In this Sunday’s first reading the prophet Ezekiel speaks of the Lord’s protest toward “rebels who have rebelled against me.” Honduran President Manuel Zelaya might relate after being forced into exile Sunday by a military coup. Soldiers stormed the presidential palace hours before a controversial referendum that could have paved the way for Zelaya running for reelection. It was the first military coup in Central America in 16 years.

The chief lawyer of the Honduran armed forces insisted that what soldiers carried out over the weekend when they detained Zelaya was no coup d’état. “A coup is a political move,” Col. Herberth Bayardo Inestroza Membreño said Tuesday. “It requires the armed forces to assume power of the country, which didn’t happen, and it has to break the rule of law, which didn’t happen, either.”

Roberto Micheletti, a member of Zelaya’s Liberal Party who was named interim leader by the Honduran Congress following the coup, said Zelaya “has already committed crimes against the constitution and the law.”

“No one can make me resign if I do not violate the laws of the country,” Micheletti said. “If there is any invasion against our country, 7.5 million Hondurans will be ready to defend our territory and our laws and our homeland and our government.”

Governments around the world insisted otherwise. The Organization of American States Wednesday gave Honduras 72 hours to reinstate Zelaya or face suspension from the group.

Zelaya was elected in 2005 to a nonrenewable four-year term. On Tuesday he said he would not seek a second term in office, dropping his plans to try to run again for office in November elections which had provoked the crisis.

Articles by Stephanie Griffith for Agence France Presse and Marc Lacey for the New York Times