"The image of openness"? Election Observers Harassed

The normally open borders of Honduras with its neighbors are only partly open this week.  Venacio Cervantes, head of Immigration,  said yesterday that the borders are open, but that foreigners must justify their trip into Honduras at this time.  "All entrances will be controlled," said the retired General.

Actually, he said a lot more:  "All hotheads and national and foreign agitators who promote boycotting the election will be neutralized".

Today, he was ordered by Porfirio Lobo Sosa to stop, after two separate incidents of harassment of foreign election observers were reported by domestic and foreign press.

Cervantes reportedly said that he was

not going to permit disorder from [those] that come to slow down the electoral process, and those hotheads who want to protest and make unrest and confusion;  the armed forces will proceed in accordance with all that's legal and we shall be forceful in the application of the law.

Unfortunately, the "hotheads" he thought would be slowing the electoral process included duly accredited election observers-- on whom any hope of this election being seen as transparent rests.

The earliest incident happened Friday, Nov. 22.  ERIC, the Equipo de Reflexión Investigación y Comunicación, a Jesuit organization long established in Honduras, had its offices in El Progresso, Yoro, raided by Immigration police from the town. They entered a room where over 100 foreign election observers had just finished receiving training from a Tribunal Supremo Electoral official, and demanded that the Guatemalans, Salvadorans, US Citizens, and Canadians that made up the group present their TSE accreditation documents.

They also ordered the leader of the group, Alexis Lanza, to bring everyone down to the nearest Immigration office for unstated reasons.

Honduran Immigration police have no authority to enforce the election law, nor have they been formally asked to do so by the TSE.  They have no legal power to ask for a foreign election observer's TSE accreditation documents. The only thing they can legally ask someone to produce is their passport or other immigration documents that identify them and authorize them to be in the country.

Then on Saturday, November 23, military police entered the Aurora Hotel in Tegucigalpa, and ordered everyone in the hotel to leave their rooms, interrupting a meeting of LIBRE activist Eduardo Enrique Reina with his duly assigned and accredited foreign election observers.  All were asked to identify themselves and were threatened with explusion from the country.

That was too much for David Matamoros, president of the TSE, who ordered Immigration to stop following and harassing foreigners, saying

They told me they were following two people who had entered the country 10 days ago, but at this moment we cannot have any discussion of the act of going to a place where we have invited foreigners, because we must maintain the image of openness, the image of peace and tranquility which we want to have, not only for the Hondurans, but also for the international observers.

Matamoros says he went directly to President Lobo Sosa to ask that Immigration, which is part of the executive branch, be ordered to cease its operations following foreigners in the country.  Matamoros also issued instructions to the police and Armed Forces pointing out that they, in support of the election, were supposed to protect, not harass, election observers.

Anything to preserve the image of openness and tranquility.

Massacre in the Aguan: Two Ways to Report

Earlier this week, another group of farmworkers living in the Aguan valley died. Children as young as one year old were killed in an act of great violence.

This time, the details were so horrific that they have attracted international media attention. But readers of the Washington Post would be hard pressed to connect the story reported January 11 with its specific context. The Post wrote

Officials in Honduras say men armed with AK-47 rifles and machetes killed four adults and four children in a part of the country torn by a land dispute between workers and landowners....

Regaderos is in the Aguan River valley where farmworkers have been demanding ownership of thousands of acres of oil palm plantations that they say were illegally seized by landowners.

All I have left out in the quoted section above is the grisly details of who was killed and how, details that feed the sensationalism of this kind of reporting. So what we are left with is all the context the Post sees fit to provide. I suppose I should be grateful that they acknowledge there is a land dispute at all; but notably absent is any attempt to explain who the victims are, structurally, and who the likely authors of this crime are.

Honduran media rushed to fill the gap with premature elimination of suspects. La Tribuna writes that

The massacre of some eight people that occurred yesterday in Sabá, Colón, could be the product of a conflict over land, the authorities noted today.

The chief of police of Colón, Osmín Bardales, said that the first inquiries point to an enmity resulting from conflic over the ownership of some land.

Nonetheless it is not possible yet to make official if this is the true cause, but he clarified that the topic of the Bajo Aguan has nothing to do with this situation.

Nothing to see here: move along.

The attempt by Bardales to divert suspicion away from the conflict that pits campesinos against major landowners is to be expected. The telling fact that the attackers were provided with AK-47s simply sits there begging to be addressed: who has this kind of weaponry?

But don't look to places like the Washington Post to follow through on asking that question, or others that might shed light on this incident. This is, after all, the paper that on December 26 published an article that shed considerably more heat than light on the crisis of violence in Honduras today.

The headline of that story Grim toll as cocaine trade expands in Honduras, offered a simple storyline that we might call the default narrative for violence in Central America. Derived from the sensationlistic coverage of what is in fact a very dangerous situation on the Mexican border, it skips the actual step of establishing cause and effect. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world; it is a pass-through point for moving drugs from South America to the US; so obviously, the murder rate must be caused by the drug trafficking.

The story acknowledges that "the homicide problem goes back decades", but then plunges right on to say that the rise to 2011 heights came "as if the cocaine were gasoline tossed on a fire".

So tell me, what kinds of evidence show that drug trafficking is producing the increased murders in Honduras? Perhaps the Post did an analysis of statistics about Honduran murders?

Well, no. Instead, they stitch together data on drug flights into the Mosquitia with the story of a police raid on a so-called drug processing lab in the mountains near San Pedro Sula, before getting to their only argument linking the drug trade-- which is, without doubt, corrosive to public safety and institutional legitimacy:

Honduran police commanders say smugglers are also increasingly paying their contacts in raw product rather than cash, driving up local drug-dealing and the lethal violence that accompanies it.

Well. I feel like that is a convincing argument. "Honduran police commanders" say so. Like Osmin Bardales, who, within hours of a massacre, knows that it has nothing to do with the continuing conflict that shapes tensions in the Bajo Aguan. Who is sure enough that it is a private conflict to state that, but offers no explanation of the access that the antagonists (presumably, other peasants?) have to AK-47s.

