Honduras, July 26: Deposed President Manuel Zelaya returned to the Honduran border and announced he would set up camp there, despite foreign leaders urging him not to force a confrontation with the government that ousted him in last month’s coup.
Zelaya arrived at a rural frontier crossing and immediately grabbed a megaphone, shouting to a crowd of 100 supporters and about as many journalists. He vowed to wait there and demanded his family be allowed to meet him.
“We are going to stand firm,” Zelaya told the crowd, complaining that the interim government has not allowed him to reunite with his family, whom he hasn’t seen since he was whisked at gunpoint from his home June 28 and forced into exile.
“Today we are going to set up camps here, with water and food. We are going to stay here this afternoon, tonight and tomorrow morning,” he said.
Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro, told a news agency by telephone that she was stopped at a roadblock on a highway leading to the border and that police and soldiers would not let her and others pass.
Zelaya drove north from his hotel in the early afternoon in a white jeep, accompanied by two pickup trucks carrying his Nicaraguan police escort. It was his second largely symbolic trip to the border in as many days.
–Agencies