Big Money's Violence In Honduras

Honduras has once more distinguished itself as the murder capital of the world. In a recent UN report, Honduras came in with a walloping 90.4 murders per 100,000 people, while Venezuela was in the number two spot at 53.7. While many are quick to blame drug trafficking for the murder rate in Honduras, a look at the location of high murder rates within the country leads us toward a different understanding of the problem.

Within Honduras, the murder rate climbs as one travels north to the central Atlantic coast departments. In the heart of this region lies the lush Lower Aguán Valley, a center of deadly conflict over land rights. On one side of the conflict, peasant farmers on small cooperatives claim ownership of their land based on agrarian reform laws passed in the 1970s. These laws allowed collective ownership and the right to cultivate crops both for subsistence and export. On the other, large landowners, including some of the richest men in Honduras, are set on expanding their holdings for the production of export crops, especially the African palm. These producers point to a law passed in 1992 and corresponding initiatives set out by the World Bank for their support.
Human Rights Watch recently reported that 92 people were killed in the Lower Aguán in just the last three years. Most of these were members of peasant organizations but a few were security guards employed by the large landowners. Interviews conducted in the region revealed that most killings and other human rights abuses have been directly or indirectly related to the land rights conflict. Journalists, lawyers and human rights defenders in the region reported that they are also harassed due to their support for the cooperatives. Since 2009, 74 lawyers and 25 journalists have been killed in Honduras. Among them, Antonio Trejo, a lawyer who had succeeded in achieving a court victory for a peasant cooperative in the Lower Aguán, was murdered not long after the verdict while attending a wedding. Five months later, his brother, José, was gunned down in the Lower Aguán while on his motorcycle. José had been investigating his brother's death and had made a public appeal for greater coverage only the day before.

A mad scramble for land has broken out in the Lower Aguán. Many who received land during the era of collective ownership and use rights have simply refused to sell. This has posed a challenge for the government in moving forward with the World Bank-guided plan to implement market reform and increase export production. In some cases, farm cooperative directors have sold commonly-held land to big landowners and speculators without the support or even the knowledge of other members of the cooperative. In others, wealthy landowners have resorted to trickery, threats, harassment, and violence to coerce cooperative members to sell.
In a few short years after passage of the Agricultural Modernization Law, three large landowners had taken over three quarters of the arable land in the Lower Aguán Valley. Since then, African palm oil has become a chief export for Honduras. With 22,000 acres of palm plantations, snack foods maker Dinant Corporation, owned by the wealthiest businessman in the country, is now the largest single landowner in the valley.

Oil from the African palm has gained popularity as a substitute for trans fats and is found in about half of all packaged foods sold in the U.S. and Europe. It is also used in cleaners, cosmetics, and increasingly, in biofuel. Both the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank have provided loans to Dinant to support the production of palm oil-based biofuel, which is promoted as an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuel. Ironically, mass production of the African palm requires enormous amounts of water, which drains the surrounding communities and makes it difficult for local farmers to raise livestock and grow food.
Despite violence, a number of the original cooperatives in the Lower Aguán have managed to survive by reasserting their legal claim to the land. They have been joined by thousands of farm families moving back into the area to occupy about 7,000 hectares of land. These revitalized cooperatives received the support of former President Manuel Zelaya, elected in 2006, who had decreed that unused parcels owned by large landowners be redistributed to land-poor families. He also agreed to hold hearings on land title claims by farmers who maintained they had been defrauded. These plans came to an abrupt halt, however, when Zelaya was ousted in June 2009.
Around that time, the World Bank was cobbling together the financial support needed to expand production of palm oil by Dinant. In April, the WB had pulled together a 30-million dollar package that included loans from Germany's development bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the Central American Bank for Economic Integration. Four months after the coup and amid rising violence against cooperative farmers, the World Bank's financing arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), disbursed $15 million of this package to Dinant to continue its expansion in the Lower Aguán.

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