The Post continues with a by now much-needed caution (but really, what reader other than someone like me is paying attention by this point?) that acknowledges that there is no causal analysis supporting their story line:

Researchers caution that the surge in killings here cannot be attributed entirely to narcotics trafficking. As in Ciudad Juarez, drug-fueled violence appears to have fostered an overall climate of impunity, in which bullets settle the slightest dispute and anyone can literally get away with murder.

Well, San Pedro Sula is not Ciudad Juarez, and Honduras is not Mexico. That "climate of impunity" might have other causes which an alert reporter might possibly, maybe, mention. Remember that whole coup d'etat incident back a while? when the de facto dictator defied the world, and unleashed the police and armed forces against the citizenry?

And that, of course, is where the next paragraph finally arrives:

Journalists, labor activists and gays also are apparently being killed at elevated rates, and political violence has flared since the 2009 coup that deposed leftist President Manuel Zelaya. Then there are the thousands of other Hondurans who seemingly have nothing to do with the drug trade who have been slain in carjackings, muggings and hotheaded feuds.

Yes. I would give a lot to know how much thought went into the "apparently": yes, journalists are being murdered at an extraordinary rate. And the Honduran police, including those commanders in the Bajo Aguan, try to claim that each such incident is due to "enmity", personal stuff, or else wave their hands at "drug violence". Yes, LBGT activists have suffered horrendous attacks. Yes, it became worth your life to be a labor or social activist.

And oh yes: being a peasant fighting for land in the Bajo Aguan is very, very bad for your health.

Here's what's missing from the Washington Post and other mainstream media: analysis. It isn't impossible. Back on October 6, a website called Honduras Daily took the amazingly difficult step of downloading and reading a UN report on global crime statistics.

That report considers the relationship between drug trafficking and violence to be non-linear:

Organized criminal groups involved in drug trafficking do not necessarily make themselves visible through violent and lethal crime. For example, in situations when areas of influence and/or illegal activities are clearly distributed among different criminal groups they may prefer to maintain a low profile and not to attract the attention of state authorities. Violence often escalates when an existing status quo is broken, as a result, for example, of changes in the structure of the drug market, the emergence of new protagonists or the “threat” posed by police repression.

In other words, violence along the Mexico and US border-- which results from cartels fighting battles to control a lucrative market, and fighting Mexican government efforts to break their power-- is not automatically a model that fits Honduras. The report continues:

higher levels of violence and homicides are not only associated with increases in drug trafficking flows, but also with decreases in drug flows that lead to turbulence in established markets, more competition between criminal groups and more killings. It is therefore likely that changes in drug markets drive lethal violence, not overall levels of trafficking flows per se.

For me a glaring omission in reporting dominated by the comfortable narrative of drug violence is the contribution of murders of women to the death toll. In a report titled Unbearable Levels of Violence, the NGO Social Watch draws the connection between impunity and the 2009 coup that so often evades the English-language media. Citing an "alarming rise" in violence against campesinos and a marked rise in violence against "transsexuals", the report goes on to say

femicide is also increasing. In the period 2003 to 2010 some 1,464 women were killed, 44% of them aged 15 to 29. In 2010 alone 300 women died violent deaths but in only 22 of these cases (7.3%) were the perpetrators brought to justice. From 2008 to 2010 there were 944 murders of women but the legal system only managed to punish 61 of the murderers (6.4%).

Similar figures have been reported by other advocacy groups, such as the Campaña Nacional Contra Femicidios. Writing in a statement relates October 7, 2011, this group reviewed the statistics on prosecution of murders of women in Honduras:

of the total of 351 cases reported to the prosecutor in 2010, only 179 (51% of the total) were able to enter the court as cases, and only 59 cases arrived at trial in court, of which 48 verdicts were produced, which indicates to us a percentage of 13.6% effectiveness in those cases.

They conclude:

While impunity exists we women will continue in a state of defenseless and the list of victims of femicide will continue to grow.

As, in fact, has happened with the latest atrocity in the Aguan, which added two more women to the death toll.

Impunity; the availability of guns; targeting of certain groups for political and structural reasons; and the ineffectuality and corruption of the police, who no one expects to actually investigate crimes professionally: all these factors should be the start of press coverage of crime in Honduras, not the end.

But then, that is a story that requires more specific historical context. So much easier to just draw a line from San Pedro Sula to Ciudad Juarez, and ignore all that is particular to each of these zones.

Tentative agreement reached in Bajo Aguan

Late today Honduran news media began reporting that an agreement has been reached between MUCA and the government of Porfirio Lobo Sosa.

El Tiempo's coverage says that Lobo Sosa and the leaders of MUCA signed an agreement after a marathon 14 hour negotiating session. It describes MUCA as accepting the government offer. But the conditions are markedly different than the offer the government was making yesterday.

The proposal "the slow adjudication of some 11,000 hectares of land for the 28 campesino groups". That comes out to a little more than 3 hectares per family. Of this, 3,000 hectares are to be planted in African palm, and another 3,000 not cultivated.

Within a year of signing, an additional 1,000 hectares of African palm land, and an additional 4,000 hectares of uncultivated land, are to be added.

The first step is to be the designation by the government of the first 3,000 hectares in African palm, followed by MUCA leaving the rest of the occupied land. Within three months, the first allotment of 3,000 hectares of uncultivated land is to be made.

The agreement still needs to be ratified by the membership of MUCA, something scheduled for Saturday in Trujillo, the largest city near the Bajo Aguan.

While Tiempo limits itself to covering the main points of the agreement without editorializing, La Tribuna titles its article "Agreement will bring peace to the Aguan". This is taken from comments made by Lobo Sosa, after an event with US Ambassador Hugo Llorens.

An AP story by Freddy Cuevas appears to be the first English-language reporting on the tentative agreement. He adds one important detail:

The workers are demanding that the troops withdraw, but the government has made no decision on that.

