Ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya vowed to end his month-long exile by staging a dramatic border crossing from Nicaragua yesterday, defying government threats to arrest him and warnings the move will prompt bloodshed.
The plan came as international rights groups slammed the government of interim leader Roberto Micheletti for a host of human rights violations since Zelaya’s ouster on June 28, including extrajudicial executions.
Zelaya — who was sent away by the Honduran military in a move supported by the courts and Congress — said he would make his latest bid to return home after Costa Rican-brokered talks with the interim government collapsed.
He was set to travel to northern Nicaragua on Thursday and “to the border the following day,” in a move sure to inflame already heightened tensions in the small Central American nation.
The exiled president would enter Honduras “when the conditions were ready,” an adviser, Alan Fajardo, said in Nicaragua, naming the conditions as sufficient citizen participation and an element of surprise.
Earlier this month, Zelaya made an abortive attempt to land in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, but was blocked by military units deployed at the airport.
On the ground, his supporters clashed with security forces loyal to Micheletti, killing at least one person and wounding several others.
Regional powers, including the US, have backed Zelaya’s quest to regain office, but urged him not to return for fear of prompting bloodshed in a country some say is teetering on the brink of civil war.
Honduras dominated talks at a regional Mercosur summit in Paraguay on Thursday, where Chilean President Michelle Bachelet called on the country’s leaders to avoid a bloodbath.
The crisis has sent thousands of both Zelaya detractors and supporters into the streets in recent weeks.
In an increasingly polarized Honduras, Zelaya supporters called a national strike on Thursday, with teachers unions suspending classes across the country.
The 15-person team of rights representatives — from the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights, the Washington-based Center for Justice and International Law and Spain’s Federation of Associations in the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights — said there had been “grave and systematic violations” in Honduras over the last month.
The groups mentioned extrajudicial executions during curfew hours, pressure on news media opposed to Micheletti’s government and the “suspension of fundamental rights of Hondurans.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
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
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
RSS