Honduran President is ousted in coup – NY Times
NY Times reports President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was ousted by the army on Sunday, capping months of tensions over his efforts to lift presidential term limits. In the first military coup in Central America since the end of the cold war, soldiers stormed the presidential palace in the capital, Tegucigalpa, early in the morning, disarming the presidential guard, waking Mr. Zelaya and putting him on a plane to Costa Rica. Mr. Zelaya, a leftist aligned with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, angrily denounced the coup as illegal. “I am the president of Honduras,” he insisted. Later Sunday the Honduran Congress voted him out of office, replacing him with the president of Congress, Roberto Micheletti. The military offered no public explanation for its actions, but the Supreme Court issued a statement saying that the military had acted to defend the law against “those who had publicly spoken out and acted against the Constitution’s provisions.”