TEGUCIGALPA – Ousted Honduran President Mel 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.

Zelaya, who has been holed up at the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa since slipping back into Honduras Sept. 21, commented a day after National Party candidate Porfirio Lobo won a presidential election rejected in advance by much of the international community with the conspicuous exception of Washington.

“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.

President Barack Obama’s administration issued a statement Monday formally recognizing Lobo’s victory and urging Zelaya to engage in dialogue with the president-elect.

Washington had already signaled its intention to recognize the election result and hailed Hondurans for going to the polls.

“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.


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.


Panama, Colombia and Costa Rica have joined the United States in recognizing Sunday’s elections, but Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Venezuela have all deemed the process illegitimate.


That position is shared by a key U.S. ally, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who said Monday that the holding of elections was not sufficient to resolve the situation in Honduras, which he called a “step backward” for democracy in Latin America.

In a speech at the Ibero-American Summit in Estoril, Portugal, Calderon said Mexico insists on the re-establishment of the constitutional order in Honduras and he questioned how free Sunday’s balloting really was.

Brazil, which has been steadfast in opposing the coup, seemed to soften its stance Monday by saying that it will consider recognizing Lobo depending on his actions between now and his inauguration in late January.

Lobo said Sunday that he would work for unity and reconciliation in Honduras.

“We will create a national unity government, a government of national reconciliation,” he told supporters.

Zelaya, for his part, described Lobo as a “personal friend,” but one with whom he had “very big political differences.