Meanwhile, early Spanish-language coverage suggests the agreement be viewed as a success by the campesinos. Writing on Publico.es of Spain, Daniel Lozano reports that "Honduras yields before the pressure of the rebel countryside". Not only does Lozano count the land grant as a success, he says that Lobo Sosa agreed to redeploy the troops sent to the region, deployment Lobo Sosa has tried to portray as unrelated to the Aguan negotiations. And he is much more explicit about the agreement being subject to ratification, quoting MUCA representative Rudy Hernández:

"We recognize that more land has been granted to us, but we are going to the membership to deliver them this agreement".

The complete agreement can be downloaded as a PDF embedded in the story published by Honduras La Prensa. We will be posting an English translation within 24 hours.

Armed Forces vs. campesinos: Militarizing the Bajo Aguan

News reports from Honduras today confirm that, fed up with negotiating with ungrateful campesinos, the Lobo Sosa government is proceeding to escalate the confrontation with unarmed campesinos seeking land rights on the Honduran coast.

El Heraldo reports that more than 30 military transports have arrived to quell what it calls the zozobra there-- literally, anxiety. Whose anxiety?

Even the right wing El Heraldo recognizes what is coming:

While the Honduran governor prepares to receive the president-elect of Costa Rica, Laura Chinchilla, this Monday, the conditions for a massacre are being created.

More than 3000 families are at risk if the Honduran government proceeds with military action. El Heraldo actually quotes a spokesperson for MUCA, the campesino organization, Yony Rivas:

"Today, the Bajo Aguán has been totally militarized and we have detected at least 30 military vehicles with troops that are carrying high caliber arms... A climate of anxiety has been created in the area, because we know that the army in our country defends the interests of the oligarchy. We are living a very difficult moment."

Andrés Pavón, director of the Comité para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos en Honduras (CODEH) noted that this was unprecedented, because civilian conflicts should be resolved by police, not the armed forces.

Lobo Sosa, the Bajo Aguan, and the OAS

If the title of this post sounds like a bad foreign film, well, hold on because we are about to embark on a very odd ride.

On April 7, the pro-coup Honduran newspaper La Tribuna published an article tying together these three unlikely themes. Headlined There are political interests in the problem of the Bajo Aguan (well, yeah...), the article quoted Porfirio Lobo Sosa appealing to the OAS to send a "commission" to review the government's proposal to settled the tense confrontation in the Bajo Aguan, characterized by La Tribuna as involving claims by 3,000 campesino families for use rights of 4,500 hectares of land currently planted in African oil palms. By my math, that would be about 1.5 hectares per family. Never mind that Honduras is not part of the OAS. Lobo Sosa needs some help, and apparently, the OAS owes it to him.

La Tribuna notes that last Monday, a proposal made by the campesinos, organized in the Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguán (MUCA), was "immediately rejected" by the government. The MUCA proposal is described as involving

the total recovery of 28 cooperatives that had been formed with the approval of the Ley de Reforma Agraria or the judgment of five hectares per family.

Lobo Sosa went on record as saying that the government offer looked good to him, not surprisingly:

the proposal, which consists of a hectare cultivated in African palm and another that would permit them to engage in contracts of co-investment with the businessmen, "is very good", since he has had experiences with co-investment with campesino groups and every time that such a transaction has been made, "it has been something that functions well when there is good faith".

Ahem.

Perhaps that "good faith" thing would be a bit more convincing if the article didn't also include Lobo Sosa's thoughts on the broader forces at work in encouraging the campesinos of the Bajo Aguan:

“I perceive that behind this, what there is is a political interest in damaging the government with the theme of human rights", he added, on considering that it makes no sense for someone to oppose the government proposal that consists of the grant of two hectares of land to three thousand families that form the campesino movement.

Funny how accusing peasant cooperatives of being armed militants might raise the broader issues of human rights, isn't it?

In an almost-certainly inadvertent moment of irony, Lobo Sosa encouraged the MUCA group to settle because otherwise, if they don't,

the declaration signed by ex-President Manuel Zelaya on June 12, 2009, will be taken as the point of departure, which consisted in the grant of 30 millon lempiras for the purchase of the land.

That's the spirit. You wouldn't want to have to go back to the way things were under Mel? oh wait, maybe we can rephrase that-- as César Ham, UD party candidate for president in 2009 co-opted by a cabinet post in the Lobo Sosa government, tried:

The director of the Instituto Nacional Agrario (INA), César Ham, recounted that the proposal of the Lobo Sosa government surpassed that proposed by Zelaya, since it went from 30 millon lempiras to 800 millon lempiras.

So we have the spectacle of Lobo Sosa and César Ham proposing more recompense to MUCA than the supposedly socialist Zelaya, albeit with extremely sticky strings attached. Obviously, the only reason to turn down such a great deal must be a desire to make politics with a land dispute to embarrass the government.

In other agricultural institute news, César Ham is looking for 100 missing tractors sent by ALBA in 2009. Or maybe all he needs is the keys; La Tribuna reports that rumor has it the tractors were found but missing the keys. And while he's at it, he can try to find anyone who knows what happened to the other farm equipment from ALBA: 85 heavy earthmovers, 15 fumigators, and 15 planting machines.

As the article helpfully concludes, all this equipment coming to Honduras was

a result of the close relationship that Zelaya maintained with Chávez, which caused discontent, above all among the businessmen and politicians, who criticized Honduras' joining ALBA from the beginning the 25 of August of 2008.

Pretty strong aversion to farm machinery.

For the want of a nail, a shoe was lost... or, updated,

For the sake of a fumigator, a coup was born...

Responsible journalism?

An article published in the Honduran Proceso Digital online newspaper today says that Porfirio Lobo Sosa will be holding a meeting Monday between different government offices to discuss the wave of attacks, many fatal, on journalists in Honduras.

As the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) noted in a report published this week, in March alone, five journalists were killed. This makes March 2010 the most deadly month ever for Honduran journalists, according to Thelma Mejía reporting on the IPS website. The CPJ says that this has "led to widespread self-censorship in the local media".

Independent and informed media point to the coup as triggering an increase in repression of media, including acts of extreme violence. Mejía writes that "local and international human rights groups warn that since the Jun. 28, 2009 coup that overthrew then president Manuel Zelaya, the wave of repression targeting the movement against the coup, as well as journalists, has not let up."

