Honduras dialogue makes timid start, no breakthrough

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (Reuters) - The two rivals for power in Honduras started a dialogue through a mediator on Thursday, but there was no face-to-face meeting or breakthrough to solve the political crisis sparked by last month's coup.

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, and the politician who replaced him after the June 28 coup, Roberto Micheletti, left behind delegations in Costa Rica's capital San Jose, holding talks under the mediation of Costa Rican President Oscar Arias.

Both men met separately with Arias, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, but they did not sit down for direct discussions. "There was no face-to-face meeting," Costa Rican presidential spokesman Pablo Gueren told reporters.

The absence of a direct meeting or any public sign of reconciliation suggested Arias faced a tough task in trying to bring together the entrenched positions held by the rivals over the coup, which has stirred up tensions in Central America.

"The dialogue has started," Micheletti, who was installed by Honduras' Congress after Zelaya's overthrow, said before flying back to his country, a coffee and textile exporter which is one of the poorest in the Americas.

The United States and the Organisation of American States are pressing for Zelaya's peaceful reinstatement, which OAS chief Jose Miguel Insulza said was the key for a successful outcome to the talks in San Jose.

But although Micheletti said his interim government would go ahead with previously scheduled elections in November, he showed no indication of being ready to give up power despite international pressure and repeated demands from Zelaya.

Costa Rica's Communications Minister Mayi Antillon said the two delegations would try to move towards an agreement "and hopefully ... the presidents will come back".

"There are respectful talks around a table," she added.

Micheletti said any solution would have to respect Honduras' laws and constitution.

Reflecting the distance between the two sides, Micheletti has insisted Zelaya's ouster was lawful because he violated the constitution by seeking to lift presidential term limits.

Zelaya stressed that both the OAS and the United Nations General Assembly backed his reinstatement. He has called Micheletti a "criminal" and said he was guilty of treason.

STUMBLING BLOCK

Arias won the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for helping to solve conflicts in Central America.

"The stumbling block is that the de facto government accept the return of the constitutional government," OAS chief Insulza told reporters in Washington. He said that provided Zelaya's restoration was accepted, all other options, like bringing forward the elections, or a national unity government or an amnesty, were open to negotiation.

But for the OAS, which suspended Honduras on Saturday, early elections would be acceptable only if held after Zelaya is restored and not under Micheletti, Insulza said.

Zelaya, a logging magnate who was elected in 2005 and was due to leave office in 2010, angered his country's ruling elite and military by increasingly allying himself with Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez, a fierce critic of Washington.

Honduran media on Thursday published a poll showing 41 percent of Hondurans thought that Zelaya's ouster was justified. The CID-Gallup poll carried out between June 30 and July 4 found 28 percent of those interviewed opposed the coup.

U.S. President Barack Obama, apparently looking to wipe clean Washington's past record of supporting often bloody military coups and regimes in Latin America when it suited U.S. interests, has made clear he considers the coup was wrong.

On the eve of Thursday's talks, the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa said Washington had suspended $16.5 million in military assistance programs to Honduras, and added a further $180 million in U.S. aid could also be at risk.

Micheletti's administration called the U.S. move "counterproductive."

Failure to strike a deal in Honduras could prompt Zelaya to renew attempts to return to his country to try to win back power with the help of his supporters and left-wing allies like Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.

Venezuela's Chavez, who lent Zelaya a plane in which he made an abortive bid to return home on Sunday, has vowed to do everything possible to obtain his reinstatement.

In an opinion piece in The Washington Post, Arias called the Honduran coup a "wake-up call for the hemisphere" and blamed it on "reckless military spending" in the region.

(Additional reporting by John McPhaul in San Jose, Gustavo Palencia, Enrique Andres Pretel and Daniel Trotta in Tegucigalpa, Anthony Boadle in Washington; writing by Pascal Fletcher; editing by Mohammad Zargham)