Manuel Zelaya

Defying a coup and bolstered by international support, ousted President Manuel Zelaya said Monday he would return to Honduras to serve out the rest of his term. Soldiers raided his home before dawn Sunday and shuttled him on the presidential plane to Costa Rica.MANUEL ZELAYA was close to slipping into Honduran history books as a former president with ideas as large as his signature Stetson hat, but nowhere near enough political consensus to remake his troubled country.

Then came his forced removal from office Sunday, which has catapulted the lame duck leader to a level of international prominence he almost certainly would not have achieved otherwise and turned him into a symbol ? an undeserved one, his many critics insist - of a president whose democratic mandate was denied him.

On Tuesday, Zelaya’s newfound relevance took him to one of the world’s biggest stages, at the lectern of the United Nations General Assembly, where he portrayed himself as the victim of a vicious, power-hungry elite that refused to share power with his country’s many poor.

“A crime has been committed, a crime against humanity, a crime which we all reject,” he said. “Whenever brute force prevails over reason, humankind returns to its primeval state, to the era of the garrote, where everything is reduced to force.”

A one-page resolution - sponsored by countries often at loggerheads, including the United States and Venezuela - passed by acclamation after sustained applause in the 192-member body. It condemned Zelaya’s removal as a coup and demanded his “immediate and unconditional restoration” as president.

Back home, though, the country is sharply divided over his removal - and his record. Thousands of his opponents turned out Tuesday to denounce him as a dictator who had been illegally scheming to subvert the Constitution by ending the one-term limit for presidents.

The day before, Zelaya’s backers praised him as a president for the working class, intending to increase their wages as well as their political power. He had spoken of building a new Honduras, with crime and corruption in check and a better standard of living for the masses, although his administration fell well short of delivering that.

During a news conference at the United Nations, Zelaya said that a number of other leaders had offered to escort him home, including Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, a Nicaraguan who is the president of the General Assembly; President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina; President Rafael Correa of Ecuador; and José Miguel Insulza, the secretary general of the Organization of American States.

The interim president named by the Honduran Congress, Roberto Micheletti, has threatened Zelaya with arrest if he returns, saying he had illegally defied the Supreme Court in pushing for a referendum on changing the Constitution. Alberto Rubí, the attorney general, said Tuesday the charges included treason and abuse of authority.

The newly installed foreign minister, Enrique Ortez, went further in a television interview, accusing Zelaya of permitting drug traffickers to use Honduras as a base to smuggle cocaine from South America to the United States, an accusation that aides to Zelaya called a tall tale intended to smear him.

Dismissing the notion that Zelaya’s removal was a coup, Micheletti appeared before Tuesday’s rally to say that elections would go ahead in November and that a new president would take office in January, when Zelaya would have been forced to step down. “We will hand over the presidential sash to whomever the people choose,” he said.

Much remains in dispute in Honduras. Zelaya, who took office in 2006, had moved steadily to the left during his presidency, railing increasingly against the country’s elite, who he said had opposed his politics of inclusion.

Critics accuse Zelaya, who comes from a well-off family of landowners, of blatant populism and of doling out cash to try to solidify a shaky political base.

“I’m O.K. with increasing the minimum wage, but he did it by more than 50 percent from one day to the next and businesses have had to cut the payroll because of that sudden jump,” said Fernando Castillo, a real estate developer who attended the anti-Zelaya protest Tuesday. “He ended up hurting the poor.”

Zelaya has spent much of his presidency holding the sort of rural chat sessions with constituents that President Hugo Chávez has made popular in Venezuela. It is Zelaya’s close relationship with Chávez that has caused alarm among wealthy and middle-class Hondurans.

Zelaya’s public support was sagging and there was debate over whether he would have won his planned referendum, even if Congress and the courts had allowed it. But his opponents chose to act first, a decision some experts saw as a miscalculation.

“Had they let it play out, it would have been easy to stop him,” said John Carey, a specialist on Latin American politics at Dartmouth University. “He seems to have triggered the only thing that could have saved him.”

Zelaya stood for the Liberal Party in the November 2005 presidential election and won by a narrow margin, beating Porfirio Lobo of the ruling National Party.

Zelaya campaigned for office on a law-and-order ticket but the country remains a major drug-trafficking transit point, overrun by street gangs and violent crime.

He pledged to tackle gang warfare and poverty in one of Central America’s poorest nations. But food prices rose.

Limited to a single four-year term in office under the Constitution, he was accused of seeking to change the law to allow him to stand for a second term.

In May 2007, Zelaya ordered all the country’s TV and radio stations to carry government propaganda for two hours a day, accusing them of giving his government unfair coverage.

In August 2008, he took Honduras into the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (Alba), an organization set up by Venezuela as an alternative to the stalled U.S. plan for a Free Trade Area of the Americas.

Zelaya’s decision to hold a national poll on whether or not to run a referendum on allowing a Honduran president to run for two consecutive terms angered many.

(SD-Agencies)