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.

Chorti seize Copan (Again)

Members of the Consejo Nacional Indigena Maya Chorti (CONIMCH), a Maya speaking indigenous group, have seized the archaeological park of Copan to protest a planned police action to remove them from lands they claim in the small town of Nueva Estanzuela.

Their claim is to 350 manzanas (about 245 hectares, or 604 acres) where, in May of this year, they asked the government yet again to give them title. INA has done nothing, according to them, and today they understood there was a police operation planned to remove them from the land; a court order obtained by the land owners.

CONIMCH leaders blame César Ham, INA's boss, for being totally focussed on the problems in the Bajo Aguan and ignoring the rest of the country.


The Chorti have used the strategy of taking over the park repeatedly since 2005 in order to get the Honduran government's attention.

A US Embassy cable from 2008 notes that the Chorti in Nueva Estanzuela (then about 10 families with 52 individuals) were invited by the government to take over a property of about 3.75 hectares there in 1991, and then the owner declined to sell it to them. The land was then sold to a new owner who wanted the Chorti evicted. And so it continues leading to the takeover yesterday of the archaeological park.

Ambassador Ford concluded in 2008:

As the descendants of the Maya who built Copan, the Chortis have been smart to play on this link and lend legitimacy to their takeovers of the archaeological site. Each time the site is taken over, the area suffers financial hardship, and the reputation of Honduras is tarnished, so the Government of Honduras knows it has to work with this group to keep them happy.....We can expect to see more Chorti protests in the future.

CONIMCH expected more supporters from Ocotepeque to arrive later today to reinforce their indefinite takeover of the archaeological park.

Fissures in the Nationalist Party

Ex-president Rafael Leonardo Callejas acknowledged the necessity of working on the unity of the Nationalist party in light of the latest decisions of the president, Porfirio Lobo...

With these words, La Tribuna highlighted what we've been observing for a while: there is a division in the Nationalist Party, in its own way perhaps as bad as the divisions within the Liberal party in Honduras.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the deep rift that has developed between Ricardo Alvarez, head of the Nationalist party and Mayor of Tegucigalpa, and Porfirio Lobo Sosa.

It is normal in Honduran politics for the president to appoint only members of his party to ministerial positions, and to then pack their employment rolls with party loyalists as well. Under pressure to manufacture a "government of unity and reconciliation", Lobo Sosa didn't do that. He not only appointed opposition party members to Ministerial posts, but also allowed them to hire whomever they pleased. And some of those appointments have brought him criticism from party loyalists.

Most visibly, for weeks, Ricardo Alvarez has been calling for Cesar Ham's head, demanding Lobo Sosa replace him and all the other "reconciliation" government members from other parties with National party loyalists. This concern also seeped into his response to Lobo Sosa's recent removal of Oscar Alvarez, Mario Canahuati, and other government officials.

In reaction, Ricardo Alvarez is reported to have said

"With respect to the changes I can say that I respect the decisions (but) I cannot say in this moment whether I share them or not because I do not understand them, because we are talking about five ex-officials of the first order, good Hondurans, excellent employees, and extraordinary Nationalist party members."

Two of those dismissed (Oswaldo Guillén and Nasry Asfura) are followers of Ricardo Alvarez's movement within the National party, and Oscar Alvarez was widely rumored to be a protege.

Lobo Sosa and Ricardo Alvarez were supposed to meet this morning to discuss the firings, but at the last minute, Lobo Sosa canceled out.

(He opted instead to attend a ceremony at which he was awarded an honorary doctorate for his "support of non-discrimination" for hosting the Summit of Afrodescendent Peoples in August. The honorary degree was conferred by the Centro de Estudios para la Democracia Popular of Chile, la Universidad Internacional Euroamericana de España y la Universidad de la República de Chile. You can see why that would be more important than meeting with the leader of a major movement in the party of which he is the sitting president.)

He attributed the criticism from his fellow party members to "ambitions and economic interests."

Oscar Alvarez and Mario Canahuati, like Ricardo Alvarez, have presidential aspirations. This is a complication in relationships within the Nationalist party, including those to Porfirio Lobo Sosa. While a Honduran president cannot run for re-election, he certainly can extend his influence through relationships with candidates vying within his party for nomination.

Exhibit A: ex-president Callejas, stepping in to try to promote party unity, he says. No fan of Lobo Sosa's "government of reconciliation", he called on Lobo to rethink it before the end of the year and undo it.

So are Ricardo Alvarez and Rafael Callejas being unfair to Lobo Sosa? Maybe not.

While Lobo Sosa states that those dismissed were fired because they failed to meet his goals for them, Eduardo Facussé noted that the dismissals favor the presidential candidacy of the head of the Congress, Juan Orlando Hernandez, to the detriment of Ricardo Alvarez.

Although his critics within the Nationalist party are not his rivals for office, because he cannot be re-elected, they are potential rivals for leadership within the party. Lobo Sosa has promoted positioning of the Nationalist party as a force of "Christian humanism" since before he was inaugurated, a position also endorsed by Ricardo Alvarez.

More distinctive has been his allegiance to the idea of what originally was called a "government of unity and reconciliation" when the US promoted it as evidence of unification after the coup. Long after there is anything to gain from this concept, long after it has become a problem for him with his own party, and despite a lack of effectiveness on the part of some of his "unity" appointees, Lobo Sosa seems to think this distinction is worth defending.

Hence his reply to the harangues from his own party:

"It's not important to me, the price I have to pay for the intolerance of a few leaders of my party who question constantly my government of integration...they will not vanquish me."

Only Nightmares After All

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alvarez said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lobo Sosa, the Bajo Aguan, and the OAS

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ahem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pretty strong aversion to farm machinery.

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

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

Agrarian Activism, Agrarian Reform and Agrarian Law in Honduras

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miguel Facussé Explains the Importance of the Bajo Aguan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selective memory and the Campesinos of the Bajo Aguan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.