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Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today said that he is encouraged by news that an agreement has been reached to resolve the political crisis in Honduras that began when President José Manuel Zelaya was ousted from power in June.

"Chavez once again shot his mouth off," said Jorge Castaneda, a former Mexican foreign minister and respected writer on the Latin American left.Castaneda, speaking at the Nixon Center in Washington Wednesday, said that Zelaya apparently was on his way to the U.N. Mission in Tegucigalpa when Chavez took to the airwaves and urged Hondurans to greet their returning president.After Chavez's broadcasts, Zelaya was unable to get there, and in the heat of the moment fled to the Brazilian embassy, Castaneda said.Castaneda, who's no friend of Chavez, ended Mexico's decades-old foreign policy of not criticizing human rights abuses in Cuba and its financial patron, Venezuela. Castaneda is considered center-left and is one of the region's most prolific political scientists.

Brazil had no warning of Zelaya's return to Honduras three months after his June 28 ouster, in which he was unceremoniously flown out of the country and dumped in a Costa Rican airport wearing his pajamas.

A leading Honduran businessman has put forth a plan that calls for Zelaya to serve out the rest of his term with limited powers, and the Organization of American States and the Roman Catholic Church are serving as emissaries between Micheletti and Zelaya in an effort to break the stalemate.

The Trump administration said on Thursday it plans to allow only 18,000 refugees to resettle in the United States in the 2020 fiscal year, the lowest number in the history of the modern refugee program.

Of the proposed 18,000 spots, 4,000 would be reserved for Iraqis, 5,000 for those fleeing religious persecution and 1,500 for people from the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. That leaves 7,500, or roughly 40%, for all others.

When reports began circulating about plans to dramatically cut resettlement, the administration faced public criticism from evangelical leaders who said an agenda supporting religious freedom around the world should go hand in hand with protection for persecuted refugees.

The U.S. is increasingly aligning itself with wealthy countries in Europe and elsewhere to make asylum a more distant prospect. On Thursday, American authorities sent a Honduran man from El Paso, Texas, to Guatemala. It marked the first time the U.S. government directed an asylum-seeker back to that country under the new policy, which gave him an option to file a claim there. He decided against filing a claim and returned to Honduras, according to Guatemala’s foreign ministry.

In nine months, the administration returned more than 55,000 asylum-seekers to Mexico to wait for their cases to wind through U.S. courts.

The U.S. isn’t alone in asking other countries to block migrants. After about 1 million refugees traveled through Turkey and Greece to seek safety in Europe, the European Union agreed in 2016 to pay Turkey billions of euros to keep them in refugee camps. The EU has also funded the Libyan Coast Guard to stop Africans from crossing the Mediterranean, where thousands have drowned. Libyan forces have kept refugees in squalid conditions and inflicted torture.