Honduran Coffee Break

It may be time to buy Honduran coffee. But cautiously.

I myself prefer tea. But when I began doing research in Central America, I learned to drink coffee. Tea bags were imported and very expensive, especially unaffordable the summer I was given $10 a week as a stipend.

Cafe El Indio ads saturated billboards and radio. The coffee that I remember most fondly was prepared on visits to the campo, prepared from whole beans roasted one batch at a time. Back in La Lima, though, coffee came from little brown paper bags with the logo of a Plains Indian in war bonnet printed in red, where the coffee tasted a lot like the bag.

Coffee is big business in Honduras. Costa Rican and Guatemalan coffee may have more brand-visibility, but Honduras actually produces more coffee than Costa Rica, and depending on the source you consult, close to or more than Guatemala. The Honduran government has just announced projections of production for the current season that would make the country the second largest producer of washed arabica beans (the variety that is desirable for fine coffee drinking), remaining only behind Colombia.

Coffee cultivation is ubiquitous in Honduras: a USDA overview this April reports that coffee was being grown in 213 of the 298 Honduran municipios, distributed in 15 of the 18 departments that comprise the country. According to the same source, 30% of the Honduran population was employed in the coffee industry. Domestic consumption has been rising, fueled by urban coffee shops that are in demand for internet access, up 56% from 2008 to 2009. But still, most of the crop (90%) is exported.

Not all of this production comes into world markets labeled as Honduran.

Substantial amounts of Honduran beans used to end up purchased in Guatemala and mixed with Guatemalan beans, since, as a 2010 USDA report put it, "Guatemalan coffee is often sold at a premium in the international market, while Honduran coffee is typically sold at a discount". One year later, that statement had been changed to reflect a new reality; now importers are "more aware of the quality coffee that it is being produced in Honduras which has increased demand within the formal market".

Consequently, one of the reasons Honduras is expected to move into second place as a world coffee producer is "a sharp drop in smuggling Honduran beans to Guatemala" leading the year's projection to be increased from 3.8 million bags to 4.29 million. In 2010, the estimate was that between 400,000 and 650,000 bags of Honduran coffee made their way across the Guatemalan and Nicaraguan borders without being registered, to be consumed under the names of these more established premium coffees. But as Dow Jones notes, "so far this season, Honduran coffee has been fetching higher prices than Guatemalan coffee, averaging $2.46 per pound through Aug. 3, as Honduran coffee gains quality recognition". This year, only 260,000 bags of Honduran origin are expected to trickle across the borders as contraband.

Not coincidentally, Honduran media are also reporting new funding of 11 million lempiras (about $560,000) invested in businesses of coffee producers in Sensenti, in the western Honduran state of Ocotepeque. The funds come from a public-private initiative supported by the World Bank and the Honduran government. About 4 million lempiras ($203,000) of the funding is in the form of loans from private and commercial sources.

A key goal is to increase the export of fine and "special" coffees in the international market. Already in 2005, the USDA report tells us, Honduras established a "Denomination of Protected Origin" for coffee from Marcala. In April 2010, the USDA reported that less than 8% of Honduran coffee produced in 2008-2009 was "specialty coffee", the kind that ends up being labeled by origin at trendy coffee shops. By April of this year, the proportion had risen to about 14%.

One of the two groups receiving funding is committed to increasing the production of "eco-friendly" coffee by 40%, which their business plan reportedly says should increase net earnings by 50% (due to the premium price that would be received for the more select coffee).

Coffee exports continuing to increase are critical if Honduras is to decrease its trade deficit on commodities. Earlier this year, the Banco Central de Honduras projected a deficit of about $6.3 million. At that point the year-to-year comparison showed the deficit larger than in the comparable period in 2010. Coffee exports were specifically singled out as promising to keep the deficit lower than would otherwise be projected. Coffee made up over 48% of commodity export income at the time of that article, with bananas far behind at just over 8%, and African palm oil, gold, melons, shrimp, sugar, silver and zinc following.

