MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

OAS mission finds “no conditions” for Zelaya’s return to Honduras

OAS chief Insulza frustrated with the development of events

The head of the Organisation of American States has said he found no willingness in Honduras' interim government to restore ousted President Manuel Zelaya. Jose Miguel Insulza said that “unfortunately, in Honduras the conditions are not there for Zelaya's return”.

Mr Insulza told a news conference on Friday that the OAS will decide at a meeting on Saturday whether to suspend Honduras from the regional organisation which would deepen Central America’s worst political crisis in decades.

The OAS Secretary General would not comment on whether that would affect Mr Zelaya's plans to return home over the weekend, apparently in the company of several other Latinamerican leaders. He said the OAS continues to recognise Mr Zelaya, who was ousted last Sunday in a coup, as the president of Honduras.

Mr Insulza spoke after meeting with the president of the Supreme Court, who rebuffed his appeal to reinstate Mr Zelaya.

“We wanted to ask that this situation be reversed” Mr Insulza told a news conference in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa, where he had arrived on a personal mission to demand Mr Zelaya's reinstatement.

“The clear result is that there is an evident rupture of constitutional order and those who did this have no intention for the moment, of changing this situation” Insulza told reporters.

The bloodless overthrow in the impoverished coffee and textile exporting country of 7 million people has created a test of Washington's commitment to defending democracy in Latinamerica.

Insulza met politicians, church leaders and judicial figures but did not talk directly to Roberto Micheletti, named by Congress as caretaker president, as the OAS wanted to avoid giving his government legitimacy.

The interim government's deputy foreign minister, Martha Alvarado, told local television immediately after Insulza's remarks that Zelaya's return as president was “not negotiable.”

Insulza said he did not rule out violence. “So far, unlike in other military coups, there have not been fatalities to lament, I cannot rule out the possibility of clashes,” the OAS chief said.