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.

The State Department and Human Rights

The United States State Department released its world wide human rights reports on Thursday with much fanfare.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a series of remarks.  After lauding her teams work on "advancing human rights in a twenty-first century landscape" she noted:

Now, every year that we issue this, we take stock of ourselves. We say: What more can we do? Where have we succeeded or are succeeding? Where are we falling short? And we know we have to recommit to the work of advancing universal rights, building the partnerships that will move us forward, helping every man, woman, and child live up to their God-given potential. And we know we have to be able to speak out and speak up for those unable to use their own voices.

It's that taking stock at the State Department that interests us. There's been a blind eye to certain kinds of human rights abuses in Honduras that happen, but don't seem to warrant action by the Secretary or her employees, including the Ambassador. So, we turned with some trepidation to the country report on Honduras

It emphasizes corruption within the national police force, an institutionally weak judiciary, and discrimination and violence against vulnerable populations as the greatest challenges to human rights in Honduras in 2011.

In the executive summary, which is all many people will read, it states:

Police and government agents committed unlawful killings. Vigilantes and former members of the security forces carried out arbitrary and summary killings. There continued to be reports of killings of agricultural workers, private security guards, and security forces related to a land dispute in the Bajo Aguan region. Other human rights problems included harsh prison conditions, violence against detainees, lengthy pretrial detentions and failure to provide legal due process, child prostitution and abuse, trafficking in persons, ineffective enforcement of labor laws, and child labor.

The government took important steps to strengthen respect for human rights and promote national reconciliation, as well as to prosecute and punish officials who committed abuses. However, corruption and impunity were serious problems that impeded the effectiveness of the National Police.

So that's the State Department's conclusion.  There are very few human rights triumphs recorded in the Honduran report, but they state "there were no acts of anti-semitism" in 2011.

Obviously, we would take issue with their statement that in 2011 the government took important steps to strengthen respect for human rights.

They didn't.

What Honduras did do was create a cabinet level position for a Minister of Justice and Human Rights, and appoint Ana Pineda to the post.  But it is at best a symbolic nod to human rights, without effect in the real world, and at worst-- as here-- serves as a kind of blind to serious assessment of the government's abysmal human rights record.  When Pineda has criticized Congress for proposing laws that tread on human rights, or criticized the police for their handling of protests, she's been ignored.  Congress extended the period in which an arrested person may be held without charges from 24 to 48 hours despite Pineda's criticism of the change, as they have ignored her every time she protests their actions.  Her position lacks any kind of authority to actually compel observance of human rights.

Pineda did manage to get a government statement that Ricky Martin should be admitted to the country and allowed to perform his show, after immigration authorities and the government censorship committee threatened to ban him.  The State Department report also credits her as instrumental in getting an LGBT crimes investigation squad created, though its actual accomplishments are small: according to the State Department, they have filed a couple of cases, although nothing about these has appeared in the Honduran media, and none have come to trial. So we think we can reserve judgment: neither of these are significant antidotes to the wave of killings of LGBT activists, the most recent, the murder of journalist Erick Martinez. 

We won't dwell in detail on the many human rights violations the State Department country report describes because as a reader of this blog, you're familiar with many of them, but we would like to linger on the mention of police harassment through arrests, especially in light of events that happened on Thursday, the same day that the State Department released its human rights reports.

The State Department report on Honduras gives a good summary of Honduras's arrest laws, what police can and cannot do:

The law provides that police can arrest a person only with a court order, unless the arrest is by order of a prosecutor or is made during the commission of a crime, when there is strong suspicion that a person has committed a crime and may try to evade criminal prosecution, or when the person is caught with evidence related to a crime. 

 They add, "but authorities at times failed to observe these prohibitions (against arbitrary arrest)."

That's what happened to yet another group of campesinos involved in the dispute over land in the Bajo Aguan yesterday.

The government still has not paid Miguel Facussé for the land it agreed to compensate him for in the Bajo Aguan. Facussé issued an ultimatum this last week, saying that he would go to court and get the campesinos thrown off the land if he was not paid by June 1.

Thursday, more than eighteen campesinos, both directors and rank-and-file members of Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguan (MUCA), were arrested in the Bajo Aguan and El Progreso, Yoro.  Their only apparent crime, being members of MUCA.