But is this all good news?

Concerns have been raised about the ecological impacts of increased coffee cultivation.

Indiana University anthropologist Catherine Tucker notes that

coffee plantations are making incursions into important watersheds and high biodiversity forests. These processes occur in a context of climate change that is disrupting traditional expectations of weather patterns.

As long ago as 1999 a writer for Honduras This Week noted the negative ecological effects of the introduction of sun coffee, which eliminates the need for shade, and thus the incentive to maintain a more mixed vegetation that Tucker argues maintains a similar biodiversity to forests. The Honduran Coffee Institute IHCAFE in 2008 claimed that shade-grown coffee constituted 98% of that grown in the country. Ellen Mickle, who studied Honduran coffee growing for her 2009 BA Honors thesis in Environmental Studies at the University of Nebraska, placed the proportion of shade coffee in Honduras at between 65% and 98% in a 2010 article for Roast magazine.

The amounts paid most coffee workers do not constitute a living wage. US Embassy sources note that even low-wage vegetable farms paying 150 lempiras a day ($8) offered better pay than coffee picking, which paid only 80 lempiras (about $4.25). Progressive media have also questioned the use of child labor in coffee cultivation.

And then there is the question of the social impacts of coffee production, where the most valued lands are located precisely where the people with the most vulnerable economic and social positions live, including many indigenous communities. The research results are actually reasonably promising, although not due in the end to government policy so much as grass roots Honduran initiative.

Anthropologist Tucker's paper for the 2008 conference of the International Association for the Study of Commons describes strategies used by the Lenca community of La Campa, located in a coffee-producing area of western Honduras, to maintain control of land. Here, even as coffee production increased

the community has retained common property woodlots and grazing areas, and created a protected watershed in a cloud forest...forest cover expanded between 1987 and 2000, and protections of communal forests increased even as privatization proceeded in areas suitable for coffee production.

These positive findings were tempered by observations of increased inequality, especially in land access. As Tucker notes, in a pattern unique in Central America, Honduras did not redistribute land to large coffee plantations in the 19th century, one of the factors delaying the expansion of the coffee industry there. She argues that government policy then aimed to encourage expansion of agricultural production fostered a decision to grant land titles to communities, not just individuals. Among those communities were indigenous pueblos that were able to maintain control of land as a result. Coffee production was split among more small producers, rather than concentrated in the hands of a few large landowners.

Indeed, even today the USDA report pointedly underlines this distinction:

Honduras differs from other coffee-growing countries in the region because of the prevalence of small producers. 85,000 producers who annually produce less than 77 bags of 60 kg. of coffee constitute more than 90 percent of all production in Honduras and contribute to 50 percent of total exports.

This situation came under pressure in the 1980s, with a move to replace land titles that were communal or simply traditional (and thus undocumented) with individual titles, on the model of individual landholding familiar in the US, and favored by US-fostered Honduran governments. In parallel, new efforts went into expanding coffee cultivation, with new roads built to formerly remote locations, again with US support. While La Campa managed to control land, the circumstances involved show that this depended largely on the efforts of the local community, and in particular, on the choice made by many to seek communal, rather than individual, land titles.

In another study of the social relations of coffee production, anthropologist Erin Smith examined one cooperative marketing to the Fair Trade sector. She concluded that the Fair Trade movement was "a key contributor to sustainable income generating strategies and socio-economic stability among rural, small-scale farmers" in this cooperative, an outcome she credits to the local farmers' own ability to organize and to international NGO support.

At the same time, she cites the cost and difficulty of being certified and maintaining standards as barriers that the cooperative members had to overcome, and notes that some individual farmers were discouraged by these factors. It took time-- five to six years-- for the cooperative to see the full benefits from the Fair Trade relationship. Participants had to be willing and able to invest efforts for years to see the benefits.

The thread that runs through both of these studies is that local actions by organized groups made the difference. As the value of coffee exports increases we can expect incentives for larger landowners to seek control of more of the coffee sector to put new pressures on smallholders and communities holding land traditionally, or organized as cooperatives.

