And the prize for “Most Pathetic Headline of the Week by a Major US Paper” goes to….

…the Los Angeles Times.  Here’s how they titled their story about yesterday’s vote by Honduras’ Congress regarding Manuel Zelaya:

Honduran Congress upholds coup

The LAT seems determined to set in stone the fiction that Zelaya was removed in a coup d'état, rather than in a legal, constitutional action.  If you didn’t catch the “coup” in the title, don’t worry – they use the word four more times in the accompanying article.

The vote was overwhelmingly against Zelaya’s reinstatement (111-14), but the LAT dismisses it by suggesting that this was a vote by the Honduran elite to rid itself of a meddlesome man of the people.

The MSM’s reporting on Honduras’ political situation should be a badge of shame, but you’ll never read that in their newspapers.

Manuel Zelaya is quite possibly insane

In an interview granted to the Miami Herald, deposed Honduran president Zelaya gives more reasons why he should never be permitted to return to power*:

It's been 89 days since Manuel Zelaya was booted from power. He's sleeping on chairs, and he claims his throat is sore from toxic gases and "Israeli mercenaries'' are torturing him with high-frequency radiation.

"We are being threatened with death,'' he said in an interview with The Miami Herald, adding that mercenaries were likely to storm the embassy where he has been holed up since Monday and assassinate him.

"I prefer to march on my feet than to live on my knees before a military dictatorship,'' Zelaya said in a series of back-to-back interviews.

Zelaya was deposed at gunpoint on June 28 and slipped back into his country on Monday, just two days before he was scheduled to speak before the United Nations. He sought refuge at the Brazilian Embassy, where Zelaya said he is being subjected to toxic gases and radiation that alter his physical and mental state.

If not insane, he’s at the very least paranoid and delusional.

* The constitutional reasons to bar him from power are overwhelmingly sufficient; this is just icing on the cake.

(Credit: Image found here)

Honduran Foreign Minister: We will not discard our constitution just to please the international community

On August 24 the Foreign Minister of the government* of Honduras issued an “open letter” to the world to defend its actions regarding former president Zelaya.
Naturally, this clear statement of the facts did not get much play among the enemies of constitutional democracy (including our own government and most major press organizations).
I post this for the benefit of those who value truth over ideology.  Please keep these facts in mind as you follow the current situation in Honduras.

SECRETARIA DE RELACIONES EXTERIORES
DE LA
REPUBLICA DE HONDURAS

An Open Letter to the Citizens of the World
from
Carlos Lopez Contreras, Foreign Minister of Honduras

As citizens of an increasingly smaller and interconnected global community, we are all responsible for respecting one another and for creating a better world together. Our diverse cultures, religions, and forms of government must continually search for ways to understand one another and work together.
In Honduras, we have always worked diligently to uphold this responsibility as inhabitants of a global village. We have always remained steadfast in our commitment, and this past month is no exception. In fact, it is an example of what we must all vow to do from time to time: hold true to the principals of democracy and the rule of law while protecting the human and civil rights of our fellow citizens in the face of criticism and misunderstanding by certain sectors of the international community.
Let me be clear about what we as Hondurans believe. We believe in the rights of every person to freely express themselves and their beliefs so long as it is done in accordance with the rule of law. We encourage full and equal participation in political discourse and believe that a free and unfettered press is a valuable part of that discourse. We believe that the Honduran government must act in accordance with the Constitution that establishes and limits its power to govern.
As the Minister of Foreign Affairs, I am charged with representing the Honduran government and its people before the world. Now more than ever, my job is to bring an understanding to our shared global community of our dedication to uphold these beliefs, and ask each of you to consider our views as we consider yours.
Yes, Manuel Zelaya was democratically elected as the Honduran President. We cherish democracy.
Yes. as President, he did abuse his power and violate the Constitution. We respect our Constitution.
Yes. his powers as President were automatically forfeited after our Attorney General investigated the violation and our Supreme Court ruled that the violation had occurred. We respect the rule of law.
Yes, the military was ordered to arrest him as part of their Constitutional duty. We know this appearance might seem troubling to some, but it is clearly written in our Constitution -and has always been a part of our Constitution.
Yes, it was a mistake to remove Manuel Zelaya, a Honduran national, from the country. We admit the error and are aware that there are consequences.
Those consequences are that the Constitution and rule of law must be upheld. And so, the Attorney General opened an investigation into the expatriation of Manuel Zelaya on July 4th, and we await the findings of this investigation.
We, the Honduran people, firmly believe that those consequences are not any of the following:

