Thousands of supporters and opponents of Manuel Zelaya have staged rival demonstrations as the ousted Honduran president held talks in Washington to rally support for his return to power.
The interim Honduran regime has been resisting domestic and foreign pressure to reinstate Zelaya since soldiers kicked him out of the country in his pyjamas on June 28.
Zelaya arrived in Washington on Saturday and met with the top US official for Latin America, Thomas Shannon, and Organization of American States (OAS) Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza, said Rodolfo Pastor, a senior embassy official loyal to Zelaya.
The meeting "is part of the ongoing negotiations" for Zelaya to return to Honduras, Pastor told AFP.
Another meeting between Zelaya and Insulza was possible on Sunday, according to Pastor.
The United States has suspended military ties with Tegucigalpa and warned it could sever 200 million dollars in aid. The World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank have frozen credit lines for the country.
The coup "is nothing but a barbaric step backward that affects all Latin American countries and even the United States," Zelaya said in the Dominican Republic before flying to Washington. "No one will go unpunished in the de facto government."
The beleaguered leader continues to call for his return to power, even though his demand went nowhere in talks launched on Thursday in Costa Rica with the interim government.
Talks between representatives of Zelaya and interim Honduran leader Roberto Micheletti ended late Friday with no breakthrough.
Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize winner who brokered the meetings, insisted that talks would resume soon, but no date has been formally set.
Meanwhile, Zelaya's supporters in Tegucigalpa grew more anxious, worried that the interim government is seeking to "buy time," said Marvin Ponce, a lawmaker with the leftist Democratic Unification Party (PUD).
Zelaya's support is largely drawn from labor unions and the poor in the impoverished Central American country of more than seven million.
"We are not trying to buy time, but rather to obtain a result," countered Carlos Lopez, a former foreign minister who heads Micheletti's team of negotiators.
In a bid to increase pressure on the interim leaders, Zelaya supporters renewed their blockades of roads and bridges. They also marched to the airport to pay tribute to a youth killed on July 5, when the ousted Honduran leader aborted an attempt to land in Tegucigalpa.
Meanwhile, Micheletti's backers organized a massive prayer for peace in the capital's baseball stadium, backed by the Catholic Church, evangelical groups and the local Jewish community.
"We have come here to ask for peace and wisdom necessary to build a new Honduras," said Darwin Andino, assistant archbishop of Tegucigalpa.
German Cuevas, a representative of the Jewish community, said the religious leaders had prayed in hopes "to unite the Honduran people and make it overcome differences in search for peace."
Zelaya, a wealthy rancher who moved sharply left after taking office in January 2006, rattled his country's ruling elite by trying to bypass Congress to hold a referendum on rewriting the constitution.
He has denied charges that the move was a bid to lift the one-term presidential limit so he could seek re-election this year.
Argentina's former ambassador to Honduras, Alfredo Forti, warned that soldiers could stop supporting the military-backed coup that ousted Zelaya.
The army is divided and some soldiers "believe there is a time when they will have to revise their position in order to avoid a bloodbath," Forti, the envoy to Tegucigalpa from 2004 to 2007, told Argentina's Clarin newspaper.
Source: AFP Global Edition