The Proceso Digital article instead takes the curious approach of tracing the beginning of violence against journalists back to 2007, mentioning a series of incidents in April 2008, the recovery of remains of a missing journalist in March 2009, and another death in April 2009. Even when citing the death of Gabriel Fino in July 2009, after the coup d'etat, Proceso Digital manages not to so much as mention the coup and its aftermath as a context.

CPJ reporting at the time of the death of Fino, a local radio reporter on the Atlantic coast and contributor to national programs, noted no specific motive had been identified; nor has any progress been reported in the succeeding months. Spanish language coverage at the time rejected any political motivation for Fino's death, with some stories suggesting it might have related to his reporting on drug trafficking. Nonetheless, a report by Daniel Kovalik published July 22, 2009 in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette identified Fino as "openly opposed to the coup", and numerous stories pointed out that the general repression of the press by the de facto regime created an unsafe atmosphere for reporters.

As Mejía notes in her IPS article, that atmosphere continues today. And so does murkiness about the motivations for these killings. This encourages US media outlets like the Los Angeles Times to present a distorted "fair and balanced" suggestion that "both the extreme right, long the dominant power in Honduras, and the extreme left would have reasons for sowing fear", citing Honduran law professor Leo Valladares. While Jose Osman Lopez, president of the Committee for Free Expression in Honduras, is quoted as saying "the killings of the journalists are part of a wider deterioration in human rights that has especially hurt opponents of the coup and belied talk of reconciliation", the impression left with the reader is that there might be anti-journalist violence by supporters of the resistance as much as by the repressive right wing.

The quote from Valladares is especially misleading, as this former commissioner of human rights has been a clear voice against violence and repression by the de facto regime installed after the coup d'Etat. In a widely reproduced interview from November 2009, Valladares made clear his support for mobilization in defense of human rights, and his condemnation of the right-wing coup that took over Honduras. In October, he was quoted in press coverage of repression as saying "all the actions of the de facto government have been nothing more than another strategy to cut off the voices that denounce human rights [violations]."

There are reasons to suspect that at least some of the recent surge in assassinations of journalists might be related to continuing repression of dissent. Many of those killed come from the north coast, where the conflict between the campesinos seeking land rights in the Bajo Aguan and private landowners, their security forces, and complicit media and police forces, continues to be heated.

This March, José Bayardo Mairena, a radio reporter, died while driving from Catacamas to Juticalpa, Olancho, as did another reporter accompanying him, Manuel Juarez. CPJ characterizes Bayardo Mairena as a "veteran journalist" who "handled general assignments that included coverage of organized crime and a land dispute in the Aguán region". Not included in the mainstream Honduran press coverage was the information that Bayardo Mairena "strongly questioned the coup d'etat carried out June 28, 2009. He also had systematically denounced the constant human rights violations carried out by the army and police against citizens in resistance on the radio station in Olancho where he worked".

Previously murdered was Nahúm Palacios Arteaga, of Channel 5 TV and Radio Tocoa in Tocoa, Atlántida, also reporting on the Aguan struggle. CPJ's report on Palacios correctly recalls that in June 2009, he "had been threatened by members of the military for his critical coverage of the coup" with his home and office raided and equipment confiscated. Despite a request in summer 2009 for protection for Palacios by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, none was provided.

Also killed in March on the Atlantic coast was David Meza Montesinos, a radio journalist on reporter La Ceiba station El Patio and a correspondent for Radio America, described by CPJ as covering drug trafficking and organized crime. His death has been attributed to drug traffickers.

So where does the insinuation of "extreme leftwing" violence against journalists come from? One attack has been linked, with great drama but no evidence, to the Honduran resistance, by radio personality Karol Cabrera, who survived it. Joseph Hernández Ochoa, the fifth journalist killed in March, died in the attack in Tegucigalpa. CPJ reported that Hernández Ochoa hosted an entertainment program on Tegucigalpa TV station Channel 51, and it was widely assumed that the principal target was Cabrera. Cabrera, who worked as a presenter on state-owned Canal 8 for the Micheletti regime, accused "Zelaya militants" of the attack on her, a charge she previously made in the unfortunate death of her daughter, a death investigators associated instead with acquaintance gang violence. In the more recent attack, the parents of Hernández Ochoa have actually accused Cabrera of engineering it to eliminate him.

The two attacks on Karol Cabrera, and her unsubstantiated claims that they were the work of opponents of the coup d'Etat, are the only reported examples of violence against journalists that have even been imputed, unconvincingly, to the progressive movement in Honduras. But leave it to the fair and balanced media in the US not only to give these claims equal weight, but to fail to provide the context that makes it clear that there is a pattern to the journalistic bloodbath of March.

That pattern points to the contested terrain of the north coast, where reporters seeking to spread real news put their lives in danger, in an atmosphere of violent repression fostered by the regime of the golpe de estado of 2009 and continuing under the Lobo Sosa administration.

Women's Day and the Frente de Resistencia

A story dated March 9 in Cuba's Prensa Latina reports that the Frente de Resistencia is calling for a popular consulta on June 28, 2010. The aim would be to carry out the popular opinion poll that was cut short by the coup d'etat of 2009. But where that consulta was going to ask if there should be a referendum on last November's ballot to determine levels of support for a constituyente, the proposed 2010 consulta is directly on whether to convene a constituent assembly.

The same communique also convenes the "Segundo Encuentro por la Refundación de Honduras" (Second Meeting for the Refounding of Honduras) this coming March 12 to 14. Following up on the first assembly of the Frente, held in Siguatepeque, this second meeting will take place in La Esperanza.

Siguatepeque, located in the Department of Comayagua, was a traditional Lenca community. Today, it is the location of the Red Comal (Comal Network), a development organization working with rural men and women that was targeted by the de facto regime in the days leading up to the coup. La Esperanza, in the Department of Intibucá, is located in the heart of contemporary Lenca country, and has been a center of popular and Lenca resistance, exemplified by this video statement against the coup d'etat by a Lenca woman. The places chosen for meetings by the Frente exemplify the fact that the Frente is a network of labor, campesino, indigenous, and women's organizations. Which brings us to International Women's Day.

