Miskito Land Councils Receive Land titles

English language news sources reported this week that five Miskito federations received collective land titles through the Instituto Nacional Agrario.

The titles cover 970,000 hectares (approx. 1.6 million acres) of land in the eastern part of Honduras, along the Caribbean coast and the border with Nicaragua.  This constitutes almost 7% of the land area of Honduras.  The latest land titles add to titles for other lands allocated in 2012 and May, 2013.

The recipients of these titles are territorial councils. Twelve Miskito and Pech Federations are organized in territorial councils:

Rayaka - located in Belen,
Diunat - Brus Laguna,
Finzmos - Morocon - Segovia
Katainasta - Laguna Caratasca
Auhya Yari - Puerto Lempira
Lainasta - Laka
Wamakliscinasta - Auka
Watiasta - Eastern Mosquitia, along the Caribbean coast adjacent to Nicaragua
Bamiasta - Ahuas, Rio Patuca, Biosfera Río Plátano
Bakinasta - Wampusirpi, Río Patuca, Reserva TawakaAsagni
Batiasta - Barra Patuca
Truksinasta - Tipi

The councils and their territories are contiguous zones in far northeast Honduras:

 (Click to enlarge.  Map taken from page 16 of this source.)

Honduras acquired title to the land that has now been titled from Great Britain through the Cruz-Wyke treaty of 1859.  This treaty ceded British control of the Bay Islands of Utila, Guanaja, Roatan, Morat, Elena, and Barbarete to Honduras. It required Honduras to recognize existing land titles on those islands, and for Honduras to observe freedom of religion and worship for their residents.

Article II of the treaty recognized ownership by Honduras of  the land occupied by the Miskito, except for land that might be claimed by the government of Nicaragua. Otherwise, the treaty was non-specific about the boundaries involved.

Article III of the treaty is what underlies the new land titles. It reads:

The Misquito Indians in the district recognized by Article II of this Treaty as belonging to and under the sovereignty of the Republic of Honduras shall be at liberty to remove, with their property, from the territory of the Republic, and to proceed withersoever they may desire; and such of the Mosquito Indians who remain within the said district shall not be disturbed in the possession on any lands or other property which they may hold or occupy, and shall enjoy, as natives of the Republic of Honduras, all rights and privileges enjoyed generally by the natives of the Republic.

Article III went on to called for an annual fund to be established for educating the Miskito over a ten year period, the fund to be guaranteed by income from the logging rights to any state-owned land in the Bay Islands and Miskito territory.  That means the Treaty recognized that not all the land in the ceded territory was privately held.

Only some of the present-day territorial councils have received title to the lands they occupy, as prescribed by the treaty.  On August 30, 2012, the council of Katainaska received title to the lands around Laguna Caratasca, where the US is building a military base for the Honduran Navy.

In May, 2013, the council of Auhya Yari received title to lands around Puerto Lempira.

Five councils received land grants together totaling 970,000 hectares in the latest phase of complying with the treaty.  The council of Finzamos (26 communities, 1340 families) received title to lands around Morocon - Segovia.  The council of Truksinasta (26 communities, 840 families) received title to lands round Tipi.  The council of Wamakliscinasta (19 communities, 790 families) received title to lands around Auka.  The council of Lainasta (39 communities, 1800 families) received title to lands around Laka.   The council of Waitasta (18 communities, 1200 families) received title to lands along Honduras's eastern border with Nicaragua.

These titles are corporate, indivisible, and non-transferable.

Sounds great, right?

The Consejo Coordinador de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras (COPINH) suggests, through its spokesperson, Bertha Caceres, that the Lobo Sosa government has an ulterior motive in granting these land titles at this particular time.  She said:

"What a coincidence.  They authorize land titles just as they are to begin asking the Misquito people to approve oil and gas exploration by the English company British Gas Group."

In May this year, at the same time as the second set of Miskito land titles were being issued, the Lobo Sosa government announced it had granted British Gas Group a license to explore for off-shore oil and gas all along the coast of Honduras, from Tela east to Nicaragua.

Honduras has had at least one test well yield oil in the sea off the Moskito lands, and the area around Tela contains suspected gas reserves.

