Honduras Swears in New President Hours after Manuel Zelaya Ousted

Congress leader Roberto Micheletti has been sworn in as the new president of Honduras just hours after former President Manuel Zelaya was ousted by the country’s military. Micheletti will now serve as interim president until January 27, the end date in which Zelaya’s four-year term was scheduled to end.

Zelaya was kidnapped by soldiers in the early morning on Sunday and flown to Costa Rica after the country’s Supreme Court ruled him to be unfit for the leadership position. Elected to a non-renewable four-year term in 2006 Zelaya had been attempting to hold a referendum that could have extended his time in office. A vote on that referendum was scheduled for Sunday but before it could be held he was ousted.

Speaking from Costa Rica the overthrown Zelaya called the coup “a plot by a very voracious elite, an elite which wants only to keep this country isolated, in an extreme level of poverty.” Almost immediately the military action carried out in Honduras was denounced by the United States, the United Nations as well as the Organization of American States.

Despite the international criticism the Honduran Congress appeared to support the move and met Micheletti’s swearing in with applause. Micheletti, who had been constitutionally second in line for the presidency, remarked after the swearing in “My slogan will be the reconciliation of the grand family of Hondurans... and a grand national dialogue.”

It was the Congress that opposed several of Zelaya’s recent acts, on being an attempt to gain support for rewriting the country’s constitution. Zelaya had sought the support of the Honduran military in preparing for the recent referendum yet they refused to help which led to him dismissing the chief of the army, Gen. Romeo Vasquez on Wednesday. The Supreme Court ordered Zelaya to reinstate Vasquez, an order he ignored, and that refusal likely played a major role in Sunday’s affairs.

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