While the communique from the Frente referred to by Prensa Latina has yet to appear on the website Vos el Soberano, the convening of the gathering in La Esperanza is mentioned in a statement by Feminists in Resistance posted on March 7, anticipating the International Day of Women, today, March 8.

The Feminists in Resistance write

The commemoration of this March 8 is invested with profound significance for organized women, since it coincides with the celebration of the first century that this date has been recognized as the International Day of the Working Woman. Nonetheless we cannot forget that this date is the result of the great and heroic journeys that we have carried out through the course of history to attain the dignity and emancipation of working women and women in general. We should not forget the pioneers that, on March 8, 1908, declared themselves on strike, demanding the right to form unions, salary increases, vocational training and a workday of less than 12 hours.

Linking the challenges facing women then to those in Honduras after the coup and today, the statement calls on

world feminist organizations, international women's movements, popular movements and democratic institutions on all the continents and, of course, all our [Honduran] people who from their respective spaces can contribute to holding back this repressive wave against the Honduran popular movement that is setting free a peaceful struggle to achieve a life of peace and liberty.

The full communique from the Resistance Front, Number 51, is available on the blog Resistencia 5 Estrellas. Coverage in Prensa Latina is partial: reporting only on the first two points of the communique (calling the consulta, and condemning the US for interference in the country's affairs).

Left out was the Frente's call for human rights organizations to pay attention to the escalation of tension in the Aguan valley. In this point of the statement, the Frente accuses

La Prensa and El Heraldo, property of Jorge Canahuati Larach, and the TV channels of the Corporación de Televicentro, property of Rafael Ferrari, that attempt to show the working families and popular leaders as terrorists.

In addition, the communique expresses support for the union of workers at the national university, UNAH.

Why do these omissions matter? whether it is CNN failing to discuss the entire context of the coup d'etat, or Cuban media ignoring the current local issues to cherry-pick the Frente's statements, it is important not to substitute selective representations that match our expectations for the unprecedented historical processes unfolding through the agency of the Frente and its constituents, including the Honduran Feminists in Resistance.

Saludos, compañeras, en el día internacional del mujer. Venceremos.

Agrarian Activism, Agrarian Reform and Agrarian Law in Honduras

At the center of the conflict in the Bajo Aguan is the Instituto Nacional Agrario, INA, a semi-autonomous government agency whose mission is to

carry out the process of agrarian reform in completion of the national agrarian policy put forth by the Government, with the aim to accomplish the transformation of the agrarian structure of the country and incorporate the rural population in the integral development of the Nation.

INA came into being in 1961 through Decreto 69, charged to write a Law of Agrarian Reform, which was eventually passed as the Ley de la Reforma Agraria, Decreto 2 of 1962. This is part of the history of INA to be read on the website established under the Zelaya administration, which remains posted on the internet. What that website doesn't point out is that advancing agrarian reform, with a modest total of 1500 hectares distributed, contributed to the coup d'etat of 1963 which threw President Ramón Villeda Morales out of office, ending the first attempt at distributing under-used land to campesino groups.

The next step in land reform, ironically, took place under the military dictatorships that succeeded. The US government country study of Honduras explains the situation in the 1970s like this:

Lacking even modest government-directed land reforms [after the 1963 coup], illegal squatting became the primary means for poor people to gain land throughout the early 1970s. These actions spurred the [military dictatorship] to institute new agrarian reforms in 1972 and 1975. Although all lands planted in export crops were exempted from reform, about 120,000 hectares were, nevertheless, divided among 35,000 poor families.

Decreto No. 8 of 1972, which took effect in 1973, established a law on "Uso temporal de tierras" (temporary use of lands). INA describes the goal of this law as "to assist in the short term the solution of the most pressing needs of the inhabitants of the country settled in the countryside" to lead to their incorporation in development. INA was authorized to determine when lands were under-utilized, and the owners of such lands in theory would be obligated to sign contracts with INA through which these lands would be made available "voluntarily, temporarily, and without compensation" for INA to assign to cooperatives. Under this law, cooperatives received terms of use of land, not titles to that land.

A new Ley de Reforma Agraria was issued as Decreto No. 170 of 1974, taking effect in January of 1975. Under this law, as described on INA's website, the goals were outlined as

to transform the agrarian structure of the country, destined to substitute for latifundio and minifundio a system of ownership, tenancy, and exploitation of the land that will guarantee social justice in the field and will augment the production and productivity of the farming and livestock sector...

For the purposes of Agrarian Reform lands expropriated in conformity with the law, national or ejidal lands, rural land in the possession of state entities, and those that the same entitites shall acquire for the same purpose will be dedicated.

(Latifundia and minifundia are legal terms for large- and small- landholding.)

Remarkably, as the US Honduras country study shows, there was more continuity of agrarian policy than change with the move to constitutional government in the 1980s, and agrarian reform actually slowed:

By 1975 the pendulum had swung back, and agrarian reform was all but halted. From 1975 through the 1980s, illegal occupations of unused land increased once again. The need for land reform was addressed mostly by laws directed at granting titles to squatters and other landholders, permitting them to sell their land or to use it as collateral for loans.

This was the period during which we first began our research in Honduras, and in the fertile landscape around San Pedro Sula, large tracts of under-used land (in theory for grazing cattle, but often left overgrown) were invaded by peasant groups who took possession and waited uneasily to be challenged. Often we began our work by meeting with the councils of such groups out in the field, explaining how our work had no potential to affect their claims for land. In other cases, we found the land in possession of cooperatives who proudly displayed their legal claim by naming the cooperativa with the date they were given the right to occupy the land: 21 de Septiembre, 2 de Marzo, and so on.

But regardless of the stability of their claim to the land, these coops struggled under an even greater burden: agrarian policy throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s pushed for recipients of land to produce export crops to contribute to external trade. Cooperativistas with whom I talked were vividly aware of the contradiction presented: on the one hand, they had land; but they could not afford to work that land simply to produce the basic grains needed for the support of their own families. Most worked small plots of land near their houses after their long days cultivating sugar cane or bananas, the major crops grown in the terrains where I worked.

