Coup Puts Honduran Diplomats, Friends and Colleagues, on Opposing Sides

In a July 7, 2009 New York Times article, Coup Puts Honduran Diplomats, Friends and Colleagues, on Opposing Sides, Marc Lacey reports:

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — The two men were much more than just colleagues. They were longtime friends who had negotiated the rough-and-tumble circles of Honduran politics to become their nation’s top ambassadors in the United States, if not the world.

Then both received early morning telephone calls, and had to make a fateful choice. The government they were representing had been toppled and a new one was sworn in hours later, requiring each man to quickly search his conscience and pick a side.

They chose differently.

“We have always shared the same values; then we separated,” Jorge Arturo Reina, the Honduran ambassador to the United Nations, said of his erstwhile ally, Roberto Flores Bermúdez, the Honduran ambassador to the United States. “He took one path. I took another.”

The gaping divide over the ouster of this nation’s president, Manuel Zelaya, has been on violent display in recent days, with angry street demonstrations for one side or the other in the capital and intense diplomatic jockeying on the world stage.

But there has been another, deeply personal fallout from the debate over the president’s removal, as friendships and even family ties are strained by the nation’s sudden political schism.

In the insular elite of Honduran politics, the ruptures are evident, perhaps inevitable. Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the wife of the ousted president, talks about her lost friendship with Xiomara de Micheletti, the wife of the man who helped depose her husband.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said, almost as if the two men were not locked in a bitter, international tug of war for control of the country. “We were friends.”

Less than a year ago, Mr. Zelaya endorsed Roberto Micheletti’s attempt to become the presidential nominee for the Liberal Party, of which both men are members. Mr. Micheletti’s candidacy failed, but as next in line for the presidency he took over after Mr. Zelaya’s ouster. Now he is vowing to arrest Mr. Zelaya if he tries to return to the country.

So divided is the country that discussion of the ouster is banned in some households. “In my family, it’s a very delicate topic,” said Luis Estrada, an architect. “I have relatives on both sides and I have friends on both sides. If you don’t want a fight, you talk about something else.”

The rift is a lot harder to smooth over for the two ambassadors. Mr. Reina used to be Mr. Flores Bermúdez’s law professor, and later became his mentor.

But when Mr. Zelaya was rousted out of his home by soldiers at the end of June and shuttled from the country, the two men found themselves taking drastically different paths.

Mr. Reina called the change in government illegal and refused to recognize the new one as anything other than a collection of coup plotters. Mr. Flores Bermúdez cast his lot with the new government and called the ousted president a crook who tried to subvert the Constitution.

“It was not an easy decision,” Mr. Flores Bermúdez said in an interview. “The difficulty was because I had been the ambassador for Zelaya. I had undertaken a lot of efforts on his behalf to bring our country closer to the United States. Then he was gone.”

Convinced Mr. Zelaya had been ousted legally, Mr. Flores Bermúdez returned home to get instructions from a new foreign minister, then went back to Washington. But his task became more complicated than ever, since Honduras has been condemned across the world for deposing its president and tossing him out of the country without a trial.

Mr. Flores Bermúdez argues that Mr. Zelaya flouted judicial orders against plans to remake the Constitution. The president’s removal from office came after a court order for the army to detain him, he said, and Mr. Micheletti was voted in by Congress.

But Mr. Reina dismisses such arguments. He has refused to recognize the new government, has rebuffed calls to return home and continues to operate at the United Nations even though his budget has been frozen. “This was simply a coup d’état covered up as a legitimate change,” Mr. Reina said. ”I don’t even call these new people a government.”

Mr. Reina has continued to speak out on behalf of Mr. Zelaya at the United Nations, arguing that if there were charges against him he should have been prosecuted. There is nothing in the law that allows a president to be sent off on a plane at gunpoint, he noted, a point to which even those who back Mr. Zelaya’s ouster, including Mr. Flores Bermúdez, reluctantly agree.

Mr. Reina insists that he still reports to Patricia Rodas, Mr. Zelaya’s foreign minister, who was briefly detained after the president’s ouster and now lives in exile. As for a recent letter Mr. Reina received, firing him from his ambassadorship, he said in a recent radio interview: “I do not abide by it, by whatever name it may be called, because I do not recognize the legal legitimacy of those who have sent it.”

Which of the two diplomats is the renegade remains in some dispute. According to Mr. Micheletti’s government, Mr. Reina is a rogue ambassador who is using the government’s offices in New York without authorization. Mr. Flores Bermúdez, by contrast, was stripped of his diplomatic credentials by the State Department on Tuesday afternoon, a move that seemed to be in keeping with the Obama administration’s condemnation of the Honduran president’s ouster.

“Since that moment,” Mr. Flores Bermúdez said, “I have been presenting myself as the former ambassador from Honduras.”

Both are major figures back home. Mr. Reina, 74, is the brother of Carlos Roberto Reina, who was president from 1994 to 1998. A former law professor, university dean and member of Congress, Mr. Reina has sought the presidency himself, representing a leftist faction of the Liberal Party.

Mr. Flores Bermúdez, 59, who remembers Mr. Reina’s teaching him law years ago, served as ambassador to the United Nations from 1990 to 1994 and foreign minister from 1999 to 2002.

“I’ve always respected him,” Mr. Reina said of his friend and former student. But, he added: “I think he’s made a mistake. I regret his decision and I think he will one day too.”

Mr. Flores Bermúdez said he called Mr. Reina before he announced that he would be siding with the new government. He hoped the breach between them would one day be repaired. “We’re both thinking of our country,” he said.