ESTORIL, Portugal & TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – The weekend presidential elections in Honduras, scene of a June 28 presidential ouster, dominated Monday’s talks at the Ibero-American Summit in the Portuguese resort city of Estoril, while back in Tegucigalpa, ousted President Manuel Zelaya complicated matters by saying he would no longer accept reinstatement.

While the United States, Panama, Colombia and Costa Rica accept the process as valid, an even-larger bloc of countries rejected the balloting as tainted.

“Colombia recognizes the new government,” said a communique from Estoril, where President Alvaro Uribe is participating in the summit.

Bogota said that its stance is that “there has been a democratic process in Honduras with high participation, without fraud, unobjectionable,” and it expressed confidence that the new administration will make “every effort to definitively overcome the difficult situation” created by the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya.

The government of Panama was the first to recognize the result of Sunday’s elections in
Honduras, won by National Party candidate Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo.
“Significant work remains to be done to restore democratic and constitutional order in Honduras, but today the Honduran people took a necessary and important step forward,” the U.S. State Department said late Sunday.

“We look forward to continuing to work with all Hondurans and encourage others in the Americas to follow the lead of the Honduran people in helping advance national reconciliation,” department spokesman Ian Kelly said.

Even Nobel laureate Costa Rica President Oscar Arias, who had brokered the accord between the two sides on behalf of the US and OAS, announced that he and Costa Rica were supporting the election. "Why do we want to make Honduras into the Burma of Central America? Why do we want a second Hurricane Mitch?" he told CNN en Espanol.

For his part, the secretary-general of the Organization of American States, Jose Miguel Insulza, declared from Estoril that the OAS – which suspended Honduras after the coup – is open to dialogue with Lobos “to build democracy.”

The decisions taken by Lobo “will be fundamental for (allowing) the international community to validate the new government,” Insulza told Chile’s Radio Cooperativa.

The OAS Permanent Council will meet Friday to analyze the results of the Honduran elections.

The situation in the Central American country, which has been mired in political crisis since the June 28th ouster, is one of the matters dominating the debates at the Estoril summit, which will conclude on Tuesday.

The participants intend to agree on a “common position” regarding the matter in the final declaration, but there are “difficulties” because of the division among nations regarding the legitimacy of the elections, Portuguese Foreign Minister Luis Amado said.

Countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Venezuela are against legitimizing the elections and are demanding Zelaya’s reinstatement in power.

However, Zelaya said Monday that he would not accept reinstatement even if lawmakers vote this week to restore him to office for the less than two months left in his term.

“Restitution under the conditions of legalizing this electoral fraud cannot be accepted by someone such as your servant, who fights for principles,” Zelaya told Radio Globo, vowing to go on “risking everything so the transformations in Honduras do not stop.”

He also insisted that turnout for Sunday’s balloting was less than 40 percent, far short of the de facto regime’s claim of 61.3 percent.

“I don’t surrender – though I am threatened, though they want to humiliate me – because I am defending a cause ... it’s the cause of the people of Honduras,” the ousted head of state said.

In a telephone interview later Monday with the Quito-based Ecuadorinmediato Web site, he accused the U.S. government of legitimizing the Honduran coup.

“The United States, as is public, traded its position on Honduras, abandoned the democratic position and is recognizing the de facto regime, because it is making deals with them, which I consider a very big mistake,” Zelaya said.

That stance is also supported by a key U.S. ally, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who on Monday said that holding elections in Honduras is not sufficient for reestablishing the constitutional order and warned of the “retreat” of democracy in Latin America.

In his speech before the summit, Calderon said that Mexico is demanding the reestablishment of the constitutional order in Honduras and questioned how free Sunday’s balloting really was.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero lobbied in Estoril for a “great national accord” in Honduras as the only way to achieve a “democratic peace” in that country.

He also demanded “a great consensus” so that Honduras knows that the Ibero-American community is willing to have “a constructive position” based on democratic principles that cannot be waived.

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez said Monday that the Honduran elections were “almost a sham,” adding that they were held “within the framework of the most absolute democratic illegality.”

“To accept this process would be to concede in a precedent-setting manner a movement that is unacceptable” in Latin America, she said.

The Paraguayan government announced Monday that it was “impossible” for it to recognize the results of the elections due to “the conditions in which they were held.”

Zelaya supporters argue a free and fair vote was impossible given the repression imposed by Micheletti's "interim" regime, which has killed at least a dozen people, imprisoned hundreds and repeatedly shut down independent media.

Zelaya, who has been holed up at the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa since slipping back into the country on Sept. 21, denied over the weekend that he was seeking political asylum abroad.

He had accepted a U.S.-brokered deal last month to end a months-long stand-off.

Under the terms of the agreement, a unity government was to be formed and the Honduran Congress was to vote whether or not to reinstate Zelaya.

But Zelaya refused to propose candidates to the national unity government until after a Congressional vote on his reinstatement and pronounced the pact "dead" earlier this month after Micheletti formed a “national unity” government at the deadline agreed to in the timetable set out in the accord. Zelaya never proposed any candidates.

Congress is expected to conduct the vote on Wednesday, and the Supreme Court has already weighed in with a advisory legal opinion against Zelaya's reinstatement. It is not clear why Zelaya decided to agree to let Congress decide on his reinstatement, as the deposed former president enjoys the support of only about a fifth of the legislators, and Congress had before his ouster already opened an investigation into whether he was mentally fit to govern, voted to disapprove his violations of the Constitution and even members of his own political party voted to replace him with Micheletti after he was ousted.


In the eyes of Constituional scholars and most Hondurans, Zelaya’s ouster was not a coup. The soldiers who escorted Zelaya from the presidential palace were enforcing a Supreme Court order after Zelaya refused to comply with their earlier order banning his planned referendum on revising the constitution to allow for unlimited presidential terms. The Constitution calls for immediate disempowerment of any official who does so.

Article 239 of the Honduran Constitution says “Any citizen who has already served as head of the Executive Branch cannot be President or Vice-President again. Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform, as well as those who support such violation directly or indirectly, must immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.”

In August, the U.S. Congress Law Library issued a report that calls the disempowerment of Zelaya, with the exception of the removal of Zelaya from the country, constitutional under Honduran law.

According to report author Norma Gutiérrez, the Honduran Congress has the power to "disapprove of the conduct of the president".

The Congress "implicitly exercised its power of constitutional interpretation in the case of Zelaya when it decided that its power to 'disapprove' the president's actions encompassed the power to remove him", the report says.

The Honduran establishment says that Zelaya, a former rancher who moved to the left once in office, had been taken under the wing of Venezuelan socialist President Hugo Chavez, who is reviled by conservatives across Latin America.