The US country study of Honduras outlines the failure of the 1974 Agrarian Reform Law and the heightened tensions about land reform that reached a head in the early 1990s in confrontations between unarmed peasants and members of the military:

An agrarian pact, signed by landowners and peasant organizations in August 1990, remained underfunded and largely unimplemented. Furthermore, violence erupted as discharged members of the Honduran military forcibly tried to claim land that had already been awarded to the peasant organization Anach in 1976. In May 1991, violence initiated by members of the Honduran military resulted in the deaths of eight farmers. To keep similar situations around the country from escalating into violence, the government promised to parcel out land belonging to the National Corporation for Investment (Corporación Nacional de Inversiones--Conadin). The government also pledged to return to peasants land that had been confiscated by the Honduran military in 1983.

But what actually happened was the passage of Decreto No. 31-92, a new law, the "Ley para la Modernización y Desarrollo del Sector Agrícola" (LMDSA). The key change made was to allow individual members of cooperatives to alienate land, selling their individual plots to large land-owners, something never before permitted under the existing agrarian reform policy. While claiming to continue every part of the original Decreto 170 of 1974 that did not "contradict" the new law, the LMDSA radically altered the structure of land-tenancy, as well as the rationale for land reform. The new LDMSA was openly based in the desire for "agricultural modernization", "increasing production", "commercialization", "the development of agro-industry", "the rational use of natural resources" and "agroindustrial development and exportation of agricultural products".

The current Director of INA is former presidential candidate for the UD party, César Ham. The conflict over the Bajo Aguan that he inherited has some of the deepest historical roots in the 20th century process of agrarian reform. As noted on INA's own website, the original impetus for reform came after the great Honduran labor strike of 1954, when unemployed banana workers began the process of taking over land marginal for banana production that the international companies were leaving unused.

One of the places where colonization of land took place before the first Law of Agrarian Reform was the Aguan, in 1955. In 1970, a formal agrarian effort called the Proyecto Bajo Aguán began.

By the time Mark Ruhl wrote about Honduran land reform in 1984 in the Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, he could report that the Bajo Aguan was the site of 14% of the participating beneficiaries of land reform, and 31% of the land that had been distributed, with 80 cooperatives comprising 4,000 families in place by 1977 (cited by Charles Brockett in 1987 in the Journal of Latin American Studies).

On the other side of this history, in 1975 the first plant to extract palm oil from African oil palms began operating in the Bajo Aguan.

Thus were set in motion the causes of the present conflict.

*********
For further reading, in addition to the articles cited above, Spanish speakers can consult

Un plan de desarrollo regional: el Bajo Aguán en Honduras by Angel Augusto Castro Rubio (1994: Universidad Iberoamericana).

The Catholic Church of Trujillo responds to La Prensa

As we reported in a previous post, the Honduran newspaper La Prensa published an unsourced and completely dubious set of claims, supposedly based on a military intelligence report, accusing campesinos in the Bajo Aguan of being guerrillas and communists. The report, we noted, was incendiary and is the kind of media that leads to and pre-emptively justifies violence.

Included in that press report were frankly incoherent accusations against the Catholic Church in general, and the Jesuit order in specific. Now, thanks to John Donaghy, we can point to a response by the Catholic Church in Trujillo, the diocese that includes the Aguan valley.

It is worth reflecting on the historic position of Trujillo in Honduran Catholicism. Founded in 1525, the town of Trujillo was the first Spanish capital of Honduras. It is widely identified as located where in 1502, Christopher Columbus first set foot on the mainland of the Americas, and where his expedition practiced the first Catholic Mass.

On August 14, 2002, the 500th anniversary of that history was commemorated with a mass on the beach at Trujillo, celebrated by the Archbishop of Santo Domingo and others. The miraculous image of the Virgin of Suyapa, patron saint of Honduras, was brought from Tegucigalpa to solemnize the ceremony.

The document issued by the Diocese of Trujillo specifically objects to passages in La Prensa supposedly citing the "intelligence report" blaming violence on

priests of the Jesuit order who hawk liberation theology in every community

and concluding that

the dominant Catholic order in the department is the Jesuits, followers of liberation theology which is a Marxist vision of the Gospel. Out of this order have come all the guerrilla priests of the Church including Guadalupe Carney.

Father James Carney, priest of the Missouri Province of the Society of Jesus, was killed in 1983 in Honduras by members of the right-wing Battalion 316. The reference to him, in this context, is one that anyone familiar with Honduran history should find extremely disturbing.

Thus, it is heartening to see the Trujillo Diocese write that the Jesuits

have accompanied the poorest families of the department of Colon who for the most part comprise the campesino population, to assist them in the defense of their rights and to attain the goals of their own development.

and that

Integral liberation for which the Jesuit priests and the whole Catholic Church work is not Marxist action nor an action which belongs to a political ideology. It is action inspired by the Gospel which demands that we work against every ideology which manipulates the people. And this is what the Jesuit priests do in our diocese of Trujillo. We are clear about the effort the Jesuit priests make and which the whole diocese does for some eighteen years so that the campesinos do not sell their lands which now are the reason for this violent conflict.

The Trujillo Diocese also objects to the statement in La Prensa, attributed to the apparently fictional "military intelligence" report, that

Authorities of the Catholic Church in the area have strong ties with campesino groups in the department, officially to promote environmental and indigenous groups but it is believed that they are also to strengthen their party (the Christian Democrats).

It should go without saying that the Christian Democrat Party is not an arm of the Catholic Church. But the Diocese considers this statement serious enough to respond to it:

no member of the Hierarchy of the Catholic church in the Diocese of Trujillo, which is composed of the departments of Colón and Gracias a Dios, has any commitment with any political party and therefore not with the Christian Democratic Party

and quoting Pope Benedict notes that

The church is the advocate (lawyer) of justice and the poor precisely by not identifying itself with politician nor with party interests

According to contemporary news reports, in 2002 the representative of Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Nicolás López, spoke directly to a group of 1000 members of Honduran indigenous groups who participated in the commemorative mass at Trujillo, telling them

You are specially beloved by God, who is in heaven, and by Christ, our savior... The Pope admires, defends, and makes his own the interests of the ethnicity sprung up here in the beginning of the 16th century... and appreciates your identity and demands that you be recognized by all, principally by those that might hold public power.

