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.

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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.

Fallout from UD participation in Lobo government

In an open letter dated January 28, translated and published in both Spanish original and English by Adrienne Pine, UD party member Tomás Andino, former member of the UD Directivo Nacional and former Diputado suplente (substitute congress-member), renounced his party membership to protest the loss of direction signaled by other party members, Marvin Ponce and Cesar Ham, accepting positions in the National Party-led government.

Ham, as we noted in the previous post, has been sworn in as a member of the Lobo cabinet. Ponce was named to a leadership position in the National Congress.

Most significant going forward, Andino calls on other members of the UD, the sole leftist party authorized by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, to join him to build a new electoral movement through the National Resistance Front:

It is my opinion that the political option of the people should be built from the base of the Popular Resistance, and as such I invite all honest UD members to leave the party so we can join together with other sectors of the revolutionary left to turn it into a huge political movement that will bring Honduras to socialism.

Andino has been participating in the Resistance since the very first day of the coup; you can listen to his first-hand report broadcast June 29 on Radio Liberada, in which he describes the farce of Congress on June 28, reminding us that the "justification" of the coup d'etat that day was a forged letter of "resignation". In November, Andino rejected his party leaders participation in the election, against the call for boycott by the Frente.

While it is still unclear how the Frente will decide to pursue its goals, and the UD party has been a tiny minority throughout its brief history, this is how new political movements are born.