{"id":15824,"date":"2013-08-16T13:25:39","date_gmt":"2013-08-16T19:25:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress-367309-1145705.cloudwaysapps.com\/?p=15824"},"modified":"2013-08-16T13:25:39","modified_gmt":"2013-08-16T19:25:39","slug":"land-reform-honduras","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sustainablog.org\/articles\/land-reform-honduras\/","title":{"rendered":"Harvesting Justice 24: We Don\u2019t Have Life without Land – Holding Ground in Honduras"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"consuelo<\/a>
Consuelo Castillo and son in their land reform community in Bajo Agu\u00e1n, Honduras. Photo: Jennifer Jewell.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Tory Field and Beverly Bell<\/strong><\/p>\n

Co-authored by Lauren Elliott<\/p>\n

Part 24 of the Harvesting Justice series<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

For the next three articles,<\/strong> we will pause to linger on Honduras. On vivid display there is the search for solutions to the problems addressed in this\u00a0Harvesting Justice\u00a0series: the piracy of land<\/a>, indigenous territories, agriculture, food systems<\/a>, and the global commons.<\/em><\/p>\n

We also focus on Honduras because it is\u00a0home to the highest homicide rate of any country in the world that is not at war. A lot of that violence is directed against communities trying to defend what is theirs. One of our colleagues there, Tom\u00e1s Garcia, a leader of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), was\u00a0assassinated<\/a>\u00a0on July 15. Many more live under continual threat of death.<\/em><\/p>\n

We at Other Worlds hold a great concern for Honduras for a third reason. We are based in New Orleans, a city with the one of the highest populations of Hondurans outside of Tegucigalpa. More than 80,000 Hondurans now reside in New Orleans in large part because of global policies, including those of the U.S. government, that have resulted in high levels of poverty, landlessness, and violence. Challenging the root causes of the migration, in the hopes that Hondurans may one day be able to live with peace and well-being in their homeland, is part of our definition of being good neighbors.<\/em><\/p>\n

Bajo Agu\u00e1n, a fertile agricultural region in the north of Honduras, might at first glance look like a bucolic paradise. In fact, it is part of a historic land struggle. It is also the site of a war \u2013 a strange war, undeclared and largely invisible, where only one side has arms.<\/p>\n

Consuelo Castillo, a community organizer in Lempira, a land reform settlement in Bajo Agu\u00e1n, said, \u201cOur goal is for everyone who is part of the land occupations to have access to land. Land is our first mother. For us farmers, we don\u2019t have life without land.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe’re fighting for our kids. We’ve started this movement for our children so they can have their basic needs met, live in dignity, and have access to education. The political\u00a0assassinations have left some children without mothers,\u00a0without brothers. The kids are the ones that are impacted the most.\u201d<\/p>\n

Consuelo and her neighbors live in homes made of blue tarps, surrounded by patches of corn and rows of African oil palms. The 3,000 residents of Lempira and five other settlements have been peacefully occupying land for three years. They insist the land has been taken from them, mainly by wealthy landowners and palm oil companies who are making money off the global craze for biofuel. In the Lempira settlement, the families have reclaimed the area from the country\u2019s largest and most infamous landowner, Miguel Facuss\u00e9.<\/p>\n

In response to the occupation,\u00a0Facuss\u00e9 and other land owners, together with palm oil companies and the backing of government forces and the\u00a0World Bank<\/a>, are waging their war. In Bajo Agu\u00e1n alone, between January 2010 and February 2013,\u00a089 small farmers<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 many of them also leaders in the land movement – have been murdered. Facuss\u00e9 and the others also use arrests and death threats among their arsenal of weapons to try to eject the settlers.<\/p>\n

While the\u00a0communities fight for legal right to the land, they also pursue their long-term vision. Lempira, for example, has created homes, turned the plantation into a working cooperative, laid the concrete foundation for a school, and created a collectively owned store. Residents are working towards\u00a0food sovereignty<\/a>, liberatory education systems, and collectively run media.<\/p>\n

The History and the Stakes in Land Reform<\/h3>\n

The Honduran government originally recruited farmers to move to the Bajo Agu\u00e1n and cultivate export crops in the 1960s and 1970s, offering promise of collective titles for those who worked the land for a prescribed number of years. Farmers came and established dozens of cooperatives, growing food for themselves and for local sale, and African palm for export. But in 1992, the Law on Modernization of Land allowed collectively owned land to be put up for sale. In the following years, many farmers\u00a0sold their parcels<\/a>\u00a0for almost nothing, either because wealthy landowners used violence to coerce them or because of financial pressures.<\/p>\n

Most of the cooperatives disappeared as land transferred to a few hands. However, some survived, including the Agu\u00e1n Small Farmers\u2019 Movement and the Unified Movement of Agu\u00e1n Farmers, and began organizing to reclaim the land.<\/p>\n

In 2008, pressed by small farmers and indigenous groups, then-president Manuel Zelaya pushed forward a land reform decree that would have redistributed large tracts and granted titles to the farmer cooperatives in Bajo Agu\u00e1n and elsewhere. The following year, in an attempt to block the changes and also to halt the grassroots movement for constitutional reform, the elite and the military \u2013 with at least\u00a0tacit support from the US government<\/a>\u2013 led a coup against Zelaya. Post-coup governments have made it clear they would not recognize the land reform decree.<\/p>\n

The new settlements in Bajo Agu\u00e1n and elsewhere are a response to this. The occupations are not just efforts to create homes and survive through farming, but are also acts of resistance to the widespread handover of land to the private sector.<\/p>\n

Consuelo said, \u201cNo matter what happens, we\u2019re going to keep on fighting for our sisters and brothers who gave up their lives, whose blood was spilled for this land God gave to us, the Honduran people, so that we could all enjoy the land\u2019s natural resources and wealth. Our martyred sisters and brothers may be lying in the grave right now, but as far as we\u2019re concerned, they\u2019re still here with us, standing by our side in this fight. We are not going to give up the struggle. We\u2019re going to keep at it to the very end, no matter what happens.\u201d<\/p>\n

To learn more about the crisis and offer solidarity:<\/p>\n