July 3 (Bloomberg) -- Honduras’s deposed President Manuel Zelaya is touring Central America to secure international support for his return to power, even as his country’s courts, military and Congress said they’ll arrest him if he returns.

Zelaya, 56, met Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli and Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro yesterday in Panama City to discuss the June 28 coup. He also spoke with journalists from news organizations from Holland to Taiwan about the “repressive” government that’s taken control in Honduras before traveling to El Salvador.

“No government in the world that calls itself democratic can negotiate with an illegal government that usurped power through force,” Zelaya said in an interview over a breakfast of fried eggs, toast and an antacid pill at the Sheraton Hotel in Panama City, where he said he got his first night of rest since soldiers forced him out of the country at gunpoint.

Jose Miguel Insulza, the secretary-general of the Organization of American States, travels to Honduras today to meet with de-facto President Roberto Micheletti, the head of the legislature who was sworn in after Zelaya’s ouster. The OAS, along with U.S. President Barack Obama and the European Union, has called for Zelaya’s immediate reinstatement.

While Zelaya shuttles across the region, his wife and son are staying at the residence of U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens in Tegucigalpa, the State Department said.

Military Chief

Honduras’s institutions remain united in support of Zelaya’s overthrow. The Supreme Court ruled that Zelaya violated the constitution by trying to hold an illegal poll on whether people support his proposal to change the constitution. The court issued an arrest order for the president on June 26.

Zelaya also ignored a court order that said he couldn’t fire the head of the military for refusing to oversee the survey, and stormed a military base with a mob of civilians to “liberate” the ballots.

The OAS has given the Micheletti government until tomorrow to cede power and allow Zelaya to return, and threatened to suspend Honduras’s participation in the multilateral body.

Micheletti supporters marched in Tegucigalpa today and other cities in Honduras yesterday. More than 1,000 Zelaya backers protested peacefully yesterday in front of the congress building and at the United Nations mission in Tegucigalpa.

The Micheletti government declared a 72-hour state of emergency on July 1 and imposed a nationwide curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.

Ready to Negotiate

Elements for a compromise are falling into place, said Kevin Casas-Zamora, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

“I would presume that’s what the Insulza trip’s about and I would also presume that’s what the State Department is working on very quietly,” he said.

Zelaya said yesterday in the interview he’s ready to negotiate with anyone in Honduras who is willing to cooperate, adding he won’t allow any conditions to be placed on his return to power. He said he’s developing a plan to go back after tomorrow and declined to provide details because he didn’t want to tip his hand to Micheletti.

“I can’t give my adversaries ammunition through the media,” he said.

‘Governing’

Last night, Zelaya met El Salvador’s President Mauricio Funes in San Salvador. Today he travels to Guatemala, according to Orlando Gomez, the Nicaraguan government’s head of Western Hemisphere affairs.

Micheletti said today at a rally in he wouldn’t object to holding elections before the scheduled date in November, before a crowd shouting “It wasn’t a coup!”

“I am governing for all of the political parties,” he said in the speech to his supporters, which was broadcast on Honduras’s Televicentro. “I am governing for the poor, for the businessmen, for the rich, for the entire Honduran people.”

U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said that an early return to Honduras by Zelaya could be an obstacle to resolving the crisis.

Military Aid

Zelaya’s Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas said yesterday that the U.S. should halt all aid to the Honduran military to make it clear it doesn’t support the coup.

The U.S. has suspended some aid to Honduras while it evaluates whether the removal of Zelaya meets the definition of a military coup under American law, Kelly said.

Opposition to Zelaya grew over the past year as he sought stronger ties with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a socialist and critic of what he calls U.S. “imperialism.”

Two years after signing a free-trade agreement with the U.S., the Honduran leader joined a Chavez-led bloc of Latin American countries in 2008 called the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America, which was conceived to undermine support for a U.S.-based hemispheric free-trade accord.

He also signed up for subsidized Venezuelan oil and began campaigning for a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution, sparking concern he would follow Chavez’s lead and try to eliminate term limits. The Venezuelan president won a referendum to amend the constitution in February that will allow him to run for re-election indefinitely.

Chavez

Chavez yesterday said the U.S. military supported the coup and called on Obama to take a harder line against the new regime. He said the U.S. should withdraw its ambassador and close its military base in the country.

“It’s possible that Obama wouldn’t have known,” Chavez said late yesterday on state television. “But I am sure the soldiers wouldn’t have moved one step if they hadn’t gotten the green light from the Pentagon.”

Approval for the Zelaya government fell to 30 percent in February from a high of 57 percent in January 2007, according to a nationwide poll by CID-Gallup.

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Maduro emphasized yesterday the world was in agreement that Zelaya should be reinstated as the president of Honduras.

“Not since Hitler has there been such unity in the world,” Maduro said in an interview. “The people that have taken control in Honduras are acting as a neo-fascist sect that’s very dangerous for the continent and the world. They’re daring the world.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Andres R. Martinez in Tegucigalpa at amartinez28@bloomberg.net; Matthew Walter in Panama City at mwalter4@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 3, 2009 15:28 EDT