Manuel Zelaya
José Manuel Zelaya Rosales (born 20 September 1952) is a politician who was President of Honduras from 27 January 2006 until 28 June 2009. The eldest son of a wealthy businessman, he inherited his father's nickname "Mel", and, before entering politics, was involved in his family's logging and timber businesses.
Elected as a conservative, Zelaya shifted to the political left during his presidency, forging an alliance with the ALBA. On 28 June 2009, in the 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis, he was seized by the military and secreted to Costa Rica in the 2009 Honduran coup d'état. On 21 September 2009 he returned to Honduras clandestinely and resurfaced in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. In 2010 he left Honduras for exile in the Dominican Republic, an exile which lasted more than a year.
He is now a deputy of the Central American Parliament representing Honduras.
Read more about Manuel Zelaya: Background, Political Career, Presidency
Famous quotes containing the word manuel:
“And Manuel embraced his mother and they laughed together: Délira’s laugh sounded surprisingly young; that was because she hadn’t really had the chance to make it heard; life was just not happy enough for that. No, she never had time to use it; she had kept it fresh as can be, like a birdsong in an old nest.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)