Hondurans fight back

The June 28, 2009, military coup in Honduras and the brutal repression ever since, made plain the ruthless backlash in store for those who move to alter the direction set by capitalism's laws of development. Despite Obama's verbal opposition to the coup, the behemoth to the north effectively supported it by continuing the training of the Honduran military and looking the other way as the illegitimate regime committed monstrous human rights violations in suppressing the resistance from below. (See "Eyewitness Report on Honduras Resistance," Oct.-Nov. 2009 N&L.) Going against many Latin American countries from Mexico to Brazil, the U.S. recognized the government of President Porfirio Lobo, elected illegitimately under the coup regime.

Lobo has put the full force of the state behind the expropriation of peasant farmers in the Bajo Aguan area. On April 10, 3,000 military troops and police were mobilized on the eve of negotiations over 20,000 hectares (almost 50,000 acres) of land "bought" (read: snatched) from cooperatives in the 1990s through bribes and assassinations.

Some 3,500 dispossessed farming families from the cooperatives, formed the Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguan (Unified Peasant Movement of Aguan, or MUCA). Their lawsuits, peaceful protests and land occupations culminated in a negotiation process, which achieved an important agreement under President Manuel Zelaya two weeks before he was overthrown in the 2009 coup. Under the agreement, allegations of coercion and fraud in the land sales were to be investigated. Land subject to illegalities in the sales process would be returned to the cooperatives.

After the coup the accords were not implemented, so on Dec. 9, 2009, the MUCA began reoccupying the farms they had been driven from. President Lobo presented a new proposal under which only a portion of land would be returned, and the peasants would have to buy that land and then devote half of the land to African palm, whose produce would be sold only to the capitalist expropriators, effectively subordinating the peasants to them.

Lobo's "negotiations" have been carried out in an atmosphere of military intimidation, assassinations of up to 12 MUCA members, dozens of eviction orders, hundreds of arrest warrants, and a media campaign linking the MUCA to the bogeymen of "terrorism," drug trafficking, Venezuela, Cuba and the Colombian FARC guerrillas. But it was the big, exploitative Honduran landowners who were found by a UN investigation to have hired 40 members of the right-wing paramilitary Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. The UN report also documented 120 foreign paramilitary mercenaries involved in the coup.

In issuing an alert about Bajo Aguan, Rights Action is calling for international solidarity, particularly from those in the U.S., whose government is supporting the Lobo regime and still disregarding human rights violations. (See "Land Crisis & Repression in Aguán, Honduras," by Annie Bird, Rights Action, April 2010.) The MUCA, as one of many creative ways that the resistance continues in Honduras and is challenging existing social relations, needs our solidarity.

--Franklin Dmitryev

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