The grant to British Gas Group will bring in a substantial sum for the government, whether or not the company finds gas or oil.  However, to get their environmental license, they must get the consent of the Miskito peoples, through a series of public meetings that are just about to take place.

So maybe the timing on these land titles is coincidental. Or maybe it is meant to influence local attitude toward the environmental license for British Gas Group, in the hope of avoiding the kind of conflict that is happening everywhere else the Lobo Sosa government has authorized exploitation of natural resources near indigenous communities.

Either way, titling this land is long over due, a treaty right, not a gesture the government should be credited with taking out of the goodness of its heart.

Aguan Developments: English vs. Spanish

The confrontation between MUCA-- Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguan-- and the Honduran government that has dragged on now for years, most recently focused on attempts to take control over land claimed by Miguel Facussé, appears to be reaching an awkward resolution.

An AP report published in English in media like the Washington Post says MUCA has "agreed to move out" of lands they occupied in the Bajo Aguan. It quotes a spokesperson for MUCA, Vitalino Alvarez, saying MUCA has signed an agreement with the government

"under pressure and under threat...There are tons of lives on the line and due to the continuous threats to forcefully remove us we have given up to avoid bad outcomes."

Honduran papers, however, report no such thing. Nobody is abandoning any land.

Instead, both El Tiempo and El Heraldo report that tomorrow the final formal agreement between MUCA and the Honduran government will be signed.

El Tiempo says the agreement to be signed tomorrow is for 2414 hectares on the right bank of the Rio Aguan (the east side). The Honduran media report that campesinos on the left bank of the river accepted the conditions offered last week, leaving only those on the right bank not in agreement.

Campesinos have claimed land on both sides of the river by establishing settlements, from which residents are periodically evicted, and which are periodically the focus of attacks. The Honduran government has offered to buy out Miguel Facussé, and Dinant Corp, his business, on both banks of the river.

One of the major points of disagreement between the English language and Spanish language press concerns the impact of a judge's eviction order handed down over the weekend. The AP story, citing a spokesperson for the Security Ministry, Hector Mejia, says that

officials were sending hundreds of officers to force 5,000 people from the approximately 10,000 acres (4,000 hectares) of plantations that remain occupied after a series of earlier evictions.

None of the current Honduran press coverage mentions a new deployment of officers (police or army) to the Bajo Aguan. Of course, there remains in the region a contingent from the armed forces posted there as part of previous government actions.

As La Prensa Grafica of El Salvador explains, the urgency in the present situation comes from the expiration on May 31 of a Honduran government offer to pay Facussé the equivalent of $20 million for the land, to then be sold to MUCA by the government. When that date came and went without payment to Facussé, he

presented eviction orders that unleashed the end of the negotiation, stalled since the beginning of April of 2010. 

La Prensa Grafica quotes Hector Mejia's statement last Friday (June 1) that the eviction could happen "at any moment" because "the order to do so has now been handed down by a judge". In this context, Mejia added that action to remove the campesinos from the right bank of the Aguan would require "hundreds of agents". He didn't say they were sending hundreds more police into the area-- just that any eviction would require that scale of operation.

It is this rhetoric, combined with the judge's eviction order, that seems to be the increased "pressure" and "threat" cited by the MUCA spokesperson.

But contrary to the AP story, no Honduran reports suggest that MUCA will leave the land they have occupied. Rather, what the agreement they will sign tomorrow commits them to is to accept the terms dictated by the Lobo Sosa government to pay for the land they are currently living on and farming. According to La Prensa Grafica, that would be to pay the equivalent of $16 million, obtained as a loan at 6% interest for 15 years.

MUCA representatives had been holding out for a lower interest rate on the financing of the purchase price of the land. They raised concerns about the ability to repay the loan-- concerns the Honduran media say were dismissed by the head of the Instituto Nacional Agraria, Cesar Ham. According to Ham, the campesinos should easily be able to cover the payments by selling the product of African oil palms to the processing businesses-- which are owned by the same wealthy individuals whose land claims are now being settled with funds obtained in part from the loan taken out by MUCA.

