One year after soldiers sent away the president of Honduras at gunpoint, political rulers in the Central American nation have failed to convince many observers that the crisis is over.
The removal of wealthy cattle rancher Manuel Zelaya on June 29 last year, who swerved to the political left during his presidency, split opinion both in Honduras and internationally.
Many in Latin America, including powerhouse Brazil, refuse to recognize Honduran President Porfirio Lobo, who won power in polls held under an unelected interim regime in November last year and took office in January.
But the US, the traditional Honduras backer, has now restored economic and military cooperation, after first condemning the coup.
“Sadly, Honduras has turned into a political football,” Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington said.
“There have been too many attempts to score political points and too few efforts that give highest priority to the welfare of most Hondurans,” Shifter said.
The coup and its aftermath increased tensions on familiar geo-political battlegrounds in the Americas.
It provoked the Organization of American States (OAS) to suspend Honduras — a move which has not been reversed despite pressure from the US.
“It is time for the [Western] hemisphere as a whole to move forward and welcome Honduras back into the inter-American community,” US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told OAS foreign ministers in Peru earlier this month.
OAS experts are studying the necessary conditions for the return of Honduras but Brazil, which sheltered Zelaya in its embassy in Tegucigalpa in a long showdown following the coup, has urged countries not to rush into readmitting Honduras.
In a major challenge for Lobo’s presidency, the killings of a string of journalists and rights activists this year have maintained tensions at home and abroad.
A group of 27 US Democratic lawmakers on Thursday wrote to Clinton to “express our continuing concern regarding the grievous violations of human rights and the democratic order which commenced with the coup and continue to this day.”
They called for a US mission to study the situation in Honduras.
The US government supports an official Truth Commission set up to investigate alleged rights abuses surrounding the coup.
But many in Honduras fear that officials who are implicated but still in power could influence that probe.
Rights activists including two Nobel Prize laureates last week set up a rival commission to investigate abuses and responsibility for the coup.
Supporters of Zelaya plan demonstrations to mark the one-year anniversary today.
Zelaya angered the country’s elite as he sought to change the Constitution. His critics accused him of seeking to extend term limits.
Zelaya made two bids to return to Honduras before appearing in Brazil’s embassy in September. He left for the Dominican Republic in January.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of