will.

Fausta writes that Roberto Micheletti, the interim Honduran president of Honduras took an opportunity to school OAS reps the other day;

“First, I wish to express unending thanks for the good will that you are showing . . . but we must speak out about something: the truth. You do not know the whole truth and, at times it appears that you do not want to hear it. Why don’t we begin to investigate what happened before the 28th of June?

And Micheletti told the OAS reps what’s what. Let’s see if they listened.

Chavez is not a Fox Fan

I can smell the sulfur from here; Chavez thinks Fox news is populated with pendejos.

Chavez wants to help Obama

Just a few months ago, Hugo Chavez called Barrack Obama a “black ignoramus”. Today Venezuelan newpaper El Universal reports that Chavez is now eager to help Obama;

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez said on Monday he would like to help his US counterpart Barack Obama, for thinking that “his intentions are good.”

Chávez’s remarks were made on arriving in the Des Bains Hotel at Venice, where he dropped on Monday to attend the premiere of “South of the Border.” The documentary film featuring him by US director Oliver Stone was to be exhibited as part of the Venice Film Festival.

“I think that Obama is well-intentioned and would like to help him,” said Chávez, and added that the new US President “is good to talk to,” unlike his predecessor, George W. Bush, Efe reported.

Chavez also commented that he doesn’t think Obama is The Devil like Bush. You have to ask yourself what about Obama would appeal to admitted socialist Hugo Chavez. Chavez is also shipping gasoline to Iran, and, in his expert opinion, there’s no proof of a nuclear weapon program in Iran.

Chavez was in Venice for the opening of the documentary “South of the Border”, the Oliver Stone tongue bath of Chavez.

Offer made by Honduran president

In an extraordinary gesture, the Honduran President, Roberto Micheletti, has offered to relinquish his seat, if ousted former president Manuel Zelaya will relinquish his claims to the presidency, according to the Washington Times‘ Sara A. Carter;

The offer represents a turnaround by Mr. Micheletti, who has insisted until now that Mr. Zelaya should have been arrested rather than deported to Costa Rica on June 28. Mr. Zelaya was deposed by the military after he sought to change the constitution to allow him to run for a second term.

But I think the real news in the story is that clintonista Lanny Davis sides with Micheletti’s government here in the US;

Lanny Davis, a prominent Washington attorney who represents the Honduran Latin American Business Council, said the new proposal “shows Mr. Micheletti is not concerned about power — he is offering to resign entirely from public life. … The question is, does Mr. Zelaya acknowledge that no one, even the president, is above the law?”

Zelaya would be well-advised to take this deal since his term in office would have ended in a few months anyway. It may be his last opportunity to return to Honduras. But I’m pretty sure that Zelaya and the Obama Administration will screw this up. the US is already moving to cut off aid to the Constitutional government of Honduras according to Reuters;

U.S. State Department staff have recommended that the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya be declared a “military coup,” a U.S. official said on Thursday, a step that could cut off as much as $150 million in U.S. funding to the impoverished Central American nation.

The official, who spoke on condition he not be named, said State Department staff had made such a recommendation to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has yet to make a decision on the matter although one was likely soon.

Washington has already suspended about $18 million aid to Honduras following the June 28 coup and this would be formally cut if the determination is made because of a U.S. law barring aid “to the government of any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.”

So now we’ve stooped to blackmailing small countries to settle their internal affairs – I thought we were over that kind of stuff now. Isn’t that what “hope and change” was all about?

Colombia between rock and hard place

El Universal reports that Colombia captured eleven members of the Ecuadoran military 300 meters inside the Colombian border;

The Army of Colombia captured 11 Ecuadorian military in Colombian territory and quickly returned them Sunday to their country, in an incident that happened at moments of strong tension between both nations and to some degree it lowered the tone describing it as a “logistic accident”.

The military – an officer, a sergeant major and 9 soldiers who were caught 300 meters within the Colombian territory, in the southern department of Putumayo- were already returned to Quito, said the minister of Defense of Ecuador, Javier Ponce.

Apparently they were foraging for fish at a local Colombian market.

While this situation was defused, Hugo Chavez on the other side of Colombia was claiming that Colombia was preparing to attack Venezuela, according to Fausta’s translation;

Chavez started by saying, “The Iranians are here, but not in the way the Yankees and the Israeli chancellor say, who is a thug, a thug, a punk, a thief, and one of those extreme-right lunatics, eh, who see an Arab and they want to kill him, no matter if it’s a child or a woman, they see a Palestinian and they want to chop them into pieces. Eh? So he showed up saying, through Latin America, that here in Venezuela we have Hezbollah terrorist cells, and then the vice-president of Colombia, this folkloric gentleman who goes around the world saying any idiocy he can think of, I don’t know.”

He then goes on to rip into the Colombians, but continues, “[Lieberman] said that they are preparing the attack in La Guajira. This is very dangerous. Uribe’s government attacked Ecuador and bombed Ecuatorian territory [smiling], they went in, took out a few dead, left some wounded women, did everything they felt like and tried to fool Ecuador and the world.

And Chavez claimed that Colombians were crossing into Venezuela according to another El Universal article;

Hugo Chavez denounced east Sunday an incursion of soldiers of Colombia in Venezuelan territory through Orinoco river (South), maneuver that Alvaro Uribe described like a “provocacación” as the government as his homologous Colombian, AFP informed.

“One is not a patrol of soldiers that by mistake happened (to Venezuelan territory). No, they crossed the Orinoco River in a boat and penetrated in Venezuelan territory”, said Chávez during his weekly program “Alo Presidente”.

“When the troops ours arrived, (the Colombian soldiers) had already left”, said the Venezuelan chief executive, who described the act as “provocations” of the Uribe government.

Yeah, they were gone, like all of the other fantasies that Chavez has like the assassination plots against him and the US military bases that are supposedly suppose to appear in Colombia somehow.

Chavez closes private radio stations

Reuters reports that 12 of the 34 targeted radio stations in Venezuela have had their door shut although Hugo Chavez describes it differently;

“We haven’t closed any radio stations, we’ve applied the law,” Chavez said on state television. “We’ve recovered a bunch of stations that were outside the law, that now belong to the people and not the bourgeoisie.”

Chavez supporters say they are waging a “media war” against private news companies and have denounced in recent days what they say is a renewed offensive by privately owned domestic and international media to discredit Venezuela.

Diosdado Cabello, the public works minister who also oversees Conatel, said some of the radio stations were shut because they did not have their broadcasting licenses renewed and others transferred them illegally to new owners.

Venezuelan El Universal describes the closure of one station;

Three Conatel officials appeared in the headquarters of Belfort radio network (CNB) in Caracas, and instructed operators to discontinue broadcasts.

Meanwhile, citizens rallied outside CNB in Caracas to reject the move and voice support for the radio network. Renowned journalists and politicians also showed up in CNB.

“No person that has said that this infringes the law. Nobody has argued that because they know that we are strictly abiding by the law,” Cabello stated.

Gerardo Blyde, an opposition leader and Mayor of Baruta Municipality, southeast Caracas, branded the decision as “well-aimed punch at freedom of speech.”

CNB had begun broadcasting on the internet at http://www.cnb.com.ve .