In the Department of La Paz, sixteen or more members of Consejo Civico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras (COPINH) were arrested while out working on their communal lands. Children who were part of this group were forced to perform yard work and clean out the latrines of the police post before being freed.

So, yeah, "authorities at times failed to observe the prohibition" against arbitrary arrest.

And that's just some of the evidence that Honduras has a long way to go, and why it will be interesting to see what changes in US policy towards Honduras come out of the State Department's process of "taking stock" of what's in their own country report on human rights in Honduras.

Aguan Agreement Endangered

The agreement between the Movimiento Unificado de Campesinos del Aguán (MUCA) and the Honduran government to buy land in the Bajo Aguan from Miguel Facussé is endangered. MUCA alleges the government is not keeping their part of the bargain.

Decree 161-2011 was signed on October 4, 2011, and gave a 90 day window for MUCA and the government to agree on financing of the purchase through private funding, with the government acting as a guarantor of the loan. MUCA would be responsible for paying off the loan.

According to Vitalino Alvarez, spokesperson for MUCA, the government only got one response to their request for proposals from private banks. That response, from BANHPROVI (the Banco Nacional Hondureña de Producción y Vivienda) agreed to finance the purchase, at 14% interest with full repayment in 7 years, and a two year grace period.

However, according to MUCA, the terms required them to assume all the costs of acquiring the loan (legal, environmental, registrations, etc.) which combined with the interest rate and repayment period, made the loan impossible for them to assume, according to Vitalino Alvarez.

Further MUCA said the government negotiated the loan terms without consulting them, whereas their interpretation of the agreement calls for a mutual discussion of the loan terms.

In any case, MUCA is right; the loan terms are too onerous for them to assume. They've earned about 150 million lempiras since they took over the land in April, 2010, or roughly 75 million lempiras a year. They put about 30 million lempiras of that back into land improvement. The balance they divided among the 3000 families of MUCA. That works out to be about 20,000 lempiras per family, or $1055 a year. Simple math shows they could never earn enough, at that rate, from the African Palms to ever come close to paying off the loan, even assuming the 3000 families that belong to MUCA needed no income for those nine years.

Did the government (or the bank for that matter) bother to even do the math? Apparently not since they presented this deal to MUCA. It turns out MUCA is smarter than the members of the Secretaria de Finanzas that negotiated this deal.

MUCA did the math, and it didn't add up. It would be insane for them to sign the proposed deal. It would have hurt the Honduran government as loan guarantor when MUCA inevitably defaulted.

Back to the drawing board.

As The US Withdraws, Hugo Chavez Moves In

The United States has cut back its aid to Honduras.

The Peace Corp has withdrawn, perhaps for only a month, perhaps for a longer period.

Honduras did not qualify for the new Millennium Challenge grant competition this year, and so has been offered lesser aid.

BID and the World Bank are funding at lower levels than in the past.

Yet the government must go on.

Like Manuel Zelaya Rosales, Porfirio Lobo Sosa is turning to ready sources of investment in Honduras to replace the US and European reductions. China and Taiwan figure large in Lobo Sosa's plans, as do Brazil and Colombia.

But also among the choices being discussed is soliciting funding from Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

Suddenly the right wing in Honduras is quiet. Porfirio Lobo Sosa has announced that a return of Honduras to its Petrocaribe contract is assured; which has garnered nothing but praise from business organizations. US Ambassador Charles Ford, when Zelaya did the same, said charges could be brought against Honduras for violating the rights of existing transnational corporations and their importers in Honduras to sell their products at a higher price, noting it would reduce the profitability of Texaco, Shell, and Esso.

In June of 2008, ANDI and Transportation Council asked the government to supply them with lower priced Venezuelan oil. COHEP, the other main business council, also saw the Petrocaribe deal as good in 2008. PVDSA allowed the government of Honduras to buy 50% of the oil on a 25 year loan at 1% interest. The balance was sold at market rates. Honduras made its payments to PDVSA, even under Micheletti's de facto government, while using the income from investing the deferred payments for social projects in Honduras.

Now Hugo Chavez has offered to end the conflict over land in the Aguan by having the Venezuelan state oil company, Alba-Petróleo, pay the 546 million lempiras on the loan the Honduran government will set up to buy 5700 hectares of land in the Aguan at market rate. This would make it possible for the government to get better terms with the bank.

Title to the land would pass to Alba-Petróleo, which intends to mortgage it back to the campesinos of MUCA and MARCA.

