DR. JUAN ALMENDARES: Good morning. It is a great honor to be on "Democracy Now!"
JUAN GONZALEZ: Tell us what the latest as a result of the talks that were not face-to-face talks in fact.
DR. JUAN ALMENDARES: Well, we believe it's impossible to have a dialogue with halcones, I don´t know how to pronounce it, the hawks... This deer is a hunter We have the halcones inside Honduras and they're very strong supporting and talking about the militaries, who have been repressive and also the ruling-class who is highly conservative, who have support from ultra-right-wing people from the U.S. from Europe. So they feel strong in the military sense in the repressive sense, in violation of the human rights. So they are violating the human rights of the people of Honduras and they're talking about dialogue. I think any dialogs is positive. The strategy they have is a dialogue at the national level, but with machine guns. And in the international level, they want to have a dialogue. They are trying to win time in the process, but this is a hard line in a very repressive, its a racist hard-line. One of the chancellors of this regime, he was making racist statements about president Obama. Now they change him to another position, to the position of justice. So that's a kind of... a...
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Juan Almendares just to clarify, the man that the coup regime put in place as the foreign minister had said several times about President Obama, called him "the little black man who knows nothing about anything." So they have moved him into justice?
DR. JUAN ALMENDARES: Yes, now he is a minister of justice. So, at the international community, we have to understand these are like Pinochet regime.
AMY GOODMAN: We only have a minute, but just the latest. The word is that Michelleti, he left after his meeting with the Nobel Laureate, President of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias. And also that Mel Zelaya, the ousted Honduran president left and is now in the Dominican Republic? Is that right?
DR. JUAN ALMENDARES: Well, we don't know where he was going, president Zelaya maybe Guatemala or ...Dominican Republic, but I am not sure. But what I want to say is the resistance movements is posing the issue in the way that the problem is not only the constitutional restitution and coming back President Zelaya, the problem is people want a new constitution. People want assembly. People want more participation, more actors in the process. So, this is very important because they had to be in the table. They cannot only be discussions between Michelleti and Zelaya. People want to claim justice, justice and justice.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much for being with us, Dr. Juan Almendares. He actually opposed Mel Zelaya in the last election, lost, president Zelaya won. Now he has been…President Zelaya has been ousted. We will continue to follow what has been taken place this story Dr. Juan Almendares speaking to us from Tegucigalpa.