In other words, MUCA is being asked to take on a large debt to a private bank, for funds that are being passed on, via the Honduran government, to the private individual who MUCA argues does not have a defensible claim to the land, and then to spend the next fifteen years at the mercy of the processing plants owned by the same individual (and others).

That is bad enough; if they were in fact being asked to leave the land, that would be adding salt to the wounds.

Pompeyo Bonilla

So who is Honduras's new Minister of Security, Pompeyo Bonilla? What's his recent resumé like?

Pompeyo Bonilla Reyes was a National Party Congressman from La Paz in June 2009 when he voted to remove President Manuel Zelaya Rosales from office.

Porfirio Lobo Sosa appointed him to head the Instituto de Propiedad (IP), the government department that issues land titles in March, 2010. In December 2010 he served on the intervention committee that investigated INA's actions in the Bajo Aguan for improprieties.

Lobo Sosa then appointed him to head the Comisión Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (CONATEL) in 2011.

Shortly after he assumed control of CONATEL, it issued a resolution suspending the issuing of low power FM broadcasting licenses for community radio stations. CONATEL argued that the frequencies were saturated in almost all departments in Honduras, and that it wanted to return these frequencies for use by the big broadcasters (so called high power FM broadcasters) to use as repeater frequencies. Low power FM broadcast licenses had first been authorized in 2005 as a way to democratize telecommunications in Honduras. Another of Bonilla's acts at CONATEL was to foster legislation authorizing wiretapping.

Pompeyo Bonilla Reyes is clearly someone Porfirio Lobo Sosa trusts. His government service is sure to be emphasized in coverage of the new office he is assuming.

Honduran sources, however, are reminding people of another episode in his long public career.

Bonilla started out in the military, and was an aide to General Oswaldo Lopez Arellano, who became head of state twice through military interventions (1963-71, and 1972-1975). During Lopez Arellano's second term as president, Honduras was given a moon rock by US president Richard Nixon. When that moon rock turned up for sale in Florida in the late 1990s, Bonilla was one of a group of individuals identified by La Prensa as possible suspects in the theft of the moon rock, which was government property. The moon rock had been kept in the Honduran presidential palace. It disappeared around 1994, and was tracked down in 1998 by federal investigators.

The US court convicted a different person, retired colonel Roberto Agurcia Ugarte, as responsible for selling the moon rock to a US collector, a retired member of the US military named Allen Rosen, who testified that he bought it from a member of the Honduran Armed Forces. But it is telling that in Honduras, Pompeyo Bonilla was considered capable of taking national property and selling it for personal gain.

Resigning Himself: Oscar Alvarez, Presidential Candidate

As we reported Saturday, Porfirio Lobo Sosa is in the process of making changes in his cabinet and has gone beyond that to make a series of changes in top level security positions nationally and in the northwest region.

The article in El Heraldo on Saturday was headlined "Remezón en Secretaria de Seguridad de Honduras": "Aftershocks in Security Secretariat of Honduras". It referred to the "separación" of former minister Oscar Alvarez. It noted that a press conference later in the afternoon was expected to clarify the matter, "la que en algunos medios se ha manejado como una destitución y en otros como una renuncia" ("which in some media has been treated as a firing, and in others as a resignation").

There were plenty of advance indications that might have pointed towards this outcome. On September 1, as he was headed on his way to Kosovo, Lobo Sosa told Honduran media that on his return he would make changes in his cabinet. El Heraldo quoted him saying that he would retain Cesar Ham as head of the Instituto Nacional Agraria, but otherwise not promising security to any cabinet member.

On Friday, September 8, back in Honduras, La Tribuna reported that Lobo Sosa said that he "already had in his possession the resignations of all of his cabinet ministers, so that 'in the coming hours' he would determine 'which ministers will go'" ("ya tiene en su poder la renuncia de todos sus secretarios de Estado, por lo que 'en las próximas horas' determinará 'qué ministros se van'").

So comes the day after, and what do we hear?

Oscar Alvarez is out in public with statements to the press, making sure that everyone understands that he resigned, he was not fired. The Associated Press story, reported from Tegucigalpa by Freddy Cuevas and translated in typically uncritical way by the AP, runs with Oscar Alvarez' preferred narrative:

A top leader of Honduras' battle against rampant drug violence has resigned, saying he lacked economic support for his efforts and had been stepping on the toes of powerful interests.