Chavez also offered to have Alba-Petróleo build an African palm fruit processing plant with agreements to give MUCA and MARCA access to markets for their palm oil. This, by the way, would be in direct competition with Miguel Facussé whose DINANT Corporation has already built a palm oil processing plant in the Aguan, who expected to get much of the palm fruit from MUCA and MARCA to process.

The amount of land being discussed, 5700 hectares, is larger than that mentioned in a purchase agreed to between the government and Facussé of 4045.7 hectares. Its not clear where the additional land is coming from, but it may be that Facussé has agreed to be bought completely out of the Aguan.

This deal raises some potential legal issues, since under the agreement, Alba-Petróleo would presumably, temporarily hold title to the land before mortgaging it to the campesino organizations, and this appears to contrevene article 14 of the Honduran constitution, which allows foreign governments title only to the land occupied by their embassy. This could easily be overcome by having title pass to the Honduran government as guarantor of the campesino organization's mortgage.

El Heraldo reports that the rough details for such an accord have already been worked out with INA and it awaits Porfirio Lobo Sosa's permission to go ahead and negotiate the final details.

Facussé expects to be paid on January 4 for 4045. hectares of land.

Cover Up in the Bajo Aguan?

Competing stories have developed about what happened in the Bajo Aguan last Friday, when a combined military-police patrol alleges it was ambushed by foreign guerrillas at La Consentida plantation, near Sonaguera.

The official story today, as told by Secretary of Defense Marlon Pascua, is that foreigners ambushed the patrol in the La Consentida orange plantation. Found at the scene were rifle bullet casings (other reports specify AK-47 casings) and fragments of an exploded grenade. Pascua is quoted as saying

"The intent of these bands is that we not patrol this sector, that the patrols not do their job..."

Well, that's one theory... Its not clear how Pascua knows the intent of the attackers with such certainty, nor why he knows with the same certainty that the attackers were foreigners. Surely by now his troops have had enough time to identify all the foreigners in the zone. Yet as of yesterday, none of the identified foreigners were doing anything suspicious, according to the military.

Pascua went on the radio to tell everyone he's given the patrols permission to return fire if fired upon.

Meanwhile, the campesinos of MUCA tell a much different story about what happened on Friday.

The MUCA spokesperson, Vitalino Alvarez, told La Tribuna that the site of the supposed ambush is not one where ambush is possible. The road is straight, and there is no forest nor bushes to hide in.

According to him, a drunken soldier detonated a grenade inside his patrol vehicle. There are no guerrillas in the Bajo Aguan, he told La Tribuna, only people dedicated to their work.

Vitalino Alvarez was quoted El Heraldo as saying:

"It was a grenade that exploded in the cabin of the car. Also I was at the hospital when they arrived; there was a boy wounded only in the lower legs below the knee; ....how could they shoot him only below the knee.... Another had a wound only on his nose produced by a grenade fragment. If it had been a rife shot, he'd be dead."

El Heraldo's coverage today makes it clear that both the Police and Military agree with the MUCA spokesperson that grenade fragments were in the passenger compartment of the truck, and that it was the driver and passenger in the truck that died, from the explosion of a grenade on the floor of the truck.

Yet the spokesperson for the Xatruch II batallion, Roger Martinez, claims to have bullet casings from Falk rifles, AK-47s, and .22 calibre rifles. He also claims the area where the ambush occurred is forested. He denied there were grenade fragments in the cabin of the car. A grenade would have dismembered the occupants, according to Martinez.

The only Falke rifles I can find are all air rifles; probably the patrol was not ambushed by pellet guns! Perhaps he meant FN-FAL rifles, which are in abundant use by the Army in Honduras according to Janes, and take the very same caliber ammunition as the AK-47, 7.62 mm. NATO standard ammo.

A .22 rifle would be an insane thing to use to attack an armed military patrol. It is 1850s military technology.

It is good for rabbit and squirrel hunting, though.

Miguel Facussé Blinks

Miguel Facussé Barjum, head of DINANT Corporation, is waging a public relations campaign to try and improve his image, and that of his company.

At the same time, he is sharpening his attacks on those who criticize him.

On the PR side, he has received positive publicity for his scarlet macaw research center in Zacate Grande. A year ago he gave over 100 titles to properties in Zacate Grande for things like the town water tank, the churches, etc. with the idea that the town would protect wildlife and encourage tourism.

