Alex Leff's Notebook:

Carter to help on Honduras

When the going gets tough, the tough get the world's most decorated peacemakers. At least, that seems to be the case with Honduras, whose de facto leaders have agreed to welcome a delegation composed of the likes of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Costa Rica's current President Oscar Arias.

Both men are proud bearers of a Nobel Peace Prize for brokering peace deals between bitter violent foes; Carter at Camp David in 1978 for the Middle East, and Arias in the following decade in Central America.

Arias has so far failed to get his San Jose Accord signed by the men for whom it was intended — Honduras' deposed President Manuel Zelaya and de facto President Roberto Micheletti. Their signatures would seal the deal on a plan that proposes to see both of these leaders back together in government again, this time in a power-sharing regime of reconciliation.

Clearly, Costa Rica's Arias could not go it alone. But now with Carter on the team, maybe the peacemakers are prepared to play ball. The former president claims he will provide a supporting role. "He is not offering himself as a mediator," Carter spokeswoman Deanna Congileo told CNN, "but rather supporting the mediation of [Costa Rican] President Oscar Arias and the Organization of American States mission."

Micheletti's nod to the team was a bit of a turnaround for the leader. Micheletti has said Arias is a "puppet" of international interests and “has ceased to be a proper mediator.”

But the de facto leader might feel more comfortable now that the mission could also include Panamanian Vice President and Foreign Minister Juan Carlos Varela, who represents a government that may be the closest thing to a regional ally Micheletti's got. While the international community has expressed that nations won't recognize the results of Honduras' upcoming presidential elections, Panama came out last week saying it would, as long as the vote is fair and transparent. The recently elected Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli — one of Latin America's few standing conservative leaders — reportedly has maintained an open line of contact with the Micheletti administration and offered to serve as a mediator.

Meanwhile, what a time to campaign for a presidential election. Each candidate probably dreads the chilly global rejection he could face if elected in a vote held in the current climate. They must be nervous. Although they almost unanimously have ruled out Zelaya's return to power, they've been publicly endorsing Arias' mediation process. Like it or not, it's still the only proposal. Let's see what President Carter brings to the table.

What's not happening in Honduras?

It's a lot easier to tell what is not happening in the Honduras crisis than what is. Since deposed President Manuel Zelaya's surprise return Monday, he has remained holed up in the Brazilian Embassy in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa.

Brazil handing Zelaya over to the de facto Honduran authorities? Not happening.

De facto President Roberto Micheletti ordering armed forces to barge into the embassy and arrest Zelaya? Not happening.

Anybody signing the fabled San Jose Accord or a return to the scene of its author, Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, to end this standoff? It hasn't happened.

It's as though Hondurans and the international community are all waiting for some cathartic moment that will finally bring clarity to the situation. Some heads have turned to Brazil for answers, but President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva seems reluctant to take on the kind of mediation role befitting of his Costa Rican counterpart. Lula said Brazil is doing what "any democratic country would do" by granting Zelaya refuge in its embassy in Tegucigalpa.

Other South American countries such as Chile have reiterated the call to reinstate Zelaya, who was toppled on June 28.

Whatever the catharsis, let's hope it's peaceful. There's no question that a diplomatic resolution to this debacle would set the tone for relations in the Americas for years to come.

Unfortunately, diplomacy is not always the gut reaction. Thousands of Zelaya supporters mobbed the street outside Brazil's embassy, and would not go quietly when police dispersed them. The images of the forced dispersion will not disappear quietly either. Protesters launched firebombs. Police wielded truncheons and fired tear gas and rubber bullets.

Human Rights Watch criticized the new reports of abuses, charging that police have employed "excessive force." HRW Americas Director Jose Miguel Vivanco said, "we fear that conditions could deteriorate drastically in the coming days."

On Tuesday, the situation at the embassy apparently worsened for the toppled leader. Enrique Flores Lanza, Zelaya's minister of the presidency, told BBC Mundo conditions were "precarious, without light or water." It is a wonder if this has bothered the glorified "couch surfer" of the America's, who until Monday had roamed from country to country — but favoring Nicaragua — to muster support.

