By Arshad Mohammed
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States threw its weight behind a fresh effort to negotiate an end to the political crisis in Honduras on Tuesday and urged ousted President Manuel Zelaya to negotiate rather than try to force his way back into power.
After meeting Zelaya, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said he had agreed to a new mediation effort that is to be led by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias and that has already been accepted by Honduras' caretaker president.
She also made clear the United States does not want Zelaya, who was toppled in a June 28 coup triggered by his efforts to change presidential term limits, to try again to return to Honduras.
Zelaya tried to fly home on Sunday, but the interim government stopped his plane from landing. At least one person was killed when troops clashed with pro-Zelaya protesters who went to the airport in the capital, Tegucigalpa, to meet him.
"I believe it is a better route for him to follow at this time than to attempt to return in the face of the implacable opposition of the de facto regime," Clinton told reporters at the State Department.
"So, instead of another confrontation that might result in a loss of life, let's try the dialogue process and see where that leads, and let the parties determine all the various issues as they should," she added.
While calling for a return to constitutional and democratic order in Honduras, Clinton did not explicitly call for Zelaya to return to power, saying that this should be negotiated by the parties themselves.
The United States has repeatedly condemned the coup in the coffee and textile exporting country, the third poorest in the Americas after Haiti and Nicaragua.
Defying the international pressure, Roberto Micheletti, appointed president by Honduran lawmakers after the coup, has insisted the ousted leader was legally removed.
But in a sign he was ready to pursue diplomatic solutions, Micheletti said on Tuesday his interim government had accepted Arias as a mediator. Arias won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end political violence in Central America in the 1980s.
"We've accepted him as the mediator, given the high profile that the president of Costa Rica has," Micheletti told local radio in Tegucigalpa. But he added: "We maintain our position that President Zelaya should not return. He committed crimes and he must pay for them."
The coup has been widely condemned abroad, and the Organisation of American States took the rare step of suspending Honduras on Saturday.
Micheletti's interim government says the ouster was a constitutional transition carried out by the army and supported by the Supreme Court because Zelaya had illegally tried to organise a vote on changing presidential term limits.
Zelaya took power in 2006 and had been due to leave office in 2010. He had riled the country's traditional ruling elite with his leftward shift and growing alliance with Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez.
(Additional reporting by Patrick Markey and Mica Rosenberg in Tegucigalpa, Frank Jack Daniel in Caracas, Matt Spetalnick in Moscow; editing by Frances Kerry)
