While I was in Honduras I visited a peasant community called Unidad al Campo (Unity in the Countryside) in Guaimaca. It was settled by landless peasants about 13 years ago and the people living the are members of the National Agricultural Workers Union. The land was totally unoccupied, nothing being done with it, and they lived peacefully for about 4 years, growing beans, maize and bananas, raising pigs.
Then one of the local businessmen, who owns the gas station, turned up claiming the land belonged to him. He wants to sell it to a land speculator. Despite not having any titles to prove this, the police sided with him, and began regularly harassing the peasants, pulling down their houses. The businessman has also hired gun thugs to harrass the community. The National Agrarian Reform Institute was controlled by the supporters of the 2009 coup at this time and did not provide any assistance, and was actially providing fake land titles to other landlords. In the past they used to have policy to support peasants using land productively, but this was torn up after the 2009 coup. One peasant has had their house destroyed 5 times. The union leader, with the red hat with the union symbol on, standing next to the newly elected local LIBRE party mayor, has lost his whole family.
The community can't build anything more than shacks or properly maintain the land as they used to due to the harassment. They need to bring extra water for the crops, but they have to do this at night as thugs hired by the supposed landowner will attack them if they see a water truck. The community is about half the size it once was (it's now about 25 people, shared between two family groups), because last year a gunmen hired by the landlord shot dead a man and his wife while they were planting banana trees. The shack with the rusted corrogated roof with no door was where it happened. That section of the community, there were about 5 shacks, has been declared a no go zone by a local judge, effectively evicting the peasants, though some continue to raise maize and live on the land illegally. The evicted people have moved to Tegucigalpa. Many have family who have headed north to the US.
We went to visit the community with the Vice Minister of Agrarian Reform Rafael Alegria. To keep us safe from the thugs or anyone else, we went with police escort armed with Israeli assault rifles. It felt extremely wrong to hear the community describe how badly the police had treated them, while being the sole reason heavily armed policemen were walking around their community.
What the Ministry is doing in the short term is coordinating with the Security Ministry to order the police away from the area (which they seem to be sticking too) and conducting an investigation into who really possesses the land titles. What these people need is land titles based on usufruct rights - if you are using the land productively, to feed people, which they are, then they should have the right to that land. More so than a petty businessman who has been willing to orchestrate suffering on these people for nothing more than personal gain. These are peaceful people who just want to look after the land but can’t because someone wants to make money out of it and them.