But this is nonsense. Yes, he tendered his resignation. That is how top government officials are replaced, in the US as much as in Honduras. As Lobo Sosa said on Friday, he had in his possession resignation letters from all his cabinet ministers. It was then his decision who to let go, and who to keep. The original reporting was all correct-- every fired cabinet minister had first assented by resigning. But that doesn't make them any less fired-- removed by Lobo Sosa, for reasons he is unlikely to ever share with the press or public.

A President is not put in the position of publicly firing a cabinet member unless things have really broken down. Diplomacy would call for a cabinet minister removed from office to say something equivalent to "I serve at the pleasure of the President": to note the successes achieved and point to the future.

But not Oscar Alvarez, bless him. He is not going quietly.

El Heraldo's report on his statements to the press sums it up in the headline "I didn't succeed in cleaning up the police nor work as I had expected". It quotes Alvarez extensively from the press conference he gave to present his side of the story:

First, I would like to say to the Honduran people that our post has always been at the disposition of the President and today he has made use of the faculties that the law confers on him....

(Primeramente quiero decirle al pueblo hondureño que nuestro cargo ha estado siempre a disposición del señor Presidente y el día de hoy él ha hecho uso de las facultades que la ley le confiere)

I have not accepted another post. I am not about to accept any job, but rather a commitment that I have with my beloved homeland, Honduras....

(“no he aceptado otro cargo. No se trata de aceptar un trabajo cualquiera, sino un compromiso que tengo con mi querida patria Honduras”)

I did not achieve my objective of cleaning up the National Police of Honduras. I was not able to work as I had expected for lack of economic support; despite the numerous limitations there were attained some noteworthy successes because we were affecting interests related with kidnapping, organized crime, drug trafficking, money laundering and other crimes"...

(“No logré mi objetivo de depurar la Policía Nacional de Honduras. No he podido trabajar como tenía previsto por la falta de apoyo económico, a pesar de las numerosas limitaciones sí se alcanzaron logros destacables porque estábamos afectando intereses relacionados con secuestro, crimen organizado, narcotráfico, lavado de activos y otros delitos”)

In relation to my immediate future, I want to inform the Honduran public that this is a moment to plan, redefine, and reorient my efforts and my actions. We three leave with our heads held high and our conscience clear having made every undertaking, effort, and labor to turn back the insecurity that we inherited.

(“En relación a mi futuro inmediato, quiero informar al pueblo hondureño que este es un momento para plantear, redefinir y reorientar mis esfuerzos y mis acciones. Salimos los tres con la frente en alto y la conciencia tranquila de haber puesto todo empeño, esfuerzo y trabajo para revertir la inseguridad que heredamos”)

If that sounds like a political speech, well, that's because it is.

Oscar Alvarez has been widely rumored to be a candidate for president in the National Party in the next election.

That, as much as his failure to contain violence targeting journalists and activists that has kept Lobo Sosa's government in the spotlight for international human rights violations, may have contributed to his ouster, which, however much he might like us to think this was entirely his decision, this clearly was.

As the Honduran press reports on the cabinet changes noted, Lobo Sosa has said previously that he would remove any government official planning to run in the next elections (which will take place in fall 2013, but for which party primaries take place next year).

What we saw at the press conference given by Oscar Alvarez was not (just) an offended cabinet minister surprised by his removal.

We saw the first public statement of a campaign platform for a real law-and-order candidate whose theme will clearly be, given more funding I could have done more and look how much I accomplished...

Bad Press: Violence in Honduras

CNN's headline on its coverage reads: Troops deployed to northern Honduras after clashes leave 11 dead.

There is, indeed, violence in Honduras. But you won't understand much about it from CNN, nor from other English-language press relying on official statements.

CNN characterizes the government ministry of agriculture as "a national land reform organization", thus managing to use the spokesman for a government agency as if he were speaking for the campesino activists who are being accused of escalating violence.

So we are treated to Marco Ramiro Lobo speaking for INA being framed as the campesino position:

"What is happening at this moment has nothing to do with these organizations ... It is the result of individuals who have committed criminal acts and must be held accountable and punished."

