Honduras: killings continue as Aguán becomes "new Colombia"

[Judi Lynn]

Honduras: killings continue as Aguán becomes "new Colombia"

Submitted by Weekly News Update on Tue, 08/30/2011 - 07:03. Honduran campesino leader Pedro Salgado and his wife, Reina Mejía, were murdered on the evening of Aug. 21 at their home in the La Concepción cooperative, in Tocoa municipality in the northern department of Colón. Salgado was the president of the cooperative and a vice president of the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), a leading organization in a decade-old struggle for land in Honduras' Lower Aguán Valley.

The murders came just one day after the shooting death of Secundino Ruiz, who is president of the nearby San Isidro cooperative and of another campesino organization, the Authentic Claimant Movement of Aguán Campesinos (MARCA). Both MUCA and MARCA won land for their members under an agreement they signed with Honduran president Porfirio ("Pepe") Lobo Sosa in April 2010. The killing of Salgado and Mejía brought the number of people killed in the Lower Aguán in two weeks to 14 or more, including Ruiz, six private guards (previously reported as five), four people working for a Pepsi distributor and a food vendor riding with them. (Comité de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras, Aug. 21, via Vos el Soberano, Honduras; FoodFirst Information and Action Network, FIAN, Aug. 22, via Adital, Brazil)

Campesino groups trace the Aguán struggle back to the 1992 Agricultural Modernization Law, which changed restrictions on the size of land holdings to allow businesses to own more than 300 hectares. Campesinos feel that land which should have been theirs through agrarian reform has gone to big businesses like Grupo Dinant, a food product and cooking oil company founded by Miguel Facussé Barjum. There are 40,000 campesinos living "in extreme poverty" in the valley "who need a piece of land to farm," MUCA general secretary Johnny Rivas told the Spanish wire service EFE. Groups like MUCA started forming about 11 years ago and have relied on a strategy of peaceful occupations of large estates—although Rivas didn't discount the possibility that some sectors of the campesino movement might have arms.

African oil palms have replaced bananas as the main commercial crop in the valley, and tensions increased as landowners like Facussé saw the potential for the palms in the biofuel business, which could attract carbon credits and international financing. To maintain their estates, the landowners have hired private guards and supplied them with arms. Campesino groups consider the guards paramilitaries and blame them for most of the 51 killings of campesinos that they say have taken place in the past two years. Meanwhile, narco traffickers and other criminals have reportedly moved into the area.

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