The sentiment is one equally appropriate for the campesinos today seeking justice in their search for land from which to support themselves in the Bajo Aguan, many of whom are undoubtedly descendants of the indigenous peoples of Honduras, supported by Catholic clergy who have historically been targets of violence by right-wing forces in Honduras. Let us pray this is not the overture to a repetition of history.

Echos of the 1980s

Hey, La Prensa, the 1980s called and they want their rhetoric back!

I knew something was wrong when I read the story in Jorge Canahuati's La Prensa on March 1 entitled "Guerrilla cell arming itself in the Bajo Aguan". The article, which claims to be based on a military intelligence report in their possession, makes a series of unbelievable claims about the campesinos opposing Miguel Facussé's title to several farms of african oil palms in the Bajo Aguan.

In a nutshell, it accuses the campesinos of allying themselves with drug traffickers for protection, organized by non-governmental organizations "of a socialist type" and by Jesuits "with communist ideologies". The alleged report claims to have studied 54 campesino cooperatives that through misadministration and corruption sold off their lands in 1993, but now want it back.

The Honduran government of the 1970s and 1980s had a single minded agrarian policy. If a group of campesinos wanted land, they were made to form agricultural cooperatives and the cooperative was then given land at the discretion of the state.

In the Bajo Aguan, the campesinos involved were largely from more highland departments of Santa Barbara, Lempira, Intibuca, and so on, forced to move into the tropical lowlands of Honduras to have access to land. The government of the 1980s failed to learn what the Spanish colonial government learned in building the eighteenth-century fort at Omoa: when you make highland people relocate to the lowlands, they die of malaria and other tropical diseases that only rarely occur in the highlands. Yet the government of Honduras continued to encourage people from the highlands to "emigrate" to the lowlands to gain access to land. The land campesinos were moved to in large numbers in the 1980s previously had been developed for agriculture in the 1920s and 1930s by banana companies, then abandoned as banana production became uneconomical.

In exchange for the land, cooperatives were directed, as part of national agricultural policy, to plant export crops like sugar cane, african palm, and to a lesser extent cacao, and were given low interest loans to buy the equipment and fertilizers necessary to plant and harvest these crops. They were not given guaranteed markets, or price guarantees on their crops, and had to compete with the oligarchy, who already controlled the markets for these raw agricultural goods and set the prices. Many cooperatives went badly into debt when market prices were low for their crop, and disbanded, though others managed to survive.

The supposed intelligence report alleges that Miguel Facussé and a Nicaraguan, Reynaldo Morales, bought up land as cooperatives failed and sold land to pay off their debts. The campesinos contest this, pointing to agrarian policy under Rafael Callejas in the early 1990s, under the Law for the Modernization and Development of the Agricultural Sector. Through this law, the government expropriated land it had previously given to campesino cooperatives, and turned it over to modern industrial farmers. The timing of this policy is not coincidentally linked to the paving of the road from La Ceiba into the Aguan valley, and back up to Olancho, which happened in the 1980s, giving this region decent access to the national market for the first time.

The alleged report, La Prensa tells us, singles out and analyzes the positions of a number of named organizations. The Movimiento Unido de Campesinos del Aguan (MUCA) is said to be more heavily armed than the National Police and supposedly is causing "thousands of dollars of losses daily to businesses" and scaring away international investment. Here's the most ludicrous part: La Prensa tells us that a named campesino leader affiliated with MUCA, and a named campesino leader affiliated with the resistance, are purchasing arms and waiting for FARC, the Colombian guerrilla movement, to come and train them in how to use them! Even more ludicrous is the allegation that these resistence leaders also head a band of kidnappers. The report claims there are orders out for their arrest. Both of these named individuals would be easy to find and arrest, since neither is in hiding, were there actually any such arrest warrants.

The report goes on like this, a fantasy with no anchor in reality, laughable if things like this didn't kill people. It talks about school teachers, assuring us that in the end, they won't support the campesinos. It talks about the Comité de Organizaciones Populares del Aguán (COPA), which sided with the resistance during the coup. It describes the Catholic Church "trying to fortify its political party, the Christian Democrats", and that the priests in the region are Jesuits, and are marxist advocates of liberation theology.

Rafael Alegria, head of Via Campesina and a leader in the resistance, rightly denounced this fantastic story. He reports he talked with the military spokesperson, Ramiro Archiaga, who denied the existence of any such military report and said he would ask La Prensa for a written explanation. Alegria attributed this bit of disinformation to the security minister, Oscar Alvarez.

A pseudonymous source, published and translated yesterday by Adrienne Pine at quotha.net, attributed this campaign of disinformation directly to La Prensa's owner, Jorge Canahuati Larach, along with Maria Antonia de Fuentes, Ana Morales, and Nelson Garcia.

Whatever the source of this disinformation, it is dangerous. It is meant to provoke bloodshed. It is a reminder that "newspapers" such as Canahuati's La Prensa and El Heraldo have not changed since they served as media to churn up enough controversy to incite and then justify a military coup d'etat. Maybe the rhetoric is from the fight against communism of the 1980s; but the tactic is that of yellow journalism of the 19th century.

Miguel Facussé Explains the Importance of the Bajo Aguan

As a follow up to the previous post, consider an article in today's El Heraldo where Miguel Facussé explains that resolving the conflict between his claims and those of campesinos is critical to prevent bank failures in Honduras.

If your reaction was "Huh?" read on. If that last sentence made sense to you: hello Miguel! glad to have you reading!

This one needs to be taken step by step precisely as presented.

