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Guatemalan president says no coup plot being hatched
Guatemala City, Jul 11, 2009 (EFE via COMTEX) --
Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom
said there is no danger he will be ousted in a military coup, a fate
that befell Honduran head of state Manuel Zelaya late last month,
while the army reaffirmed its respect and support for the country's
institutions.
In statements published Saturday by the local media, the leftist
president said he was not sure why socialist President Hugo Chavez
and his close ally, Bolivia's Evo Morales, raised alarm bells over a
possible coup plot in Guatemala.
Chavez said Friday in Venezuela that he knew that plans for a
coup in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua were in the works,
similar to the June 28 putsch that toppled Zelaya.
"I understand there's a coup plot in Guatemala," as well as in
other Central American countries, Chavez - who himself was briefly
removed from power in 2002 - said.
Meanwhile, in Bolivia, Morales sent a message of support to
Colom, saying that the Guatemalan "oligarchy" has been planning to
oust him since the May 10 murder of prominent Guatemalan attorney
Rodrigo Rosenberg.
In a posthumously released video, Rosenberg said the president,
first lady Sandra Torres, presidential aide Gustavo Alejos,
businessman Gregorio Valdez, and top executives of the
public-private Banco de Desarrollo Agricola (Banrural), the
country's second largest, had arranged to kill him.
"The oligarchy invented a death" to remove Colom from power,
Morales said.
Rosenberg's murder - which is being investigated by the
International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG -
and the subsequent distribution of copies of the video touched off
the Central American country's most serious political crisis in
years.
Thousands of people, mostly young middle- and upper-class
Guatemalans, as well as representatives of opposition parties and
other conservative groups, have demonstrated to demand Colom step
down and respond to the murder allegations.
Rosenberg said on the video that his life was at immediate risk
because he had evidence of the involvement of the president and his
associates in the April 14 slayings of businessman Khalil Musa and
his daughter, Marjorie.
Musa, who had earlier been appointed by Colom to the board of the
Banrural development bank, was killed for refusing to cover up
"illegal, multi-million-dollar transactions being carried out day
after day" at the financial institution, Rosenberg said.
Three days after the video was made, Rosenberg was gunned down
near his home in an affluent Guatemala City neighborhood.
Referring to the Rosenberg killing, Colom said he respects "the
investigation that the Attorney General's Office and the CICIG is
carrying out" and that once the results of the probe are known the
people responsible for the murder will "obviously" be prosecuted.
For his part, Guatemalan Defense Minister Abraham Valenzuela, the
nation's armed forces chief, denied that any group has approached
military leaders "to suggest" any action against the nation's
institutions.
"The army is one of the few institutions that on a daily basis
helps defend the rule of law and the country's institutions,"
Valenzuela said.
The warnings by Chavez and Morales about a potential coup in
Guatemala follow the recent ouster of Zelaya.
Honduran army soldiers dragged the elected head of state from the
presidential palace in his pajamas on June 28 and put him on a plane
to Costa Rica. Congress later named erstwhile congressional speaker
Roberto Micheletti as his replacement.
Honduran lawmakers justify Zelaya's removal by claiming that he
threatened the constitutional order by trying to hold a non-binding
referendum on his call for an assembly to overhaul a constitution
that, among other things, allows the military to name its own
commanders with only nominal input from elected officials.
Zelaya's foes say he wants to change the charter so he can run
for re-election, as leftist leaders in the region such as Chavez and
Morales have done recently, a charge he has flatly denied.
Noting that the current Honduran constitution limits the
president to a single four-year term, Zelaya said a revised charter
would apply only to his successors.
The "first phase" of a dialogue aimed at resolving the political
crisis in Honduras concluded in Costa Rica Friday with little more
to show than an agreement to continue talking at a
still-to-be-determined date.
Costa Rican President Oscar Arias is mediating the discussions.
EFE
ca/mc
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