CUBA, June 29, 2009. United Nations’ Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon called for the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, to be reinstated and human rights be fully respected in that country. "The Secretary General (...) expressed his firm support for the democratic institutions of the country [Honduras] and condemned the arrest of the constitutional president of the Republic of Honduras," says a UN communiqué quoted today by AFP news agency. Likewise, Nobel Peace prize winner (1980) Adolfo Perez Esquivel rejected the coup d' etat conducted early Sunday against President Manuel Zelaya and asked that the military and all those involved in the coup be condemned. In a statement published in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Perez Esquivel said that “military coups supported by the Pentagon and the CIA and by economic, ecclesiastic and political groups that do not want any changes at all are emerging again,” reported Prensa Latina (PL). According to PL, the UN’s General Assembly was summoned to a special plenary session for Monday noon at the request of numerous countries led by the Bolivarian Alliance for Our Americas (ALBA) to discuss the coup d’etat in Honduras and the kidnapping of its constitutional president Manuel Zelaya. Meanwhile, Cuba urged international organizations and the Honduran public opinion to condemn the coup perpetrated in that South American country. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, who is in Nicaragua to attend an extraordinary ALBA meeting summoned in support of the Honduran president and people, called upon the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Rio Group and the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) to demand that the constitutional guarantees of Honduras be respected.
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