Ex-president to return to Honduras under amnesty deal

TEGUCIGALPA: Former Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, thrown out of the country at gunpoint in a 2009 coup, was set to return home on Saturday under an amnesty deal brokered with the current leader, Porfirio Lobo.

Zelaya is ending a 16-month exile in the Dominican Republic, part of the deal that will allow Honduras to rejoin the Organization of American States (OAS) and gain access to international aid and lines of credit.

Aid is vital in a country where 70 percent of a population of nearly eight million live on four dollars or less a day, according to government figures.

The deal included a promise that all legal action against Zelaya would be dropped.

Zelaya is returning to lead the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), a movement formed after the June 2009 coup.

Movement leaders hope it will become a political party and end the two-party monopoly that has dominated Honduran politics since the early 20th century.

"There is an environment of insecurity at all levels in the country, and we fear that something may happen," the ex-president's brother Carlos Zelaya told AFP on Friday. "President Zelaya is a man who is returning to his country prepared to take risks."

Movement leaders plan to give Zelaya, known by his nickname "Mel," a warm welcome when he arrives on Saturday.

Supporters from around the country will greet Zelaya at the airport when he lands, and then meet at a city plaza where the 58-year-old ex-leader will hold a rally.

Despite his broad popular support Zelaya cannot run in the 2013 presidential elections because the constitution currently bans ex-leaders from running. Supporters want his wife, Xiomara Castro, to run instead.

Zelaya was a conservative rancher when he was elected in January 2006, but took a political turn to the left once in office.

He was ousted in a military coup sanctioned by the Honduran legislature and the supreme court.

Honduras' membership in the Washington-based OAS was suspended after the coup.

The OAS had demanded that Zelaya be allowed to return to Honduras before the country could be readmitted among its ranks.

An agreement laying out conditions for Zelaya's return was sealed last Sunday during a summit of Central American nations in Managua, and was brokered with the the assistance of OAS members Colombia and Venezuela.

Also last Sunday, President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua announced that his country was "immediately and fully" restoring diplomatic relations with Tegucigalpa.

The rupture between the two neighbors had been another obstacle to Honduras's readmission to the OAS.

Readmission could come as soon as Thursday, the top OAS official said.

Late Friday, Zelaya left the Dominican Republic and flew to Nicaragua on the first leg of his trip back home.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011