This is contrasted in CNN's narrow-band reporting of different government voices with Miguel Angel Bonilla, minister of communications, who says

"Effectively there are people who are taking advantage of the situation... They want it to look like they are peasants."

CNN accurately reports that 11 people were killed in the Aguan, five on Sunday, 6 on Monday. But it leaves out some critical details, like who died, when, and how. And where it gives "details", it is relying on less than objective sources.

The Honduran paper La Tribuna reports that the conflict Sunday was an armed ambush of security guards on one of the African palm plantations, which have been the focus of contention between campesino groups and large corporate farm owners.

The violence reported on Monday claimed the lives of four employees of a bottling plant and a fifth person traveling with them, shot as they drove on the highway between Sinaloa and Sabá, Colón. Univision quotes regional police authority Roberto Benítez as saying that the victims were mistaken by someone-- he doesn't know who-- as parties to one side of the conflict-- he doesn't say which. Still, that is better than CNN manages.

Honduran press reports, never particularly sympathetic to campesino activists, nonetheless clarify that the government is at pains to try to distinguish between the people they think are responsible for the ambush on Sunday, and campesino groups involved in negotiations with the government designed to confirm title to lands in the region, such as the Movimiento Unificado del Aguán (MUCA).

You wouldn't understand that from the CNN report, which instead links the Sunday and Monday incidents-- one, remember, the shooting of bottling plant employees on the road-- to the long confrontation between campesinos and landowners:

The region in northern Honduras is the site of longstanding disputes over palm plantations between local peasants and corporate landowners.

Of course, CNN got that from a Honduran government statement that said the deployment of 600 troops-- bringing the total number of troops stationed there to 1000-- is aimed at

reinforcing operations to stop more disturbances and confrontations between peasants and private security groups.

CNN then develops its storyline further, relying on the most dubious unverified source possible: Dinant Corporation company treasurer Roger Pineda, who claimed that "hundreds" of armed attackers were involved in the Sunday attack.

Dinant, of course, is the corporation owned by Miguel Facussé, one of the main landowners losing land in the government-brokered settlement with MUCA. Dinant's comments were reported in El Nuevo Diario of Nicaragua on Sunday, where he is quoted as saying

"This morning some 200 campesinos attacked us, wanting to take over a finca, and they wounded 11 guards of ours and killed four of them."

Do I know who is responsible for these latest incidents, which are serving as the pretext for increased militarization of the Bajo Aguan? No. But I know more, even though I have to rely on the biased media of Honduras, than anyone would whose only insight into Honduras came from CNN and other English language media.

Oh, and another thing about the CNN article. The accompanying photo is not of the violence in the Bajo Agua. The caption starts "Students confront soldiers in a protest in Tegucigalpa on Tuesday".

But that's another blog post.

Kidnapped Campesino Leader Escapes

The good news came through late yesterday: Juan Chinchilla, kidnapped leader of the peasant movement under attack in the Bajo Aguan, was free.

Now the details are coming out, and it is critical that they not be passed over lightly.

The article in today's Tiempo is headlined Director of MUCA escapes from his captors.

"Escapes" is the key word here. Despite massive mobilization intended to apply pressure on the Lobo Sosa government to seek his release, there is no reason to give credit to them, as Adrienne Pine suggests is happening in email communications.

Chinchilla was kidnapped on Saturday. His motorbike was found, riddled with bullet holes, near Tocoa.

According to Tiempo, he was found after his escape on the highway near Trujillo, the major city on the north coast of Honduras nearest to the Bajo Aguan settlements. Tiempo says Chinchilla has declined to talk to the police and has yet to take part in a press conference.

So for more detailed coverage, readers need to turn to the website of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular, of which Chinchilla is also a leader.

There, Wilfredo Paz, another leader of the FNRP, is quoted as saying Chinchilla

"is in good condition, although very worn for the beating and torture they applied.”

Paz is quoted as saying Chinchilla is being kept safe in an undisclosed location. He went on to explain that Chinchilla untied himself while his guards were asleep.