Today he is in a fight with about 300 campesinos in Zacate Grande over land rights and the right of their radio station to operate.

His recent actions suggest he has reached the end of his rope. In short order, he has sued prominent critics; taken out self-promoting newspaper ads, including one in which he sought to unilaterally renegotiate the terms of a settlement with the Honduran government over disputed land in the Bajo Aguan; and continued his campaign of seeking police enforcement of judicial orders against campesinos living on land he refuses to cede.

Targets of his suits against Honduran critics recently included Monsignor Luis Alfonso Santos, Bishop of Santa Rosa de Copan, and Andres Pavon, head of a major human rights organization in Honduras, the Comité para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos (CODEH).

Both were sued for defamation of character and, ironically, purported human rights violations.

The case centers on comments Santos and Pavón made associating Miguel Facussé with the deaths of 14 campesinos (so far) in the Bajo Aguan.

The cases against both gentlemen were dismissed by the Tribunal de Sentencia of Tegucigalpa, though Facussé's lawyer, Antonio Ocampo, wants to appeal, or to refile the charges in Choluteca or Olancho where he has friendly judges.

Bishop Santos issued an apology for his use of the word "arabe" to describe Facussé, whose family has been Honduran for several generations after emigrating from the Middle East.

But none of his critics have been discouraged from discussing the facts Facussé most objects to having mentioned, the role of his hired enforcers in the deaths of campesinos in the Bajo Aguan.

In his latest move, on June 10, Facussé took out a newspaper advertisement stating the terms on which he would accept government compensation in return for the disputed land in the Bajo Aguan. This reverses positions he has held as recently as June 7.

Then, in an interview with radio station HRN, Facussé claimed that much of the land was worth 300,00 lempiras/hectare, but that he would sell it for 135,000/hectare to the government. A further 800 hectares he claimed were worth 400,000 lempiras/hectare, for which he wanted full price from the government.

But the land wasn't really worth what he was asking, and the government took a hard line on the price.

In today's paid advertisement, he said he accepted the government's offered price for 3200 hectares of land, at prices that vary between 76,000 and 103,000 lempiras per hectare.

But he continued to try to bargain, saying that he would not transfer three farms the government plans to transfer to the campesinos represented by MUCA. Cesar Ham, head of INA, rejected Facussé's offer since it would violate the government's agreement with MUCA.

The farms Facussé does not wish to transfer are called Marañones, Lempira, and La Concepción. Marañones, 400 hectares, he proposes to give to the Cooperativo de Empleados de DINANT, set up for the employees who will lose their jobs in this land transfer.

Lempira and La Concepción, totaling some 894 hectares, he insists on keeping. What's unclear is what's so special about these two farms, located in Tocoa proper.

Why did Facussé hold out for ridiculously high prices for the land, then give in and accept the government's much lower rate?

The newspaper advertisement offers a clue. In it he says that he seeks to collaborate with the government to establish an environment suitable for foreign investment, something that he needs to keep his business running.

Not only did his advertisement fail in his goal of getting a settlement on his terms; it also perpetuated his campaign against the campesino activists in the Bajo Aguan. In it, he announced that he had solicited and received orders from a judge in Tocoa to remove the campesinos who have occupied the farms he does not wish to sell to the government, and he was turning these judicial orders over to the police for enforcement.

Facussé's continuing conflict with campesinos and publicity about the violence against them has cost his company. Significant international financing for his biodiesel project was withdrawn this spring by two separate European sources. This biodiesel plant was to be supplied from his African oil palm farms in the Bajo Aguan.

While attempting to generate good public relations, Facussé has managed to point out that he is the impediment to a Bajo Aguan solution. The scrutiny his position in the Bajo Aguan has invited from international investors is a problem that affects all Honduran businesses, not just DINANT Corporation.

The government of Lobo Sosa knows this, and it knows it cannot go back on its agreement with MUCA and retain its own international funding. The government could simply expropriate the farms in question, and pay the appraised value of the land. It is a credit to Miguel Facussé's power that so far it has not done so.

But when Facussé began to take out newspaper ads to try to take his case to the public, it was a sign that he knows he has lost control of the message internationally, and probably nationally as well.

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?

Dreams of an Insurgency

On November 15, armed guards at one of Miguel Facussé's African palm plantations in the Bajo Aguan community of El Tumbador, shot and killed 6 campesinos who they said were trying to invade the plantation.

