THE interminable document read out yesterday by Nobel laureate Oscar Arias is far worse than the seven points of the act of rendition that he proposed on July 18. He did not communicate with international opinion via a Morse code. He spoke before TV cameras that were broadcasting his image and all the details of the human face, which generally has as many variables as a person’s fingerprints. Any intention of lying can be easily discovered. I was observing him closely.
Among television viewers, the vast majority knew that a coup d’état had taken place in Honduras. Via that medium they were informed of the speeches made in the OAS, the UN, the SICA, the Non-Aligned [Movement] Summit and other forums; they had seen the outrages, and the abuse and repression of the people in activities that have brought together hundreds of thousands of people to protest against the coup d’état.
The strangest thing is that, when Arias was expounding on his new peace proposal, he wasn’t delirious; he believed in what he was saying.
Although very few people in Honduras were able to see the footage, many people in the rest of the world did see it and likewise, had seen when he proposed the famous seven points of July 18. They knew that the first of them stated textually: "The legitimate restitution of José Manuel Zelaya Rosales in the Presidency of the Republic until the end of the constitutional period for which he was elected."
Everybody wanted to know what the mediator would say yesterday afternoon. The recognition of the rights of the constitutional president of Honduras, with his powers reduced almost to zero in the first proposal, was relegated to sixth place in Arias’ second project, in which not even the phrase "legitimize the restitution" is employed.
Many upstanding people were shocked, and they possibly attribute what he said yesterday to his own shady maneuvers. Maybe I am one of the few people in the world to understand that there was an auto-suggestion more than a deliberate intention in the words of the Nobel Peace laureate. I particularly noticed that when Arias, with a special emphasis, his words choked with emotion, spoke of the multitude of messages that presidents and world leaders, moved by his initiative, had sent him. That is what passes through one’s mind; he doesn’t even realize that other honest and modest Nobel Peace laureates like Rigoberto Menchú and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel are indignant at what has taken place in Honduras.
Without any doubt whatsoever, a large number of Latin American governments, those which knew that Zelaya had approved of Arias’ initial project and that he trusted in the good sense of the coup leaders and their yanki allies, breathed a sigh of relief, which only lasted 72 hours.
Seen from another angle and returning to things prevailing in the real world, where the dominant empire exists and close to 200 sovereign states are having to battle with all kinds of conflicts and political, economic, environmental, religious and other interests, it only remains to give a prize to the brilliant yanki idea of thinking of Oscar Arias in order to gain time, consolidate the coup and demoralize the international agencies that supported Zelaya.
At the event commemorating the 30th anniversary of the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution, Daniel Ortega, recalling with bitterness the role of Arias in the first Esquipulas Agreement, stated before a huge crowd of Nicaraguan patriots: "The yankis know him very well, that’s why they chose him as a mediator in Honduras." An that same event, Rigoberto Menchú, of indigenous descent, condemned the coup.
If the measures approved in the foreign ministers’ meeting in Washington had simply been implemented, the coup d’état could not have survived the peaceful resistance of the Honduran people.
Now the coup leaders are already moving within Latin America’s oligarchic circles, some of which, in their high state positions, no longer blush when speaking of their sympathies toward the coup, and imperialism is fishing in the troubled waters of Latin America. Exactly what the United States wanted with the peace initiative, while it accelerated negotiations to surround the homeland of Bolívar with military bases.
One must be fair, and while we are waiting for the last word of the people of Honduras, we should demand a Nobel Prize for Mrs. Clinton.