TEGUCIGALPA – Organizations supporting Honduras’s de facto government held a march on Wednesday in favor of participation in the Nov. 29 general elections, while opponents of the June 28 coup that ousted President Mel Zelaya urged voters to stay home.

Hundreds of partisans of Roberto Micheletti’s de facto regime marched from east Tegucigalpa to a shopping area near the presidential palace as dozens protested outside Congress to demand Zelaya’s reinstatement.

The coordinator of the anti-coup Resistance Front, Juan Barahona, told Efe his group was calling for a boycott of next Sunday’s ballot because the electoral process “is directed by an illegal and putschist regime.”

Zelaya, backed by most of the international community, says a free and fair vote is impossible given the repression imposed by the de facto regime, which has killed at least a dozen people, imprisoned hundreds and repeatedly shut down independent media.

The pro-election marchers carried a massive Honduran flag as well as posters exhorting Hondurans to cast ballots for president, vice president, lawmakers and mayors.

Barahona said the Resistance Front would not recognize the election results even if lawmakers decide to reinstate Zelaya when they take up the matter Dec. 2.

“Whether they restore him before or after, the electoral process continues being illegal,” Barahona said. “This is a process that brings us to elect a president to continue with the coup d’etat.”

Within the hemisphere, only the United States and Panama have said they will recognize the winner of Sunday’s election to choose a successor to Zelaya, whose term ends in late January.

Personnel from the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, both funded by the U.S. Congress via the National Endowment for Democracy, will travel to Honduras to observe the elections.

The U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa will also deploy election observers, State Department spokesman Charles Luoma-Overstreet told Efe in Washington.

The U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Arturo Valenzuela, said Monday that though elections meeting international standards “are a necessary condition” for the restoration of democratic order in Honduras, “they are not sufficient.”

What is also needed, he said in a speech at the Organization of American States, is full compliance with the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord.

But Zelaya pronounced that pact dead early this month after Micheletti formed a “national unity” government headed by himself before Congress even addressed the matter of restoring the legitimate president.
Critics say the de facto regime was emboldened when Valenzuela’s predecessor, Thomas Shannon, said that Washington would recognize the election winner regardless of whether Zelaya was reinstated.

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

But while coup leaders and their 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. EFE