Zelaya Pledges New Broad Front in Honduras

Tegucigalpa, May 30. -Former President Manuel Zelaya, general coordinator of the National Front for Popular Resistance (FNRP), said he would work to transform it into a coalition like the one that has ruled Uruguay since 2005.

"The FNRP will be a broad front comprising politicians, labor unions, teachers, farmers, councils, and civil society and nongovernmental organizations, all without losing their identity," Zelaya stated.

The Uruguayan Broad Front, created in 1971, won the two most recent presidential elections and now rules with former guerrilla fighter Jose Mujica as president.

Speaking at his first news conference since returning to Honduras on Saturday from 23 months of exile following a 2009 coup, Zelaya stated, "We are now politically fighting so that our mass organization, with a new ideological form, reaches power within two years."

The former statesman said his return "is a victory of resistance and the Honduran people," and "the coup has been a failure of the Latin American right."

Zelaya arrived in Tegucigalpa on Saturday after signing an accord with President Porfirio Lobo, and with the mediation of Venezuela and Colombia.

The agreement also includes the return of all exiles, respect for human rights, the acknowledgment of the FNRP as a political force and the convening of a Constituent Assembly. (Prensa Latina)