So by all means buy that new Marcala, Copan, or La Campa single-source cup in your local coffee shop. But keep an eye out for news that might indicate that you are drinking an unhealthy brew.

Suspicious Occupations For Foreigners

Operation Xatruch II confirms the presence of foreigners in the Bajo Aguan

So screamed the headline in yesterday's La Tribuna.

Our gentle readers will remember the repeated claims (here, and here) of the presence of foreigners training and leading the peasants in an insurgency against the large landowners of the Bajo Aguan, always citing "military intelligence" as the source of this gem. Despite numerous previous attempts to locate these "foreigners" on repeated militarization of the zone, none were ever located.

The headline promises that now they have, but what it delivers is something much more tame.

"We have some Colombian citizens, two Panamanians and one Nicaraguan,"

said an unnamed spokesperson for the Dirección Nacional de Investigación Criminal to a radio program. All were in the country on 90 day tourist visas.

He continued:

"The activities they're engaged in are suspicious because some are wandering around selling coffee and fruit drinks in the zone, and others are buying gold from those that pan for it in the rivers."

La Tribuna tells us these are "screening activities (actividades pantalla)" according to the National Police: "they aren't occupations that generate income" an unnamed police spokesperson told them.

Really? Screening activities? Have the National Police been to a market or city street, say in the heart of Tegucigalpa, the capital, lately? There they will find many many people engaged in making and selling drinks to the general population. They do seem to be able to make some sort of living by doing this. Are they too suspected foreigners in the heart of Honduras? Have the police checked?

Its hard to imagine that buying gold from artisanal miners is not an activity that could generate a profit.

Now the really suspicious thing is that they were in Honduras and working, on a tourist visa, which is illegal, but that didn't seem to bother the police one bit.

Funny how all the sources in this article are anonymous despite calling in to the radio and speaking with reporters in some official capacity. It's almost like it's a PR campaign, to make the operation look good when in fact, its been completely ineffective in stopping the violence, or in locating the putative arms caches alleged to exist in the region.

These suspicious drink vendors and gold buyers remain under investigation.

In Defense of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History

Victor Manuel Ramos, editorialist for Tiempo, published a column under this title on Friday August 26. His commentary echoes much of what we said about the legislative moves proposed to shift income derived from visits to Classic Maya Copan from the Institute of Anthropology and History-- charged with the care of all the cultural patrimony of Honduras-- to the town of Copan Ruinas, the local base for Copan's archaeological tourism.

Ramos describes the role of the Institute:

charged with keeping watch over the conservation and diffusion of all the tangible and intangible properties that constitute the cultural patrimony of the nation. Founded in 1952, it has been carrying out the functions that the law imposes on it with the great economic limitations that the same law and the State has fixed on it.

Ramos reminds us that the Institute is not designed legally to develop tourism or exploit the cultural patrimony, and underlines the historic lead it has taken in promoting international research collaboration:

it has assigned functions intended to carry out scientific and academic investigations to disentangle many of the unknowns in the knowledge of the cultures of our Precolumbian forebears and of history after the discovery [of the Americas], a responsibility that it fulfills, almost entirely, thanks to the cooperation that foreign academic institutions and universities that send us their students to carry out studies and doctoral theses.

He outlines the economic model that has sustained the Institute's activities for the last 35 years:

A large part of the financing of the Institute comes from the activities that the institution itself carries out, fundamentally thanks to the funds provided by ticket sales at the National Monuments that are under its responsibility. One of these monuments is the Maya Ruins of Copan, of extraordinary archaeological value and considered as one of the most valuable cultural riches of humanity.

He correctly gives credit to the Institute for the preservation and development of Copan:

It has been the Institute that is the institution that has been charged with the care, the conservation, the investigation and the promotion of the Ruins of Copan, the reason that it has been converted into one of the sites of great influx of visitors to the country. As a consequence, the largest part of the funds with which the Institute functions, with great difficulties because the budget always is insufficient, come from the Ruins of Copan.

