The Latin American business blog Inka Kola News [2] is running a translation of an interview with the new Honduran chancellor (foreign minister) Enrique Ortez, recently appointed by de facto president Roberto Micheletti, in which he disses world and regional leaders who reject his coup-installed government in contemptuously condescending terms—and refers to Barack Obama [3] as a "little black man who knows nothing."
Inka Kola News picks up the offending quote from the July 4 edition of the Salvadoran daily La Página [4], which cites the Argentine newspaper Clarín [5], which in turn cites an unnamed Honduran TV station. The translation—with our bracketed annotations—follows:
Following the coup d'etat of José Manuel Zelaya, the de facto government led by Roberto Micheletti has named its new government team, among them the new Chancellor Enrique Ortez Colindres, who in his declarations has made the position of the coup-mongers [golpistas] clear.
According to the Argentine newspaper El Clarín, the new "chancellor" Enrique Ortez took part in a journalistic TV program in Honduras where he was asked about the international reactions to the coup d'etat. Ortez said that he gave no importance whatsoever to the OAS and "the other little groups out there"; he said [Spanish Prime Minister] José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero should "go back to his shoes" [zapatero is Spanish for shoe-maker] and said that he was not going to talk about El Salvador "because it's not worth talking about such a small country, where you can't even play football because the ball lands in another country."
But he went further, defining the president of the United States, Barack Obama, as "that little black man who knows nothing" [ese negrito que no sabe nada de nada].
File under "how to win friends and influence people."
See our last post on Honduras [6].
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