Businessman Porfirio Lobo on Wednesday was sworn in as the president of Honduras and issued a call for national and international reconciliation to overcome the crisis besetting his country since last June’s removal of Manuel Zelaya.

With the presence of just two regional heads of state — Panama’s Ricardo Martinelli and Leonel Fernandez of the Dominican Republic — but a multitude of other vice presidents and representatives from countries as far away as Taiwan, Lobo opted to treat the crisis as a situation that has practically been surmounted and thanked the international community for its efforts to help reestablish normality in the country.

“We have just come out of the worst political crisis in our democratic history, but … we have managed to avoid all the great dangers that confronted our nation,” Lobo, 62, said at a ceremony lasting about six hours.

“We’re ready and willing to confront the future united,” emphasized Lobo, the winner of the November 29 election, which many of the world’s nations refused to recognize as legitimate because the balloting took place under a government they regarded as installed by a coup.

Zelaya supporters, backed by human rights organizations and most foreign governments such as Venezuela and Bolivia, said a free and fair vote was impossible in Honduras given the repression imposed by Roberto Micheletti’s government.

Before barely a score of foreign delegations and diplomats, the new president gave assurances that he wants “a necessary and indispensable reconciliation with the international community.”

His first act as president was to sanction the decree approved Tuesday night by the National Congress granting political amnesty to the officials and others involved in the crisis caused by the June 28 deposement of Zelaya.

Lobo interrupted his speech to ask congressional speaker Juan Orlando Hernandez to bring him the decree and he signed the document saying that the amnesty for political crimes was in keeping with the “principle of reconciliation.”

Amid boos, the new president thanked Costa Rican President Oscar Arias “for being interested from the beginning in a fair and peaceful solution” to the crisis, and Fernandez for signing the accord to facilitate the trip into foreign exile by Zelaya, who had been holed up in the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa for four months after sneaking back into the country.

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