In other words, without the care that the Institute has historically exercised, Copan would not have become the recognized destination for visitors that has become a source of income for the residents of the town. This, he notes, undercuts the claim made by the town

because if that situation should come to pass the Institute would enter a phase of economic precariousness and would proceed irremediably to bankruptcy, with consequent responsibilities for the State, since such a blow would lead to the failure to fulfill the obligations agreed by Honduras with UNESCO in relation to the management of the cultural patrimony of the country, above all because the Ruins of Copan are inscribed as UNESCO World Cultural Heritage.

What Ramos doesn't mention here is that UNESCO has expressed concerns already about aspects of the management of Honduran world heritage sites, including endangerment of Maya archaeological sites by a proposed airport, and threats to the Rio Platano Biosphere from development.

Quite correctly, Ramos notes that the town of Copan

receives most benefits from the Archaeological Park, because the enormous quantity of visitors also stay in the hotels of the locality, they consume food, they buy crafts, they visit the restaurants and the shops and use local transportation. All those businesses contribute taxes to the municipality. More than that, the benefits that the Institute receives are really limited if we compare them with those that the entire community and the municipality receives, since the costs for entry are very cheap and if we do an analysis of the expenditures of the visitors we will see that a tiny quantity corresponds to the Institute in the shape of tickets since the major part of the expenditures of the tourists remains in the hands of the local business people.

Ramos ends by noting that while Copan is cultural patrimony, it is not

the sole Precolumbian patrimony that the nation possesses: there are the ruins in the San Pedro Sula area, the ruins in the Valley of Otoro, the ruins in Catacamas, in Comayagua, in Atlantida, in Los Naranjos and El Puente. All of those sites, in their majority require enormous investments for their study, restoration and conservation because, equally, they are part of the valuable legacy that our ancestors offered us and, as will be understood, only with difficulty can the Institute fulfill its great obligations if we take shears to its meager budget in violation of the law.

Even without the political redirection of income from Copan away from the Institute, support for the broader mission of development the general cultural heritage has been, and remains, tenuous. While Ramos does not make this explicit, the vulnerability of the Institute now is a consequence of first, the appointment by the de facto regime in 2009 of someone whose comprehension of this mission was nonexistent to lead the secretariat of culture. Since the inauguration of the Lobo Sosa government, the leadership of the Institute of Anthropology has remained in the hands of someone appointed by this functionary of the coup government, while the position of secretary of culture is held by someone with a seriously flawed concept of culture and no apparent success in governing this critical sector of the government.

The losers will be the Honduran people, whose historical legacies the Institute is charged with preserving, studying, and representing to the public.

On the murders of campesinos and popular leaders in the Bajo Aguán

The original in Spanish; English translation by Adrienne Pine used by permission.

To the national community, the government of the Republic and the international community

On the murders of campesinos and popular leaders in the Bajo Aguán region and the accelerated deterioration of human rights in the country

This is the moment in which silence becomes a crime. Froylan Turcios
He who witnesses a crime and remains silent, commits it. José Martí
To remain silent is to share in the crime. José Adán Castelar

The regimes that arose from the June 2009 Coup d'État, annointed by the U.S. government, the business lobby that has ransacked the country, and the fundamentalist churches, have brought about a resurgence of the repression that in the decade of the 1980s, plunged Honduras into suffering.

If yesterday it was a fanatical, fascist and brutal militarism that trained and formed groups of assassins to selectively and clandestinely kidnap, kill and disappear popular leaders and politicians, today, that militarism that for many years lay dormant, now enhanced with better equipment and greater antidemocratic enthusiasm, has returned to undertake the task of extermination wherever it is directed.

In the country and city, in the protests of citizens outraged by the crisis and the coup, in the students' and teachers' marches, wherever free people gather to protest, the apparatus of death is brought in with armored cars, rifles, teargas canisters, and pistols under the fallacious argument that it is through the rule of law and silent acquiescence forged by arms that progress, democracy and coexistence flourish.