Perhaps most troubling is that Paz reported that Chinchilla's guards were not all Honduran:

"Some spoke English, while others spoke a language he could not understand."

I originally wrote the following paragraph as the conclusion for this piece:

Watch for the Honduran police to dismiss this crime as unrelated to the political circumstances in the Aguan; to blame Chinchilla and to try to imply that he was engaged in drug trafficking; or to blame it on a generalized climate of violence. And don't be fooled.

Then, before posting, I checked for more Honduran news stories. Turns out I could not even imagine how bad the spin would be. This is from El Heraldo's story:

In relation to this act of delinquency, the legal advisor of the Instituto Nacional Agrario (INA), Marco Ramiro Lobo, asserted that what those who grabbed Chinchilla were attempting was to 'boycott' the negotiations [with Miguel Facussé, in which he was a participant].

“We are concerned that this act will provoke distortion in the negotiations", said Lobo.

Confused about who these people were, who might have been motivated to promote a breakdown in the negotiations? Read on:

Ramiro Lobo did not directly accuse the businessman Miguel Facussé for the disappearance of the campesino leader, although he stated that “the primary suspects probably come from this sector”.

Maybe there is another way to read this, but I doubt it: the INA representative is subtly implying that this was an inside job-- by MUCA. Think I am reading too much into the way Heraldo presented the story? read the first (and at the moment, only) comment on the story:

I don't know why this sounds like a sham to me, an invented kidnapping that didn't yield the outcomes that they wanted...

Well, I know why it sounded like a sham to you. Because that's how Heraldo wants you to react, and they carefully chose their words to give the impression that it wasn't really a kidnapping.

Don't be fooled.

Welcome to the 1980s

Daily life in Honduras is increasingly much like it was under the military dictatorship of the early 1980s. In the name of security, the country is gradually being militarized.

Yesterday came word that the Department of Copan, along the border with Guatemala, is the latest place to become fully militarized.

Without warning on Wednesday, Operation Fuerza Cabañas, an indefinite deployment of 8 combined military and police units, a total of 350 troops, to the northern part of the Department of Copan, took control of the towns of La Entrada, Florida, San Antonio, El Paraíso, Cabañas, Santa Rita y Copán Ruinas. Police and military began combined patrols, stopping and identifying people walking and driving, and set up 24 hour checkpoints at various points along roadways.

The official policy of joint policing involves placing roadblocks and checkpoints where military and police review the identity papers of everyone who passes that point, by car, bus, truck, or on foot. They inspect everything in and on any vehicles. They pat people down, looking for weapons.

The policy also involves combined patrols walking through neighborhoods, entering houses rounding up people they suspect of being criminals, without warrants.

Most troubling are getting reports from correspondents throughout the country of more disturbing checkpoints set up at night, where the people stopping vehicles are masked, do not wear uniforms, and are heavily armed.

This is precisely what daily life was like in the early 1980s under the last military dictatorship. Travel through the country meant being stopped by army and police units, having everything in your car inspected and potentially queried, up to and including books based on their covers. It meant having buses stopped, young men removed, some taken to military bases for further investigation-- something that happened not just to Honduras we now, but to RNS as well.

First to be militarized in the current campaigns were parts of Colón and Olancho, allegedly to take over security. The military immediately established checkpoints, took over and still control the INA regional headquarters, and began rousting the campesinos of the Movimiento Unido de Campesinos del Aguan (MUCA) who have occupied African palm lands they argue were improperly taken from them by large landowners such as Miguel Facussé. The occupation of this region is indefinite.

In the case of the Copan campaign, the publicly stated purpose is to bring security to the residents of the area. The department of Copan is one of the places where Mexican drug cartels are reported to have established safe houses.

Press accounts of the rationale of this latest deployment is mixed. SDP reported it was strictly an anti-drug campaign. Honduran domestic sources called it a response to the assassination of a congressman from Copan by supposed gang members from Guatemala.

If there were any doubt that militarization is meant to intimidate local populations, Oscar Alvarez, the Security Minister for the current government, has dispelled that with numerous threatening statements.