Yet, however true to the events, the media images seem to be stoking what some commentators are calling Zelaya's showstopping appearances. Monday's discreet entry followed two abortive missions to return to Honduras, first by plane, then by land, both stirring a media frenzy for their sky high theatrics. The media attention prompted Americas Quarterly editor Christopher Sabatini in his blog to compare the cowboy hat-wearing Zelaya to the likes of Paris Hilton.

Sharing the stage, in New York City, Costa Rica's Arias received renewed endorsement as Mr. Mediator, a role that so far has failed to thaw the stalemate. During a late Monday news conference in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "Once again, the Costa Ricans will be using their good offices to try to encourage (a peaceful return of Zelaya) to occur, because now that President Zelaya is back, it would be opportune to restore him to his position under appropriate circumstances, get on with the election that is currently scheduled for November, have a peaceful transition of presidential authority."

Arias concurred, saying, "I think this is the best opportunity, the best time, now that Zelaya is back in his country ... to sign the San Jose Accord."

But so far, not happening.

Central America marks independence

This week Central America marks 188 years of independence from Spain, in a celebration that in some ways got bogged down in politics.

For one, the passing of the “Antorcha de la Libertad” (Liberty Torch) became yet another event to salt the wounds of the two-and-a-half-month-old Honduran coup. Every year the torch is carried from country to country as a symbol of the region’s break-away from the grip of Spanish King Ferdinand VII, and of its renewed civismo or civic sentiment.

According to a Guatemalan government website, “The torch has traveled the isthmus for 50 years with the purpose of emphasizing the civismo and patriotic values among girls and boys, youths and adults.”

This year, on home turf, Hondurans got none of that. It was in Nicaragua that deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya’s education minister, Marlon Breve, received the torch from the hands of Salvadoran vice minister of education, Eduardo Badia. Breve, in turn, passed the torch to Nicaraguan Education Minister Miguel de Castilla.

“Central America is hurting,” de Castilla said, according to newswire EFE. “Central America has one piece missing: freedom. Human rights and education have one piece missing, the broad Honduran lands have been usurped by the boot of the military,” he added.

Hondurans remain bitterly divided on these points.

The administration of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has been a staunch critic of Honduras’ de facto government — which itself claims to be the country’s rightful, constitutional power — since Ortega’s ally Zelaya was booted from his home in a pre-dawn raid on June 28, and has also been a gracious host for the leader in exile.

Here in Costa Rica, children poured into the streets on Sept. 14, the eve of Independence Day, carrying candle-lit lanterns, a national tradition.

Costa Rica — Zelaya’s initial host, the one who welcomed the ousted president fresh off the plane in his pajamas — gave a slightly different message for the big event. President Oscar Arias made a call to put a muzzle on politics as usual in his pre-Independence Day address.

“If we continue how we are, in a hundred years we’ll still be arguing over who is the true representative of whichever ideology, whichever trend, or way of thinking. We’ll still be arguing over who’s communist, who’s socialist, who’s liberal, who’s neoliberal, who’s social democrat, who’s social Christian …” he went on. To be sure, Arias has been called a variety of those things by different people at different times.

Arias said that by being bogged down in this circular debate, Latin America loses out to other emerging powers. “This will be the century of the Asians and not the Latin Americans,” he said.

The Nobel Peace Prize-touting president is the hand-picked, and thus-far failed mediator in the Honduran crisis, so the act of celebrating independence takes on a different note this year as the region's very interdependence has struck such a high note.

This week Arias has another chance to push his San Jose Agreement forward, as Honduras’ presidential candidates are set to meet with him for a powwow this week.

More on that shortly….
 

On gorillas and guerrillas

Sunday's revolutionary fun in the sun in Managua was nothing short of bacchanalian.

Sandinista supporters celebrating the anniversary of the 1979 revolution danced deliriously, sweating through red and black party bandanas and downing light beer and cheap rum like water.

