OAS set to suspend Honduras after coup

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Organization of American States was likely to suspend Honduras on Saturday after a caretaker government refused to restore President Manuel Zelaya who was toppled in a military coup last weekend.

Honduras' interim rulers who took power after the coup have rejected an OAS demand to restore Zelaya, and defiantly renounced the OAS charter in an apparent preemptive move.

But an OAS official said such a renunciation was not valid, since the Honduras authorities were not a legitimate government.

Zelaya, a leftist, was ousted by troops, creating Central America's gravest political crisis since the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989.

He had upset the ruling elite, including members of his own Liberal Party, by trying to expand presidents' time in office and establishing close ties with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Honduras, an impoverished coffee and textile exporter, would be only the second country suspended by the Western Hemisphere's top diplomatic body after Cuba, which was barred in 1962 as Fidel Castro took the island toward communism.

OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza said after talks in Honduras on Friday the interim government showed no willingness to reinstate Zelaya.

"There is a rupture of constitutional order and those who did this have no intention for the moment of changing this situation," Insulza told reporters in Tegucigalpa, the capital of the nation of 7 million.