The police declined to investigate the latest shootings. They neither recovered the bodies nor collected any evidence.

After these latest killings, Porfirio Lobo Sosa ordered the complete militarization of the zone.

Oscar Alvarez, Honduras' security minister, claims to have information through the Police intelligence unit that there are armed groups intending insurrection forming in the Bajo Aguan.

This is not a new claim; it was made at least as early as February of this year. There's no public evidence to support the claim.

Then on Wednesday, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, declaring that there was good evidence that there was an arms cache somewhere in the Bajo Aguan with 1000 AK-47s and M-16s in the hands of groups being trained to attack the government of Honduras. Lobo Sosa knows this because Security Minister Alvarez told him it was true.

Lobo Sosa indicated a massive, secret operation was underway in the Aguan, to clean out all the known arms caches in the Bajo Aguan:

"We have traces of the people who have been voyaging outside of Honduras to receive training, we have them all located, including the places where they are being trained outside of here, of Honduras; it's a large quantity of arms they have, and we're going after them."

No one outside of the military and the national police knows the target(s) of this investigation. Lobo Sosa claims the current operation will put an end to the killings in the Bajo Aguan.

The first, and so far, only target, was the INA regional office in the Bajo Aguan, which the military and police took over in an early morning raid yesterday morning.

They found nothing.

Why target INA? it might have something to do with the history of the land where the latest massacre of peasant activists took place.

El Tumbador, the site of the massacre, in the 1980s formed part of the Centro Regional de Entrenamiento Militar (CREM). CREM, just outside Trujillo, was where US military advisers trained Salvadoran, and later Nicaraguan Contra forces, in the US's battle against leftists in Central America.

There's a long history of conflict over this land, home to some important archaeological remains investigated in the 1970s by Paul Healy. In 1983 I was advised by the Honduran military that the US base commander had denied me permission to verify the safety of the Selin Farm archaeological site, which I was checking as a representative of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

After the CREM facility was decommissioned, campesinos moved in and established the community of Guadalupe Carney in the remains of the base. Guadalupe Carney has been the site of killings of as many as 17 campesinos in struggles over rights to the land.

Today, both the Movimiento Unificado de Campesino del Aguan (MUCA) and the US citizen Temistocles Ramirez claim El Tumbador. So how does Miguel Facussé come into it?

The Instituto Nacional Agrario (INA) says that the government, not Miguel Facussé, owns the land in question at El Tumbador.

The documentation is stored in the INA regional office in Sinaloa, in the Bajo Aguan. César Ham, current head of INA (a cabinet position in the Lobo Sosa government, remember), said that Facussé appropriated 565 hectares of government land inappropriately, land which belongs specificially to INA, land that was part of CREM.

Oscar Alvarez, the security minister, says that armed groups in the Bajo Aguan are funded by NGO's that are trying to destabilize Honduras. According to him, it's Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who are supporting these supposed clandestine groups. This charge has drawn a categorical denial by Nicaraguan Authorities.

Rafael Alegria, campesino leader and one of the voices of the FNRP called Alvarez's allegations a smoke screen designed to disorient public opinion.

The de facto regime made similar claims about the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP) right after the coup, and harrassed and deported many Central Americans during its 7 month reign. In fact, Oscar Alvarez goes further, and revives a claim that in the 1980s, "several Hondurans were recruited in Nicaragua and then trained in Cuba to try to destabilize the Honduran government".

In fact, there is a large paramilitary organization in the Bajo Aguan right now, armed with AK-47s and M-16s, and protected by powerful individuals, just as Porfirio Lobo Sosa claimed. Except that it's not a campesino group. It's the armed guards hired by DINANT corporation to guard facilities in the Bajo Aguan.

Honduran resistance members argue that these private police forces are being trained by Colombian groups like the Mano Blanco, linked to similar violence against campesinos in Colombia. Reports of former AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia) operatives being hired by Honduran elites were treated seriously by the UN in fall 2009. It is publicly acknowledged by Honduras and Colombia that security forces from Colombia are in Honduras this year on a "training" mission.

It was the spokesperson for DINANT corporation, Roger Pineda, who told HRN radio the unbelievable story that the El Tumbador finca guards were attacked by a group of 200 campesinos armed with AK-47 rifles. Press photographs circulated that showed several of the corpses allegedly holding (in what appeared to me to be a completely unnatural manner) AK-47s.

