Roberto Micheletti
Roberto Micheletti was president of Honduras from 28 June 2009 to 27 January 2010, the seven months between the morning the army put Zelaya on a plane to Costa Rica in his pyjamas and the day Lobo was sworn in. He was the president of Congress whom the Congress, the supreme court and the armed forces made head of state within hours. No government on earth recognised him. He was of Zelaya's own Liberal Party. He was a bus company owner from El Progreso who had sat in Congress since 1982 and had lost the party's nomination to Zelaya in 2005. The quarrel was the referendum Zelaya had called for that morning on whether to call a constituent assembly, which the court had declared illegal and which the Congress read as a bid for re-election. The seven months were the curfews and the two states of siege, the radio and television stations closed. There were the Organisation of American States' expulsion of the country, the aid suspended by Washington and Brussels, and the two mediations, Arias's in San José and the OAS's in Tegucigalpa, both of which produced agreements he signed and did not carry out. There was Zelaya's secret return in September to the Brazilian embassy, where he stayed four months under a cordon of soldiers and loudspeakers. There was the election of November 2009, already scheduled, which Lobo won and which the Americans decided to recognise. That was the way out. He took a week's leave before the inauguration so as not to hand over in person. He was made a congressman for life by the outgoing Congress the same month, an office the court later found unconstitutional. He has spent the years since defending what he calls the constitutional succession and everyone else calls the coup. It was the first in Central America since the Cold War and the one that, having succeeded, set the country on the road to Hernández. He was born in El Progreso, the son of an Italian immigrant, and was in the presidential guard of Villeda Morales as a young man. He was jailed after the coup of 1963, which he mentions. He ran the state telephone company in the 1990s. The country's politics is still divided by his seven months. Xiomara Castro's election in 2021 was, in part, the answer to them.
- Lived: 1943 CE – ?
- Nationality: Honduran
- Roles: president, businessman, politician
