President Barack Obama addressed the political crisis in Honduras during a press conference Monday in Mexico alongside the leaders of Mexico and Canada. Obama said it was hypocritical for critics of Washington’s response to the coup to demand a more forceful US role in returning the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya to power.

President Obama: “The same critics who say that the United States has not intervened enough in Honduras are the same people who say that we’re always intervening and the Yankees need to get out of Latin America. You can’t have it both ways…If these critics think that it’s appropriate for us to suddenly act in ways that in every other context they consider inappropriate, then I think what that indicates is, is that maybe there’s some hypocrisy involved in their approach to US-Latin America relations that certainly is not going to guide my administration’s policies.”

While President Obama spoke in Mexico, thousands marched to the UN headquarters in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa calling for the return of ousted president Manuel Zelaya. Meanwhile, the Union of South American Nations announced Monday it will not recognize any leader elected while Honduras’s coup-installed regime is in power.