Advisers Led Zelaya Astray Says Micheletti

In a recent interview with El Heraldo newspaper, interim president Roberto Micheletti assigned blame for the problems that led to the ousting of Manuel Zelaya on June 28 and since to the deposed president's advisers. "Zelaya is not a bad man" said Mr. Micheletti, but "he surrounded himself with people who filled his head, filled his spirit with aspirations and with arrogance, people who wished to remain in power and who thought that the Honduran people were so weak that we would not respond in such a determined manner." Mr. Michletti singled out former Minister of Foreign Relations Patricia Rodas Baca as having done the most damage to Mr. Zelaya, observing that she not only weakened has ability to govern but also hurt the nation. Referring to Mrs. Rodas' father, Mr. Micheletti noted, "I do not understand how not even a tiny bit of the blood of so noble a man as Modesto Rodas Alvarado could not find its way into the feelings of this person." "She is the one who has done the most harm to this country."

Modesto Rodas Alvarado was nominated by the Liberal Party to run for the presidency in 1963. Ten days before the election that year, on October 3, Col. Oswaldo López Arellano led a coup d'etat against the Liberal president at the time, Ramón Villeda Morales, ushering in two decades of military rule in Honduras. Mr. Rodas left for exile in Nicaragua, where he eventually met his wife, Margarita Baca Saravia. From the mid-1960s until his death in 1979, Mr. Rodas was perhaps the most influential leader of the Liberal Party. His followers were known as "Rodistas". (photo of Patricia Rodas courtesy AP)