• The restitution of the Presidential powers of Manuel Zelaya. This is not an option the Honduran Constitution grants to the government. In fact, it is clear that the exact opposite must take place. No powers under any circumstances.
• The granting of amnesty to Manuel Zelaya by the executive branch.  This is a proscribed duty of the Congress. and the Congress alone. This is their power. and theirs alone.
• The unilateral decision to negotiate breaking articles of the Constitution in order to satisfy some members of the international community.  Popular opinion by powerful nations does not rule our nation, and should not rule any country.

Please consider what is being asked of our country: Break the Constitution. Ignore the rule of law.
We simply can not do this because of a mistake in expatriating a Honduran national who had been Constitutionally stripped of the powers that democracy provided to him only to have him abuse them.
We would never ask another nation to ignore its Constitution and trample on the rule of law much less purposely violate its Constitution to please our opinion.
Each day, our citizens wake up and hope that through our insistence and dedication that we can bring understanding to others. We are thankful to friends who have courageously spoken up on our behalf. We are grateful for their support, and are humbled that they have chosen to work selflessly alongside us to bring other nations to understanding our commitment to democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law.
We are a little country among the community of nations but our nation’s larger mission is to protect human rights, democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. We are confident that these are values worth standing firmly in order to uphold. We invite the world to examine our true intentions and decide for themselves. As we prepare to hold free and fair elections this coming November, our faith in these principles could not be more clear.

* Not the de facto government, as the world’s media like to call it, but rather the de jure government.
(Letter text found here.  Official publication copy here.)

World’s media continue to lie about the reality of what happened in Honduras

A constitutional crisis is underway in Honduras, but not for the reasons that the media – and the Obama administration, for that matter – would have you believe.

As I have written previously, former president Manuel Zelaya was removed from power in June after a series of moves on his part that violated the Honduran constitution. Completely in accordance with said constitution, the Honduran military, on the orders of the Honduran Supreme Court and with the endorsement of the Honduran Attorney General, arrested Zelaya.

The military exceeded its authority by exiling Zelaya rather than simply taking him into custody, but as far as I can tell, that is the only misstep in the entire drama.

Despite these facts, the Obama administration and the majority of the world’s media have had the audacity to refer to this as a coup.

Now the deposed Zelaya has been smuggled back into the country and is holed up in the Brazilian embassy. The Obama administration, which to date has struggled to find a left-wing regime it couldn’t find common cause with, has pledged its support to Brazil.

An AFP report from today follows the tired old script [emphasis added]:

The United States pledged Tuesday to do whatever it can to help Brazil's embassy in Honduras, which was surrounded by soldiers and had its lights, water and phone lines cut off after deposed President Manuel Zelaya took refuge there.

"Our embassy in Tegucigalpa is in contact with their counterparts in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa and we're discussing what kind of assistance that we can provide to help them during this crisis," said State Department spokesman Ian Kelly.

[…] Honduran soldiers earlier dispersed thousands of protesters who had camped out overnight outside the embassy to protect the man they see as the country's rightful leader, but who was deposed in a military-backed coup in June.

The Honduran government is understandably angry that Brazil would give aid and comfort to a man who through his actions is an avowed enemy of the country’s constitution.

It is to America’s shame that our government continues to pretend otherwise.

9/24 UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, Spain's leftist president Jose Zapatero has joined in the charade (with Reuters' hearty concurrence):

Democracy must be restored in Honduras and a political crisis caused by the overthrow of President Manuel Zelaya must end, Spain's prime minister said at the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday.

"We won't accept the coup," Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero told world leaders.

Zelaya was ousted in a June coup in the worst political crisis in Central America in decades.

Reuters contradicts its own shoddy reporting on Honduran crisis

It’s almost like a reflex.  Reuters leads off a July 20 dispatch on the Honduran constitutional crisis in this way (emphasis added):

Honduras' political foes are on a collision course after negotiations collapsed and deposed President Manuel Zelaya vowed to return home despite warnings from a defiant de facto government.
Zelaya says resistance is being organized in Honduras to pave the way for his return this weekend and that nobody can stop him. The interim government installed after the June 28 military coup has threatened to arrest Zelaya if he returns and crack down on any protesters who stir trouble.