It's among DINANT corporation's paramilitary guards that Oscar Alvarez needs to look for his arms cache.

But instead, credit the new military operation for the successes it can report: in traffic stops they found 27 people carrying pistols and even a shotgun, without having the proper documentation of their right to own these guns

So José Luis Muñoz Licona, director of the National Police called the operation a success.

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.

Bajo Aguan: MUCA rejects government offer-- or maybe it accepts it

A report posted three hours ago by La Tribuna claims MUCA has rejected the government offer and demanded demilitarization of the Bajo Aguan as a condition to continuing negotiation. The report cites Jerónimo Escobar, described as representing MUCA, interviewed on Radio América. At almost the same time, Radio América published a contradictory report claiming an agreement was within reach. Meanwhile, Spanish- and now English- language press alike is swallowing and reproducing the claim that the deployment to the Aguán was never meant as a threat to the campesinos, but was just the beginning of a little military repression of the general population across the country. Which, for some reason, the Lobo Sosa government seems to think makes deploying the army against the citizenry better.

Jerónimo Escobar is said to have indicated that at the meeting with Porfirio Lobo Sosa, MUCA presented

a "new and good" proposal to the governor Lobo Sosa, on the basis that the proposal that had been made would not be accepted because it would not resolve the problems of land tenancy of the campesino families.

As a reminder, the government offer reportedly is two hectares to each family, one cultivated in African oil palm (which has to be sold to the companies owned by the major opponents of the campesinos for processing) and the other in

a co-investment project that would guarantee the sale of the product to the businessmen... the government offers to the 28 campesino organizations that make up MUCA 28 parcels of land in African palm production so that by a mechanism of co-investment the farmhands can supply the processing plants.

In other words, the campesinos would become a labor force for the business community, taking on all the risks of production, while the processors could set prices in response to international markets, allowing them to make money no matter what the world market did.

Lobo Sosa spokesman Samuel Reyes continued the government's practice of assessing its own proposals as very good ones, saying that

the proposal that the government is making is attractive compared to the counterproposal of the campesino movement that demands the assignment of 4 or 5 hectares of land for each family since that is what the Ley de la Reforma Agraria calls for.

Unfortunately, according to La Tribuna, MUCA did not actually agree with the self-congratulation of the Lobo Sosa administration.

It is somewhat surprising, then, to turn to Radio América's website and find them reporting that there will be an agreement. Datelined just after 4 PM, this story says that the campesino negotiators meeting with Lobo Sosa

estaría aceptando la propuesta que les presentó recientemente el gobierno para pone fin a la lucha por la tierra

[will be accepting the proposal that was presented recently to them by the government to put an end to the struggle for land.]

The subjunctive voice here tells the most important part of the story. Radio América continues

the government delivered to MUCA a proposal that includes 10 points, which in the majority are in agreement with the demands of the fieldhands and others require revision.

The source credited by Radio América is Andrés Pavón, described as playing the role of mediator for MUCA, who is said to indicate that there is consent by MUCA to resolve the confrontation. Pavón is also said to have indicated that

for the moment they trust the word of the authorities of the government that the military and police deployed in the Aguán are to initiate a process of general disarmament and to combat the wave of criminality and not to violently dislodge the campesinos.

This is really the only position that MUCA can take: it puts pressure on the Lobo Sosa government not to turn to military violence, since that would be a public proof of falsehood. MUCA, like the Frente de Resistencia in general, is committed to non-violent protest, so they have nothing to fear from disarmament if it takes place under watchful eyes of international media, said to be in the region, and with the Lobo Sosa administration on alert not to give itself a black eye.

But it cannot be ignored that the deployment to the Bajo Aguan is a form of intimidation; nor that it serves to advance a narrative of lawlessness and violence that is dangerous and serves to legitimate greater police and military repression.

This, in fact, is how the ongoing tension in the Bajo Aguan has finally reached English language mainstream media, via an AP news wire story by Freddy Cuevas in Tegucigalpa. Headlined "Honduran Army to help combat violent crime wave", the story advances the official storyline:

On Monday, Lobo's administration announced it was sending more than 2,000 soldiers and police officers to the Atlantic coast region around the Aguan River to seize drugs and illegal weapons. Drug cartels are increasingly using the coasts of Central America to move drugs toward the U.S. market.

