Reply #1: "We are going to give them both equal treatment." --Oscar Arias

[Peace Patriot]

That is not a good sign. They are dealing with a rightwing military COUP. You don't give "equal treatment"--whatever that means--to illegal usurpers and oppressors who removed President Zelaya at gunpoint, suspended Constitutional civil rights, declared martial law and aimed US-funded rifles and Zelaya supporters and opened fire on them, killing a young man and wounding others--and all over a simple ADVISORY referendum on GENERAL Constitutional reform!

Granted it is not an easy situation to resolve, with the violent usurpers still in power, and Arias may have just been using soothing language to get things started. But all along Zelaya has asserted the dignity of his elected position, and has acted with courage as the legitimate representative of his people. The coupsters have actively tried to tear him down, and have denied and tried to destroy his legitimacy, by contriving absurd legal arguments and charges--that he committed treason, for instance. He did nothing of the kind. It is they who committed treason. They really have no right to sit at the table where the future of Honduras is determined. They only have power, not legitimacy. And they are sitting at that table by action of the US government, which has been funding these rightwing operatives in Honduras to the tune of $49 million dollars--US taxpayer dollars--through the USAID-NED and the International Puke Institute (discovered by Eva Gollinger in FOIA requests), not to mention multi-millions in military funding. (And we don't know the extent of the funding of rightwing tools in Honduras--or anywhere else--given the Bushwhacks' secretiveness, and the secretiveness of our secret government.)

I am reminded of the Bushwhack-instigated attempted coup in Bolivia this last September, wherein the rich, white separatist minority try to secede from the national government of Evo Morales and take Bolivia's oil/gas reserves with them. Michele Batchelet convened UNASUR--the new South American 'common market' formalized only last summer. And she did not invite the coupsters to that meeting. Batchelet and the leaders of Brazil and Argentina told them, in no uncertain terms, that they had no right to attend. Brazil and Argentina--Bolivia's chief gas customers-- also told them that they would not trade with a separatist state. UNASUR then unanimously voted to support Evo Morales government, and sent a delegation to Bolivia to help investigate the coupsters' machine-gunning of 30 unarmed peasants, and to insure a smooth and peaceful election on Bolivia's new Constitution.

That situation, too, was about Constitutional reform. However, although the coupsters were planning to assassinate Morales, and trashed government buildings and seized an airport in their region--preventing Morales' plane from landing, at one point (interesting parallel)-- they never gained the levers of power of the national government, nor did they succeed in ousting or killing Morales. So their neighbors and other members of UNASUR did not have to figure out what to do with an illegitimate coup government.