TEGUCIGALPA – The Honduran Congress has scheduled a debate on the reinstatement of ousted President Mel Zelaya for three days after the Nov. 29 presidential election, ignoring threats from the international community not to recognize the balloting as legitimate unless the deposed leader is restored beforehand.

“We have decided, along with the rest of my comrades in the leadership, from today to formalize the convocation for a Dec. 2 session of the full legislature to analyze the issue,” congressional speaker Alfredo Saavedra told the media on Tuesday.

By then, he said, Congress will have received the advisory opinions lawmakers have requested from several institutions, including the Supreme Court, which has played a leading role in trying to give the June 28 coup a veneer of legality.

A U.S.-brokered accord between Zelaya and the de facto regime led by Roberto Micheletti collapsed early this month when the latter pressed ahead with formation of national unity government – mandated by the pact – before Congress addressed the matter of restoring the legitimate president.

Zelaya said last Friday that the Obama administration effectively abandoned opponents of the June 28 coup by signaling it will not insist on his reinstatement as a condition for recognizing the winner of the Nov. 29 election to choose his successor.

“They have left us in the middle of the river, saying now that their priority is the elections and not the restoration of democracy,” Zelaya told Costa Rica’s ADN Radio from Tegucigalpa, where he remains holed up at the Brazilian Embassy.

Critics say the de facto regime was emboldened when senior U.S. diplomat Thomas Shannon said Washington would recognize the winner of the Nov. 29 election regardless of whether Zelaya was reinstated for the roughly two months left in his term.

The head of the Organization of American States, Chile’s Jose Miguel Insulza, ruled out sending OAS election observers to Honduras under the current circumstances.

And most members of the OAS and the Rio Group, a hemispheric club that excludes the United States and Canada, have indicated they will not recognize the elections as valid without Zelaya’s reinstatement beforehand.

Zelaya said the coming ballot in Honduras could not be free because “there are thousands of citizens repressed” by the de facto regime, which has killed a dozen coup opponents and jailed hundreds more.

Micheletti contends Zelaya’s ouster was not a coup, insisting that the troops who dragged him out of the presidential palace and sent him into exile were simply enforcing a Supreme Court ban on the president’s planned non-binding plebiscite on the idea of revising the constitution.

But while the coup plotters and their foreign apologists accuse Zelaya of seeking to extend his stay in office, any potential constitutional change to allow presidential re-election would not have taken place until well after the incumbent stepped down in January. EFE