Dana Frank
October 21, 2011
Since 2009, beneath the radar of the international media, the coup government ruling Honduras has been collaborating with wealthy landowners in a violent crackdown on small farmers struggling for land rights in the Aguán Valley in the northeastern region of the country. Over 46 campesinos have been killed or disappeared. Human rights groups charge that many of the killings have been perpetrated by the private army of security guards employed by Miguel Facussé, a biofuels magnate. Facussé's guards work closely with the Honduran military and police, which receive generous funding from the United States to fight the war on drugs in the region.
New Wikileaks cables now reveal that the U.S. Embassy in Honduras--and therefore the State Department--has known since 2004 that Miguel Facussé is a cocaine importer. U.S. "drug war" funds and training, in other words, are being used to support a known drug trafficker's war against campesinos.
Miguel Facussé Barjum, in the Embassy's words, is "the wealthiest, most powerful businessman in the country," one of the country’s "political heavyweights." The New York Times recently described him as "the octogenarian patriarch of one of the handful of families controlling much of Honduras' economy." Facussé's nephew, Carlos Flores Facussé, served as President of Honduras from 1998 to 2002. Miguel Facussé's Dinant corporation is a major producer of palm oil, snack foods, and other agricultural products. He was one of the key supporters of the military coup that deposed democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009.
Miguel Facusse's power base lies in the lower Aguán Valley, where campesinos originally settled in the 1970s as part of an agrarian reform strategy by the Honduran government, which encouraged hundreds of successful campesino cooperatives and collectives in the region. Beginning in 1992, though, new neoliberal governments began promoting the transfer of their lands to wealthy elites, who were quick to take advantage of state support to intimidate and coerce campesinos into selling, and in some cases to acquire land through outright fraud. Facussé, the biggest beneficiary by far of these state policies, now claims at least 22,000 acres in the lower Aguán, at least one-fifth of the entire area, much of which he has planted in African palms for an expanding biofuel empire.
http://www.thenation.com/article/164120/wikileaks-honduras-us-linked-brutal-businessman
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