Even if this militarization does not end in repression of the MUCA group specifically, let's pause to consider what it implies for the condition of civil society in contemporary Honduras. According to this story, which is rapidly being republished around the US as I write-- and others in Spanish published previously in Honduras-- the new campaign will involve soldiers assigned to search vehicles and pedestrians and pursue criminal suspects.

This is the fulfillment of the law and order promises that Lobo Sosa made in his failed presidential bid in 2005, and it is worth underlining that the means taken potentially open the doors to violation of civil rights under the Honduran Constitution, if searches take place without cause and without due process. And an open-ended military-police action against the citizenry casts a shadow over all projected mobilization by Hondurans who plan to continue protesting the situation in their country.

Lobo Sosa Insinuates Bajo Aguan campesinos are armed

In remarks quoted in El Heraldo as of 10:43 pm Monday April 12, Porfirio Lobo Sosa dangerously escalates his rhetoric, drawing connections between the campesino activists of MUCA who are occupying land in the Bajo Aguan, and unnamed foreigners who he insinuates have provided guns to the self-identified peaceful activists.

"No voy a permitir grupos armados de ningún tipo en Honduras y lo quiero repetir: no voy a permitir grupos armados en Honduras."

El Heraldo stated that Lobo Sosa said this in response to questions about why he has sent 2,000 military into the area

where campesinos advised by foreigners have invaded dozens of hectares of already cultivated land.

The claim that the MUCA movement is advised by foreigners is a way to divorce their actions from Honduras, to make these farmers into a dangerous other.

El Heraldo notes that Lobo Sosa

has asserted that behind the land conflict in the Bajo Aguán "there exist political interests"

and goes on to add that

some sectors do not discard the presence of armed groups in the region.

A subsecretary of the Ministry of Security, Roberto Romero, is quoted at length as arguing that this militarization of the Aguan in no way violates the spirit of supposedly ongoing negotiations:

"The negotiations have been respected and at the moment the only thing that the secretary of Security has done, with instructions from the President, is comply with a constitutional mandate, which is to generate spaces of trust and augment the security in this zone, in such a way as to control the flow of arms."

Lobo Sosa himself reinforces this grand lie:

"What they (Army and Police) are going to do is remind people of the Ley de Tenencia y Portación de Armas (Law of ownership and carrying of Arms) that establishes penalities of nine years in prison for anyone who carries arms in an irregular way."

Meanwhile, Sandra Ponce, who has the title of "Human Rights Advocate" (Fiscalía de Derechos Humanos), explained that in response to complaints she had initiated an investigation which has already found that

what official sources say is that the mobilization does not equate with a repressive action against persons of the campesino movement, but rather to operations against drug trafficking.

Univision quotes Ponce more succinctly as saying

The police have no order to dislodge the farmhands and their mission in Tocoa is to lower the arming and the drug trafficking in the region.

But who's arming here? not the campesinos.

In this atmosphere of intimidation, MUCA is reportedly expected to come to a final decision today about the no-longer-negotiable offers from the Lobo Sosa government. But the militarization, we are asked to believe, has no specific relationship to the campesino actions.

And the Honduran news media add fuel to the flames, editorializing that MUCA is following a "hard line" and repeating that the businessmen disputing land rights "have asserted that the occupation of the land is aided by foreigners" and that Lobo Sosa "fears that the actions of the campesinos are politically motivated and that they seek to disparage his government with the theme of human rights", concluding that

the greatest risk that presently exists is to continue giving time for radical groups so that they can totally take control since what they want is a greater confrontation to impose their manicheanism by violence [sangre y fuego].

The solution, according to the editorialist for El Heraldo, is simple; people just have to stop thinking that police actions in the middle of a tense land dispute have anything to do with that dispute, and it is up to the campesinos to see that they don't give anyone the idea that a massacre is about to happen or they will show they are tools of the radical left:

the peasants of MUCA have the opportunity today to give the lie, through deeds, to those that see them as instruments at the service of the radical left. They only have to accept the proposal of the government of Lobo....

So we hope, then, that in the meeting today a definitive agreement will be reached so that the government can dedicate itself to confronting grave national problems such as insecurity, without its actions being misinterpreted like yesterday, that deployed armed forces and police to combat common delinquency and organized crime in Cortés, Atlántida, and Colón [coastal departments], and that stirred up such an ado saying that a "genocide" was being prepared against the campesinos of the Aguan.

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...