People who read only the opening paragraphs of news articles will come away with a reinforcement of the oft-repeated – but false – claim that Zelaya was deposed by a military coup.
Read a little further, and one will see that Reuters itself can’t decide whether or not the events of June 28 constituted a military coup.
In a section entitled “Unusual Coup”, we see laid out many of the facts demonstrating that the military, far from instigating Zelaya’s removal from power, was actually carrying out the constitutionally lawful order for his arrest:

Zelaya was expelled from the textile and coffee exporting country in his pajamas in the middle of the night. He had upset his political rivals by seeking to lift presidential term limits, and the army moved against him after the Supreme [Court] ordered his arrest.
[…] The Honduran coup is an unusual case. Unlike those that battered Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, Zelaya's ouster was approved by the Supreme Court and Congress as well as Catholic Church leaders in the country. There is also no military strongman in the picture this time.

So, get this straight: The Honduran Supreme Court lawfully ordered Zelaya’s arrest, and the military lawfully carried out the arrest order.  Honduras’ Congress (including Zelaya’s own political party) endorsed this lawful order. 
The only way that the military exceeded its authority was by exiling the president rather than merely taking him into custody.  Even so, once the operation was completed, the military stood down.  They have no influence over the interim president – from Zelaya’s political party, by the way – that Congress lawfully selected to take Zelaya’s place.
Despite the cognitive dissonance abundantly evident in this article, Reuters seems incapable of admitting that no coup – military or otherwise – took place in Honduras on June 28.
The article ends on an encouraging note:

The interim government, which has been denied around $200 million in multilateral aid and $16.5 million in U.S. military aid and is at risk of regional trade sanctions, insists it can and will stand up to the international pressure.

Honduras knows that it has few if any friends in this crisis.  For some reason, it seems like the whole world – governments and media alike – is determined to snuff out the liberty of this tiny republic.  Good on the people and government of Honduras for refusing to refusing to buckle under  the unbelievable pressure.

The truth about Honduras (SPREAD THE WORD)

The following is written by a longtime Christian missionary in Honduras (known personally to members of a sister church there). Please do your part to counter the 'coup' nonsense that we're being fed by the media and our government!

(Map credit: geology.com)

