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.

Aguan Agreement Endangered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the drawing board.

Cover Up in the Bajo Aguan?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vitalino Alvarez was quoted El Heraldo as saying:

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

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

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

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

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

It is good for rabbit and squirrel hunting, though.