Honduras mediation fruitless so far – any hope?

Interim President Robert Micheletti and ousted (ex)-President Manuel Zelaya both met with Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Thursday — but separately, as the two both refuse to talk face-to-face. Not a good sign.

But, Micheletti’s camp still says it’s open to advancing the date of November elections. Positive signs like this are why I break with fellow left-liberals and their black-and-white castigation of what happened in Honduras as a “coup.”

What would be “movement” for me would be if a close Zelaya ally would be named the speaker of the Honduran Congress until elections. If Zelaya is representing progressivism in a general way, and not himself as the aggrandizement of progressivism, he’ll accept that, as a quarter-loaf for himself, and a half-loaf for the cause.

And, if this works, Edward Schumacher-Matos points out that the U.S. in general burnishes its Latin America image while Hugo Chavez is left holding the bag.

Elsewhere, Schumacher-Matos has a good wrap-up of how we got here, errors of the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court, and MUCH more. With comments like this:

Brodi Kemp, a researcher at Harvard's Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, says: “You could argue that Zelaya gave up his claim to moral legitimacy when he went outside the constitution. If you accept that, then what do the other political actors do? . . . Sometimes an act is legitimate even though it proceeded illegitimately.”

His column is well worth a read.