There was a euphoria that was contagious, which made me wonder how close to the feeling this came to the actual moment, 30 years ago to the day, when the Sandinistas swept to power, having toppled one of Latin America's wealthiest and longest ruling dynastic dictatorships, the Somoza family.

I hadn't reached my first birthday. My earliest memory of this whole situation comes not during the revolution, but rather the counterrevolution. It was a march on Washington sometime in the 1980s, and I could hear protestors yelling "1, 2, 3, 4, We don't want your Contra war!"

On Sunday, a 26-year-old reveler, Roger Vílchez, acknowledged that he hadn't even been born when his president, Daniel Ortega, marched onto Plaza de la Revolución. He grew up a child of the first generation in nearly half a century that didn't have an oppressive Somoza in power. "This day is really important, not just for me but for all the Nicaraguan people," he said. "This is a celebration of the cultural heritage of Nicaragua ... a free land."

Temporarily tattooed on Vílchez's back was a black silhouette of the man after whom the Sandinista party is named, Augusto César Sandino — who looks like a Latino hero out of an old country-western movie. Young children also had their faces painted with Sandino.

Not every Sandinista was celebrating at the Plaza de la Fé. Fecerico Aguado, who was 17 when he joined the armed struggle against Somoza's National Guard, refused to attend. "Some of us who fought in the revolution didn't go to the plaza," he said. A number of former comrades of Ortega have split from the party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, claiming Ortega has betrayed the revolution by clamping down on civil society, criticism and the media, and taking unlikely bedfellows like the Catholic Church and a conservative former president to secure his power.

However, as first lady Rosario Murillo boasted on Sunday, the FSLN boasts more than 1 million members. Nicaragua's population is estimted at a little less than 5.8 million.

Top officials from Nicaragua's ally nations like Cuba, Venezuela and the recently deposed Honduran government spoke with revolutionary verve, thundering before a crowd that seemed to revel in it.

But the event crescendoed into a speech by one leader in particular: Daniel Ortega. His talk still struck familiar notes with anti-imperialist pronouncements, lambasting the U.S. for maintaing military bases in Latin America and even accusing the superpower of somehow assisting in the coup that ousted Honduras' Manuel Zelaya on June 28.

The Ortega administration, and allies in Hugo Chávez's left-wing trade and aid bloc ALBA, call the interim government in Honduras "gorillas," and refuse to pronounce the name of Zelaya's de facto successor Roberto Micheletti correctly. In an interview this week with the Nicaraguan guerrilla hero Edén Pastora, he mocked the Honduran with his new nickname "Gorilletti."

But making perhaps the most headlines, Ortega reiterated a call to change the Nicaraguan Constitution to extend presidential terms — the same taboo topic that reached close enough to tipping point in Honduras to topple President Zelaya.

Last week, the Liberal Constitutional Party leaders promised to block any attempt by Ortega to remain in office beyond his term ending in 2012. However, judging by the excitement on Sunday, it remains to be seen whether they can.

Arias keeps talks going to find Honduras solution

Talks to end the Honduran standoff are continuing into the early morning hours here in San José behind closed-doors at President Oscar Arias’ home, after two Hondurans came agreeing only on one thing: They refuse to negotiate.

Honduras’ de facto president, Roberto Micheletti, departed this evening after a three-hour meeting with Arias, who is serving as mediator through the process, leaving behind a commission that possibly could hammer out an agreement with Manuel Zelaya, whom the military kicked out of the country on June 28.

An agreement, however, seemed unlikely at first. Both men had sunk their heels so deeply in their individual demands. Micheletti said Zelaya must go to jail if he sets foot in Honduras. For his part Zelaya said Micheletti should go to jail with the rest of the administration Zelaya calls golpistas (coup leaders) and criminals.

However, Nobel Peace Prize wielding Arias trudges on through the night.

“The conversation needs to continue and I think the parties involved agree it needs to continue,” Arias said.

Stay tuned for more coverage of the San José talks.

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