He said of the campaign in the Bajo Aguan,

"we have the names of a few of the leaders who incite the humble campesinos to take the roads; they will be captured and placed at the order of the prosecutors....We cannot permit that they muddy the name of Honduras and bring water to their mill, which is not the water of honest campesinos, but of persons that wish to discredit the rule of law and the actions of President Porfirio Lobo Sosa."

Is the fascism of the 1980s the future of Honduras?

Only Nightmares After All

It seems that Oscar Alvarez, Honduras's Security Minister, only dreamed he had intelligence that Nicaragua was training campesinos in the Bajo Aguan to be insurgent guerrillas, and that Nicaragua was arming said campesinos with thousands of AK-47s.

At least, that should be the only conclusion possible after Porfirio Lobo Sosa flatly denied that the Government of Nicaragua was participating in a scheme to train and arm Honduran campesinos as insurgents.

Lobo Sosa made his comments to the press after officiating at the graduation of the current class from Zamorano, the Agriculture school near Tegucigalpa, saying

"there is no evidence of any participation by the government of Nicaragua in training rebels to act in land disputes between campesinos and landlords in Honduras."

Oscar Alvarez's fantasy of Nicaraguan trained peasant insurgents began in the cabinet minister's meeting on November 22 when he told Lobo Sosa that he had intelligence that indicated there were armed campesinos in the Bajo Aguan and that Nicaraguans were training them.

Alvarez included a telling detail: there was a large arms cache of 1000 AK-47s, and he knew where it was.

Lobo Sosa went public with Alvarez's accusation on November 22, backing it as something known by police intelligence.

On November 24, Alvarez himself made press statements that repeated all the same elements, but backpedaled on claiming that the government of Nicaragua was behind it:

"The information that we have is that people coming out of Honduras have been moving to Nicaragua, supposedly to train....We've been informed that they've entered from Nicaragua, that they've entered, also, in shipping containers."

Alvarez said.

Unfortunately for the security minister, his claims did not gain wide support from his colleagues in the cabinet.

In fact, one of the security minister's targets actually was another cabinet ministry: the National Agrarian Institute (INA), headed by his colleague in Lobo Sosa's "government of reconciliation", Cesar Ham.

The local INA office was the target of a raid as part of the "security" operation seeking the non-existent arms caches in the Bajo Aguan, as we previously noted, without finding the promised fire arms.

Then an even more important cabinet colleague, Mario Canahauti, Honduras' Foreign Minister, asked for documentation of the claims of Nicaraguan government involvement:

"I need the documentation which permits me to guarantee we have the evidence, so as not to create a serious international problem for Honduras."

Nicaragua, of course, strongly denied training or arming any Hondurans.

Lobo Sosa backpedaled and said he never mentioned Nicaragua. And in fact, his remarks just said it was an adjacent country:

"we have all this located, including the places where they are training outside of Honduras; its a large quantity of arms that they have and we have to chase this down."

Now Lobo Sosa says there's no evidence of participation by the Nicaraguan government.

No weapons, no proof of Nicaragua's participation. But a Security Minister can dream......

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...

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).

César Ham: co-opted leftist

As noted in a previous post, the government assembled by Porfirio Lobo Sosa incorporates former rivals for the presidency (although not all of them: notably, Liberal Party candidate Elvin Santos is not included).

César Ham, presidential candidate for the UD party, is one of those included, named as Director of the Instituto Nacional Agrario.

Tomás Andino, UD member active in the National Resistance Front, reacted to the agreement by Ham to serve in the present government by resigning from the party. Since then, a call has gone out for other UD members to resign as well. Fundamentally, what these members of the party are decrying is a betrayal of the revolutionary leftist roots of the UD party itself.

Campesino leader Rafael Alegría quoted in El Heraldo as saying that he didn't think it was possible for Ham to be part of the Lobo government:

They are making common cause with a party on the right in the country, historically responsible for the delay in the detention of poverty in our country

Those leaving the party over this issue may go on to political activism in other forms. But their departure raises the question, what happens to the UD? And, what is the role of Ham in the future of Honduran politics?

