The daring return of deposed President Manuel Zelaya has thrust Honduras back onto the world stage and posed a sharp challenge to interim leaders determined to hold new elections without him after a June coup.
Thousands of Zelaya supporters defied a curfew and spent the night surrounding Brazil's embassy, where the leader remained holed up Tuesday, a day after slipping back into the country. In exile since June 28, Zelaya said he had traveled for 15 hours overland in a series of vehicles to pull off the stealth homecoming.
The government of interim President Roberto Micheletti ordered a 26-hour shutdown of the capital Tegucigalpa beginning Monday afternoon, closed the airport and set up roadblocks on highways leading into town. The measures were taken to keep out more Zelaya supporters from other regions in an attempt to head off the big protests that disrupted the city after his ouster.
But Zelaya loyalists ignored the decree and surrounded the embassy dancing and cheering and using their cell phones to light up the streets after electricity was cut off on the block housing the embassy.
"We're here to support him and protect him, and we're going to stay here as long as it's physically possible," said Carlos Salgado, a 43-year-old jewerly maker from Zelaya's home state of Olancho.
Call for talks:
Supported by the U.S. and other governments since his ouster, Zelaya called for negotiations with the leaders who forced him from the country at gunpoint. But Micheletti urged Brazil to turn Zelaya over to Honduran authorities for trial.
Zelaya told The Associated Press that he was trying to establish contact with the interim government to start negotiations on a solution to the standoff that started when soldiers flew him to Costa Rica. "As of now, we are beginning to seek dialogue," he said by telephone, though he gave few details.
Talks moderated by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias stalled over the interim government's refusal to accept Zelaya's reinstatement to the presidency under a power-sharing agreement that would limit his powers and prohibit him from attemting to revise the constitution.
In June, the country's Congress and courts, alarmed by Zelaya's political shift into a close alliance with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuba, backed the president's removal.
He was arrested on orders of the Supreme Court on charges of treason and abuse of power for ignoring court orders against holding a referendum on reforming the constitution. His opponents feared he wanted to end a constitutional ban on re-election - a charge Zelaya denied.
Arias called his proposed compromise the last option to end the Honduran crisis. "I think this is the best opportunity, the best time now that Zelaya's back in his country," he said in New York.
Zelaya returned on the eve of the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, where U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged the opposing factions in Honduras to look for a peaceful solution.
"It is imperative that dialogue begin, that there be a channel of communication between President Zelaya and the de facto regime in Honduras," Clinton said at a joint news conference with Arias.
Micheletti showed no inclination to give any ground, saying late Monday that Zelaya had violated Arias' mediation effort by returning. "Arias' mediation in Honduras' political problem has ended ... and he has absolutely nothing else to do in this conflict," Micheletti said in a televised interview.