Just when the situation was supposed to improve based on the Cartagena Accords and when the presidents of Honduras and Colombia had declared that the promise to respect human rights is being kept, the bloody acts of recent days have revealed a regression, in particular because the campesino movement has been criminalized through allegations of ties with guerrilla forces trained and financed by foreign governments.

While the situation is dire throughout the country, in the agricultural sector and particularly in the Bajo Aguán region it is unsustainable. The death count has now surpassed 50.

Sending military forces is an attempt to distract from or blur the responsibility of the Armed Forces for the presence of death squads and in the protection of the repressive forces stationed in the region, known for their particularly provocative and homicidal vocation. Likewise, the manner in which the problem is being addressed allows us to deduce that what is being sought is to exhaust the campesinos' ability to fight in order to impose a predetermined solution privileging the interests of large agribusiness owners in the region.

But the blindness of the government, its commitment to big business and failure to recognize civil rights laws prevents it from seeing that, in the campesino struggle, the ability to fight will not be exhausted and that, in the absence of a just and democratic solution to the agrarian problem in the near future, the Aguán region could open the floodgates for actions of greater magnitude that would threaten the future of the entire country.

The escalation of violence has reached a key stage; a dramatic and bloody moment that obligates us, as academic and intellectuals, artists and creative workers of the most diverse affiliations, to denounce the vile behavior of the forces that attempt to resolve the latent structural conflicts in our society through political crimes, cold-blooded murder and intimidation of grassroots organizations.

Additionally, we are shocked that, despite all the evidence, the majority of the media, identified with the coup d'état and dedicated to repeating the official propaganda line, ignores the symptoms of social and political decay and goes on pretending that nothing is happening. As such, femicides are blamed, in accordance with police claims, on the victims; crimes against leaders of popular movements are unquestioningly attributed to common crime, drug trafficking or internal battles. They have even reached the extreme of brushing aside and distorting the facts behind the murder of an adolescent student who was participating in a peaceful protest at the entrance to his school.

These crimes continue to be met with total impunity and are carried out with greater and greater viciousness and cruelty, within the framework of a strategy to instill fear and neutralize our nation's will to fight.

We do not aim to dictate a political economic or social course of action, but rather to call attention to the savagery being used to stifle fair and just social demands. Violence indicates a State incapable of governing, maintaining order and protecting our coexistence, attributes that are the sine qua non of sovereignty and legitimacy.

In view of the above, we urge the national and international community to take a stand against the permanent bloodshed happening in the Bajo Aguán. Each life cut short for the sake of satisfying the interests of the national oligarchy and its transnational economic and political ties, is one more crime against humanity that distances us further from the possibility of rebuilding our coexistence.

Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, historian
Darío A. Euraque, historian
Teresa de Maria Campos; anthropologist and artist
Helen Umaña, writer
Isadora Paz, sociologist and artist/dancer
Aníbal Delgado Fiallos, sociologist
Mario Gallardo, writer
Mario Ardón Mejía, anthropologist
Adrienne Pine, anthropologist
Armando García, writer and photographer
Geraldina Tercero, anthropologist
Manuel de Jesús Pineda, writer
Roxana Pastor Fasquelle, educator
Guillermo Mejía, journalist
Eduardo Bähr, writer
Débora Ramos, writer
J Antonio Fúnez, writer and diplomat
Dana Frank, historian
Julio Escoto, writer
Patricia Murillo, journalist
Gustavo Larach, historian
María de los Ángeles Mendoza, historian
A. Flores, publicist
Allan Fajardo, sociologist and businessman
Anarella Vélez, historian
Héctor Martínez Mortiño, economist
Emilio Guerrero, writer and businessman
Héctor Castillo, artist
Jorge Martinez, writer
Sergio Raúl Rodríguez, musician
Víctor Manuel Ramos, medical doctor and writer
Mayra J. Mejía del Cid, lawyer
Héctor Valerio, medical doctor and businessman
Marcio Valenzuela, engineer and businessman
Gustavo Zelaya, philosopher and historian
Rosa María Messen Ghidinelli, sociologist
Jorge A. Amaya Banegas, historian
Daniel Reichman, anthropologist
Oscar A. Puerto Posas, economist
Russell Sheptak, historian and computer engineer
Rosemary Joyce, anthropologist
Mauricio de Maria Campos, economist and diplomat
Iris Mecía, poet and journalist
Joaquín Portillo historian
Isbela Orellana, sociologist
Omar Pinto, artist
Edgar Soriano, historian
Tito Estrada, playwright
Natalie Roque, historian
Cesar Lazo, journalist and writer
Fabricio Estrada, poet
Ricardo Salgado, policital scientist
Soledad Altamirano, poet
Rodolfo Pastor Campos, political scientist and diplomat
Lety Elvir, writer