As news coverage in Honduras notes, the UD currently has three different factions. Ham, officially the leader, was strongly identified with President Zelaya in the lead-up to the June 28 poll. A "dissident" faction is headed by Renán Valdez. Separate from both of these is what is described as "a group of militants, founders of this party, among them the writer Matías Funes". Funes was quoted in August, 2009, fiercely criticizing César Ham for his personal corruption, his alliance with President Zelaya, and predicting he would withdraw from the presidential campaign to avoid an embarrassing electoral loss.

In the end, of course, César Ham remained on the November 29 ballot. Reporting on the November 21 meeting of UD directors that decided to continue with the election, news media quoted Ham as saying

The party assembly resolved this evening, after a wide-ranging debate and discussion, to participate in the electoral process in order to permit the people to have representation and defend their rights in the National Congress and mayoralties...in this way the Constitutional Assembly that the people demand can be reached...the Constitutional Assembly should not only be sought in the streets, but also in the political spaces such as the mayoralties and the National Congress.

In his letter resigning membership in the UD, Andino notes a history of cutting political deals with the leaders of other parties to gain advantage in the Honduran Congress. While this is politics as usual, as a revolutionary party, the UD is not supposed to cut such deals. Ham has not responded to the well-advertised letter from Andino, except to dismiss it during a press event where he announced his intention to implement a 2009 law facilitating expropriation of land for rural farm collectives to develop.

Perhaps harder for Ham to ignore is Andino's charge that

Power turns out to be irresistible to those gentlemen, because from it they derive privileges, such as the importation of luxury cars to then sell them.

This is, of course, a reference to Ham's use of congressional import privileges, which was prohibited by UD party rules. When initially faced with the charge in January of 2009, Ham denied it. As reported at the time, it was a faction of the UD itself that brought these charges to public attention. Ham, admitting the use of this privilege, argued that the vehicles were sold to raise funds for the use of the UD party assembly.

Ham started his tenure as Director of INA with this somewhat less than ringing vote of confidence from Porfirio Lobo Sosa:

César Ham is nobody's fool, he is going to respect the law and the constitution of the Republic. He is going to try to come out very well from his position, to serve the campesino sector well... César is going to do well...they are going to do well, they are not going to violate the law, they are not going to do anything that would signify generating an instability in the country because we know that this would not suit us.

According to coverage of the inauguration of Lobo Sosa in El Heraldo, when he mentioned former presidential candidate César Ham during his inaugural address, the crowd that had applauded his comments on Bernard Martinez booed so loud that it overcame the loudspeakers and made his citation of Elvin Santos inaudible.

So who is César Ham? A biographical sketch published in El Heraldo on November 24 describes him as a second-generation leftist, son of a union activist father, with a history of activism at university and afterward. A founding member of the UD party, and a congressional member elected from that party, he nonetheless traced a shaky course within the UD. In this article, he explicitly called on Hondurans resisting the coup to vote for him, rather than follow the call of the Resistance Front to boycott the election.

The UD party, or Partido Unificación Democrática, was officially recognized in 1993, formed from leftist movements that could not be recognized until the Treaty of Esquipulas gave former guerrilla groups recognition as political parties.

INA, which César Ham now runs, has a mission described on its official website:

To maximize the national peasantry. facilitating access to land for the vocation of agriculture and cattle ranching through the expropriation and adjudication, offering legal security in the tenancy, of land assigned, by granting titles in Freehold, accompanied by an effective program of business rationalization that considers attention to organizational aspects and technological advances in productive units, with the goal to generate high production and productivity that will facilitate the insertion of the producers in the local, national, and international market, converting them into efficient, profitable, and self-sustaining businesses, generators of employment and income for the benefit of the great majority.

What does this mean? INA is critical to farmers seeking land titles. INA was one of the sites of resistance to the coup d'etat, occupied by campesinos until they were forcibly dislodged at the end of September under the de facto regime.

César Ham, embattled within his own party, repudiated by the Resistance Front, appointed by Pepe Lobo against strong public disapproval, faces skepticism on every side. Political commentator Juan Ramón Martinez is quoted as expecting him to create problems that will have to be solved by the Minister of Agriculture, in a cabinet characterized as internal unity or ideological coherence. For this commentator, the Lobo Sosa cabinet is temporary, expected to be transformed into a more conventional form not long after July or August. It may be a short run for this leftist turned accommodationist.