United States, Brazil at odds over Honduras crisis

Reuters Via Yahoo News ^ | 11/30/2009 | Mica Rosenberg and Gustavo Palencia

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

Honduras' disputed presidential election is likely to set Washington against emerging Latin American power Brazil over whether to recognize the winner of a vote promoted by the leaders of a June coup.

Conservative opposition leader Porfirio Lobo easily won the election on Sunday, but he will struggle to get recognition in Latin America where many leftist governments see the election as a nail in the coffin of ousted President Manuel Zelaya.

The United States has tried and failed to have Zelaya, a leftist, reinstated and now looks resigned to backing the election as the best way for Honduras' to get out of political gridlock and diplomatic isolation.

The State Department called the vote "a necessary and important step forward" after results came in on Sunday but did not say whether Washington would explicitly recognize Lobo's victory over ruling party candidate Elvin Santos.

Brazil, which is increasingly flexing its muscles as its economy becomes more powerful, refuses to recognize the vote.

"Brazil will maintain its position because it's not possible to accept a coup," President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Sunday.

Zelaya has taken refuge in the Brazilian Embassy in the Honduran capital, putting Brazil at the heart of a crisis in a region where the United States has long been dominant.

Washington supported coups and right-wing governments fighting civil wars against Cuban and Soviet-backed leftist guerrillas in Central America during the Cold War.

[gwilhelm56]

Washington does NOT givadam about OUR CONSTITUTION... why should they givadam about the HONDURAN’s Constiution??

[pieceofthepuzzle]

Typical leftists. They’re the self-annointed champions of ‘the people’, except when the people vote to get rid of them.

[ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas]

Brazil, which is increasingly flexing its muscles as its economy becomes more powerful, refuses to recognize the vote.

Sometimes I get the feeling Obama is not telling us everything that is going on with Brazil:

WSJ: If President Obama has embraced offshore drilling in Brazil, why not in the old U.S.A.? The land of the sorta free and the home of the heavily indebted has enormous offshore oil deposits, and last year ahead of the November elections, with gasoline at $4 a gallon, Congress let a ban on offshore drilling expire....Americans are right to wonder why Mr. Obama is underwriting in Brazil what he won't allow at home.

[saganite]

“Brazil will maintain its position because it’s not possible to accept a coup,” President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Sunday.

But he would have gladly welcomed Zelaya if he had managed to subvert the constitution of Honduras and set himself up as dictator for live ala Chavez. For that matter, so would Obama.

[Venturer]

Reuters seems to have a hard time accepting the fact that Zelaya’s removal was not a coup, but legal removal of a man determined to make himself a dictator.

[livius]

Lula is one of the biggest leftists in LatAm, but he’s not quite as blustery as Chavez and the gang, so he attracts less attention. He actually did manage to get a grip on some of Brazil’s problems (such as inflation) when he first took office and was even opposed by the unions because he wasn’t leftist enough. But he has quietly become more and more left-wing over the years and I think he is now acting as Obama’s proxy in LatAm.

Hugo is just too nutty to be easy to sell to the American public, so I think Obama has had to distance himself from him, although there is no doubt at all that his sympathies are with Chavez. Venezuela was the first to want to interfere in Honduras, but its threats to invade simply stimulated Honduran resistance.

Lula’s Brazil, on the other hand, is like Obama: sneaky and ruthless. Slipping Zelaya into the embassy there was a master-stroke. Obama is simply rewarding Brazil and I think we will see more of this in the future.

[Joe Boucher]

I think many of our people do, it’s just the politicians in D.C. who ignore it.

[WellyP]

Lula is trying to pull his party back together. This is all internal politics. Lula is in his last year in office and his Workers Party is split between Lula’s former Enviroment Minister Marina Silva now running on the “Green” ticket and Lula’s appointed successor Dilma Rousseff.

http://brazilportal.wordpress.com/tag/dilma-rousseff/

Brazil Ruling Party Is Still Not Presidential-Race Favorite
Posted on November 23, 2009 by Brazil Institute
NASDAQ, 11/23/09
Sao Paulo state Gov. Jose Serra continues to lead in the latest poll for the 2010 presidential election race, keeping the ruling Workers Party in a distant second.
According to the latest poll by CNT/Sensus in Sao Paulo, Serra leads with 31.8% of the potential votes while Workers Party candidate Dilma Rousseff has 21.7%.
Read full [...]

[CharlesWayneCT]

Honduras' disputed presidential election is likely to set Washington against emerging Latin American power Brazil over whether to recognize the winner of a vote promoted by the leaders of a June coup.

Is the winner a candidate promoted by Zeyala's political party? I thought the winner was from a different party.

Or did they mean the "vote" was promoted by the leaders of the "coup"? Of course, it wasn't a coup, but the vote wasn't "promoted" by them either, it was the regularly scheduled election. Zeyala was trying to circumvent that election somehow.

[AmericanInTokyo]

Little, yet GREAT Honduras stood up to this scourge, totally stacked against them, and was STILL VICTORIOUS!

The Reds have dropped their pitchforks on the spot, they are running with their little pointed Lucifer tails between their legs! LOL! On to the next Republic!