September 1, 2011

60% reduction in crime?

Oscar Alvarez, the Security Minister of Honduras, claims to have reduced crime by 60% over previous levels. He "recalled that statistic" El Heraldo reported, when asked about cleaning up the police in Honduras.

Meanwhile, in the same edition, El Heraldo notes that the area around the capital city, Tegucigalpa, is a dumping ground for bodies, 12 bodies so far this month there alone.

(The source of the "statistic" Alvarez cited is unclear. The US State Department cites data from 2009, when Honduras was widely described as having the highest level of murder in the world. Since the actual numbers of murders in a variety of categories have risen, perhaps Alvarez's "statistic" reflects a dramatic decline in some other form of "crime".)

But never mind. Alvarez is busy clearing out corrupt police:

"There have been 196 police officers arrested this year,"

he told the reporter.

That's 1.7 percent of the police force arrested this year.

"You have to note the positive actions of the police,"

Alvarez continued. He promised that in September we'd notice the change.

Alvarez is happy to blame others for any remaining crime in Honduras. He again criticized the Public Prosecutor's office for being soft on crime.

As usual, though, his definition of what constitutes troubling crime and that of other commentators is somewhat distinct.

For example, Alvarez told the El Heraldo reporter

"When minor children take to the streets and take over schools and a prosecutor says that they are acting within their rights, I think that something is not right."

Yes indeed. If all those pesky citizens exercising their rights to protest were just arrested, then clearly, the number of bodies being dumped around Tegucigalpa would drop dramatically.

We need to underline that ever since Oscar Alvarez was installed as security minister, and as a direct consequence of the coup d'etat, policing-- the governmental function of providing safety to citizens in their everyday lives-- and military functions have been blurred.

The armed forces are deployed to the Bajo Aguan, with the rationalization that the appalling number of murders there-- most of which the security forces Alvarez directs insist are individual and unrelated acts of common crime-- are at the same time the reflection of shadowy forces (foreign guerrillas arming peasants? drug traffickers? drug trafficking armed peasants?) that constitute national security threats.

There is a reason the Honduran Constitution enshrined a division between the police and military. What happens when Oscar Alvarez combines the two, and defines citizens as enemies, is the kind of lack of accountability that reminds observers of the worst of the 1980s.

It is worth noting that Alvarez gave his interview on returning to Honduras after signing a new agreement with US Homeland Security Head Janet Napolitano to provide airline passenger information (the APIS system) to US Homeland Security for each flight originating in Honduras.

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.

Congress Enables Embezzlers

Congress just made it easier to steal from the government.

In a reform to the Ley Orgánica del Tribunal Superior de Cuentas (TSE), the national auditing body, they removed imprisonment as a punishment for embezzling government funds, for amounts under a million lempiras (about $52, 770 ).

Now an embezzler who steals less than a million lempiras can only be fined up to the amount they embezzled, or, if they lack the funds, a lien can be put on their property.

There's practically no incentive not to steal, since the worst they can do is ask for the money back-- without interest!-- if they catch you.

Good job Congress! You've streamlined petty corruption in a bold reversal of all those old-fashioned good government initiatives intended to discourage this traditional political pastime.