According to the article, Facussé explained that "one of the aspects that preoccupies him most is the image that Honduras projects to the world of the investors", saying

One of the most important things is the idea of what we are in Honduras, the image that we are giving to the investor. In this time, to succeed in getting investors to come to Honduras will be very difficult because of the political situation that we have experienced, so that we have to unite ourselves in some way to give a good appearance to the world.

Hah! too bad someone went and created that whole political awkwardness, scaring off those investors. Now if we could just get that guy to come forward and take responsibility...

And what's at risk here is far more than any of us have considered, as Facussé went on to explain:

If we do not succeed in getting investors to come to Honduras, with the calamitous situation that faces the world, here we are going to be in misery, I think that we have to make a common front and see how we can resolve this problem, it's not a problem of Miguel Facussé, rather, one of the entire country.

When I read the phrase aquí vamos a ir a la miseria I couldn't help but think of the kind of life campesinos who reoccupy unused land routinely live, without basic services, acceptable housing, and under constant threat of expulsion.

But to return to Miguel Facussé's clarification of the issues at hand: it appears that one of the worries is that there are loans authorized that cannot be paid out, portending disaster for the entire Honduran economy:

The World Bank, the International Development Bank, and the Banco Alemán authorized loans, but they are paralyzed by the problem of the Bajo Aguan. There are a total of 20 banks that are financing me and the guarantee is the land and its cultivated products. Look, if it comes to shutting, various banks here are going to close.

Facussé says this is much more than a mere conflict over agrarian policy, on which he is willing to give his informed opinion as well:

This has gone beyond what is an agrarian problem, we bought the farm and we paid very well for it, those of the agrarian reform had the dough but they did not invest it and they squandered the money, therefore I believe that agrarian reform is not the way out.

That should come as news-- not sure what kind of news to call it-- to César Ham, who one assumes thinks it is an agrarian issue. But he should be reassured: after responding to a call to discuss matters with INA, Facussé reported that Ham is a responsible official:

He isn't that wild bear now, I found him very amiable.

And isn't that the most important thing-- that all the political and economic elites like each other?

Selective memory and the Campesinos of the Bajo Aguan

Today's email brings another urgent notice about ongoing violence against farmers in north coast Honduras', in the fertile Aguan river valley. Here, the Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguan (MUCA) has been vigorously calling attention to violence that so far has resulted in the reported deaths of four rural farmers. The Bajo Aguan conflict has been well covered by like that of anthropologist Adrienne Pine, who reported on January 9 on a paramilitary operation to evict the campesinos in the lower Aguan valley. Spanish-language blogs include details of the names and numbers of those detained and mistreated in these operations. On January 9, El Libertador reported three deaths among the campesinos, two from Cooperative San Esteban and one from Cooperative Guanchias, without disclosing their names; as well as the deaths of two security guards involved in the raid.

But you would be hard-pressed to know the full story if you were only reading the daily newspapers in Honduras. El Tiempo has a story about the Bajo Aguan confrontation datelined February 16, headlined Government seeks solution to agrarian conflicts of the Aguan. It reports that César Ham, in his new role of government insider as director of the Instituto Nacional Agrario (INA), has formed a "commission" of landlords, campesino leaders, and the government to "seek a peaceful solution".

From the government's perspective, the problem is that 3500 campesino families have occupied and are cultivating 9000 hectares of land for which businessmen claim property titles. Ham is reported to be studying solutions ranging from expropriating the land (while paying the land-holders); moving the campesinos to other land; or a combination.

El Heraldo also had a story about the ongoing conflict yesterday. Not surprisingly, their coverage had a somewhat more sinister tone, claiming that the violence being experienced could be "attacks on the part of organized crime". Heraldo emphasized what they claim are the deaths or disappearances of five security guards for Dinant Corporation at the hands of "supposed campesinos". The report quotes an "anonymous source" who goes further in smearing the campesino movement that is itself under attack:

A different treatment should be given to this problem, since these actions have characteristics of guerrilla cells, based on the messages that they left and the weapons that they are using.

These Honduran news reports engage in selective silence. The deaths of the campesinos reported by email and on progressive blogs are not mentioned or are only vaguely included in a generalized claim of violence.

References to the "landlords" don't specify who is involved, nor do these reports make clear what is at issue and why. The conflict involves land claimed by Miguel Facussé and others prominent in the coup d'etat of June 28.

The land at issue was claimed by the campesinos under policies-- now silently repudiated-- of the Zelaya administration. As reported by the Salvadoran blog Tercera Información

These campesinos, belonging to various unions grouped in the Movimiento Unificado de Campesinos del Aguan (MUCA), a part of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular, remind us that "there exists a legal agreement (convenio) between president Zelaya and these campesino groups of the Aguan, signed at the beginning of the month of June 2009 before the coup d'etat, in which was agreed that a technical legal commission would investigate the legality of the tenancy of these lands and the supposed property-owners Miguel Facusé, René Morales y Reinaldo Canales would be paid for the improvements that they had made; but the lands would be handed over [to the campesions occupying them].

Needless to say, in the wake of the coup, the Micheletti regime did not follow through. As those claiming title to the land were powerful backers of the coup and the regime, it was their interests that were uppermost for Roberto Micheletti. So, as progressive blog Kaos en la Red puts it, the campesino groups took direct action:

groups of campesinos initiated a process of recovery of land beginning December 9... land usurped by the businessmen Miguel Facussé, René Morales and Reynaldo Canales, who, taking advantage of the coup d'Etat, paralyzed the process of negotiation initiated under the presidency of Manuel Zelaya.

The attempt to throw the farming community off the land has involved police, Armed Forces, and security forces contracted by the landlords, who routinely hire military reservists for such purposes. The blurring of lines between military and civilian, government and private security, has been a feature of Honduran life for the entire time I have worked there. It is corrosive to the atmosphere of civil society at the best of times when you cannot be certain if the uniformed man with the gun telling you to "come with me" is official or free-lance. In the wake of a coup that officially authorized violence against peaceful protestors by both police and army, and that gave the army a renewed mandate to intrude in daily life, the blurring of lines is fatal.

And of course, none of this is reported in the English-language media, obsessed by its storyline of normalization under the new regime that supposedly is unifying Honduras.