Commenting on Arturo Valenzuela’s recent speech to the OAS (a link to the speech follows Mark’s comment), Mark Weisbrot writes:
Yesterday, President Obama’s new top State Department official for Latin America, Arturo Valenzuela, delivered a speech about Honduras at the meeting of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States. The speech provides some important information about the State Department’s strategy going forward. As before, this strategy is oriented toward legitimizing the coup government.
It appears that the State Department is still clinging to the October 30th "accord," and not just the "elections" to legitimize the government. So perhaps they still have hopes of reaching a deal with Zelaya after the election, or they are just pretending that they have such hopes, but one of these two things is the implication in this speech. When Zelaya refuses to be part of the farce, the implication here is that Washington will blame Zelaya for rejecting the implementation of the "accord." (This of course is despite the fact that Micheletti torpedoed the accord immediately by declaring himself head of the "unity government.") I would think that they Obama administration could also win Republican support for this position, even people like Senator DeMint, thus closing the gap that some of the administration seems to worried about on the domestic front.
Their problem remains that practically no other country in the world is buying their line.
Valenzuela’s speech is here.