Honduras president calls military action 'brutal kidnapping'

[jillio]

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (CNN) -- Honduran President Jose Manuel Zelaya said he awoke to gunfire in his home and was still in his pajamas when the military forced him to leave the country Sunday.


Civilians berate Army soldiers in an armored car near the presidential house in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on Sunday.

1 of 2 "This was a brutal kidnapping of me with no justification," Zelaya said of the military-led coup. He was speaking from Costa Rica where a military plane had taken him after he was held Sunday morning.

In Tegucigalpa a growing crowd, including families with children, gathered outside of the presidential residence. Video showed soldiers walking down some of the streets of the capital, and military helicopters flew overhead.

Zelaya, a leftist elected in 2005, had found himself recently pitted against other branches of government and military leaders over a referendum planned for Sunday that could have allowed the president to run for another term.

Honduras' Supreme Court ruled the referendum illegal, and the military and Congress agreed.

Despite the military and Congress' position, Zelaya pressed forward, vowing last week that he would push for the referendum. His four-year term ends in January 2010, and under current law he cannot run for re-election.

He called the coup an attack on Honduran democracy. "There are ways to protest without arms," Zelaya said.

A military team entered the president's residence and met resistance from Zelaya's guards, a Honduran government official told CNN. The official at first said Zelaya was injured, but later said it appeared he had not been.

Earlier, the military had confiscated ballots from the presidential residence, in effect canceling the disputed vote. Meanwhile, the state-run television news station was taken off the air, and there were reports of cell phones and electricity interruptions in parts of the country.

The country's top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, told the president that the military would not support the referendum.

In response, Zelaya said last Wednesday that he would fire Vasquez.

Zelaya last week referred to the highest court in Honduras as the "Supreme Court of Injustice" but later reaffirmed that Vasquez still held his military post.

Determined to hold the referendum, the president on Thursday led a protest to the military base where the ballots were being housed and took possession of them. The military seized those ballots Sunday morning.

Sunday's events followed a tumultuous week in Honduras, a country where 70 percent of the population lives in poverty.

The military had ruled Honduras for 25 years, until a democratically elected civilian government came to power in 1982.

Zelaya won the presidency in 2005 with 49.8 percent of the vote to 46.1 percent for Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo

Honduras president calls military action 'brutal kidnapping' - CNN.com

 

[kokonut]

Of course, it's a "brutal" kidnapping but people conveniently ignores the salient fact that he tried to illegally extend his tenure in office as president.

Yet today, as people lay dead and dying at the hands of Islamist despots, simply because they dared to quest for freedom, the leaders of our nation – the elected caretakers of the beacon of liberty and freedom – stand indifferent to a call for solidarity; they exist deaf to the pleas for help. As pro-freedom protesters take their lives in their hands in pursuit of liberty, the leader of the free world extends a hand in friendship to the very Islamist tyrants whose hands are stained with the blood of the innocent.

The military, judiciary and Honduran congress removed the country’s president because he was attempting to illegally extend his tenure in office. – attempting a bloodless coup – in usurpation of that country’s constitution. The people of Honduras – in the form of that country’s military, judiciary and congress – stood up to tyranny by exorcising the Marxist cancer that threatened that nation’s sovereignty. Yet, the leader of the free world – and his secretary of state – sided with the tyrannical, calling for the reinstatement of ousted despot who tried to destroy their democracy.

Today, it would seem, the United States has seated as president a man who possess no value for the tenets of Natural Law; who sees no duty to maintain the beacon of freedom and liberty; and who purposely and deliberately turns a deaf ear to the cries for freedom from every corner of the Earth in deference to the will of the one-world philosophy of neo-Marxism.

Glad to see the "One" who was quick with Honduras, as people seek freedom and democracy, but purposely slow on Iran by those seeking freedom and democracy. The messiah doesn't walk on water, he ensures that people drown instead.