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Date: Sunday, July 5, 2009, 4:40 PM
Dear Friends,
This has been a very difficult and yet productive trip. At this point we need your prayers more than ever. Tensions are very high here in the capital of Tegucigalpa. Thankfully, we met some people here with military and police connections that offered to get us to a safe house if need be. Praying that will not be needed, but grateful God gave us that option. Many here think we will need it...
There have been unidentified planes and helicopters in Honduran airspace. The military was able to chase some away, but one helicopter is lost. The airspace over Honduras is closed because Zelaya threatened to come back today. Apparently he is in El Salvador now.
Who knows how long it will take for this drama to play out. We are praying hard to get out by Tuesday and head to Washington with our findings for the congressman who asked us to do a report. On this end we have been asked to assist a group of Honduran government officials get their information into the right hands when and if they leave for DC this week.
We are so incredibly sad that the American people know little about this situation and what they do know are mostly lies. We beg you to pass this email to anyone on your email list and to any government officials you know.
See link below for some more interesting background information:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/carlos_alberto_montaner/2009/07/preventing_a_honduran_bloodbat.html?hpid=talkbox1
In the last few weeks before the President was arrested for treason hundreds and hundreds (I have heard everything from 800 to 2000) Venezuelans were granted entrance to this country. We were told that they were given Honduran passports. These are counter-intelligence and military people whose prime job is to organize mobs and create chaos. They have much experience in these things. What Zelaya, Chavez, and the Castro brothers want more than anything is a bloodbath here to intimidate the population into allowing Zelaya back in the country as President.
Chaos is what this President has specialized in the past few months. He has tried to destabilize the country in every way he can. Class struggle is something that this regime really poked and stoked. It is true that Honduras needs to do more for its poor, but at the government level everything was a pinata. Not much assistance ever got to the poor.
This former President is a known narco-trafficker, allowing planes to land at the capital's airport loaded with drugs and cash. Our own government has documentation on this - it has not been released to Congress. Our government is advocating this thug be placed back in power. He broke 18 laws of the country - and by the Honduran constitution some of these laws he broke called for him to cease immediately to be the President of the country.
This was in no way a military coup. The military is not in power. They acted on the orders of their Supreme Court!
The grave mistake the government made here was not arresting the President, but letting him go free! Had they jailed him, the International community could not find fault with the current government. The only reason the government did what they did in whisking him off to freedom was because they had no idea who was in place in Honduras to create chaos. Many of the police and had been paid off by the President and they did not want bloodshed.
The thugs supporting Zelaya, many of them paid rioters brought in from every corner of the poorest of the poor areas are bombing, shooting, throwing grenades, burning things, and trying to scare the people here into giving in and letting Zelaya back.
We have talked to the poor and many of them tell us they prefer to eat only tortillas and salt rather than live under a Chavez puppet. The poor that Zelaya promised to help have received nothing in three and a half years of his presidency. He has bankrupted the country, most of the money that came in for aid is unaccounted for - presumably stolen by Zelaya. He provided NO BUDGET for the country for 2009 nor funding for the upcoming elections. He refused to release the funds putting their November elections in jeopardy.
He did manage to hand over 100 Venezuelan or Chinese tractors to the poor that cannot be maintained or fixed. Magnificent! Even the poor are laughing their heads off over that one.
I saw many poor people at the marches here carrying signs that said THE PEOPLE ARE NOT STUPID. They have somehow managed to inform themselves of the issues. That alone amazes me. The masses are waking up. The poor we know here have called Zelaya a crook for the last two years or more. In the beginning I think a lot of them had hope for change. No more.
CNN has been propagating the most ridiculous lies about what is going on here. One of their chief correspondists is married to some high ranking Sandanista - so much for objectivity.
Yesterday a friend in the states sent me an article about how the Honduran Military is a bunch of thugs and torturers. So really, why if the military are such thugs did they not torture Zelaya and take over the country? They were acting on orders of their Supreme Court who ordered them to arrest the treasonous President, a President who in a matter of a few hours was prepared to dissolve the contstitution and throw out the Congress!
All evidence we have says the US government was begging the Honduran Congress to let the President go ahead with his illegal referendum and then when the chaos began the US would back the Hondurans. Really? Like we did with the Iranians when their election was stolen and blood ran in their streets? I understand the Iranian situation is complicated, but it took forever to even condemn their actions of shooting innocent protesters. The Hondurans had zero confidence in the US to back them if bloodshed resulted. All they sought was peace and the legitimate removal of this man from power.
The Honduran people are devastated that the United States has not only abandoned them but actually insists they return a traitor, liar, and theif to power. Justice does not prevail here. Reason does not prevail here. Politics do, and innocent people may die.
In our villages, fifty years ago, the Nicaraguans came in and fought one very evil guerilla battle. Some of our friends there told us of their family members' heads being chopped off and placed on fence posts. Pregnant women's bellies were slashed open so that they and their children died. It is very much feared in our villages that these demonic deeds will happen again.
An army colonel we spoke with yesterday told us that the guerillas are already in place to intimidate the people not to fight. And armies are mobilizing according to the President.
Americans have always stood on the side of the underdog. Honduras has been our ally and friend helping us stand against communism for decades. Now is not the time to abandon them. Stop the politics! Do what is right!
Please help us by passing this information to anyone you know. I am sorry I do not have time to answer each of you individually. But your notes of encouragement have meant the world to us. This is a very scary time. We are holed up in a hotel that is only a block from the Presidential Palace and a place where it is feared will be a lot of violence.
Our mission here is nearly accomplished. One or two more meetings tomorrow with the very highest level officials and then we need to get out of here and head to Washington.
On a positive note we have been introduced to a slew of people that can help us advance the work with the children in Honduras if we survive this mess. We are very encouraged about that. This country will be a whole new nation once this is over and our ideas about working with the youth are being well received. Many are asking to learn more, come and see our work, and help mentor the youth!!!
Please pray for Honduras. Please send this to all your friends. Please bombard Washington with a plea for justice.
Love to all,
[Name withheld for safety's sake]

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UPDATE: July 3 photo from LA Times:

Zelaya supporters are not ashamed to make known who their hero is. Make no mistake – left-wing leaders throughout the Americas are upset because the people and government of Honduras refuse to go quietly into the Marxist abyss.
This is a significant challenge to the ambitions of Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, Raul Castro & co. Don’t think for a moment that they’ll back down from the challenge.
Honduras is in for a rough ride, and it looks to be a lonely one.