Report from Land Occupations in Post-Coup Honduras

Compartimos este excelente reportaje sobre la ocupación de tierras en la Honduras post-golpe.

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Poor farmers are taking land from agribusiness that supported the 2009 military coup - and paying with their lives.

It's been more than 20 months since a military coup shook the Central American country of Honduras to it's core. The aftermath has seen a decades old land conflict reach deadly heights as poor farmers occupy agribusiness-owned land, and are often found dead soon after.

In previous years, the farmers would be on their own, but the coup gave rise to a broad resistance movement of which the campesinos are a key sector.

Produced by Jesse Freeston.

JESSE FREESTON: On June 28, 2009, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped by the military and left in his pajamas at an airport in Costa Rica. The military and police took control of the streets to repress the mass movement that demanded both Zelaya's return and the progressive changes he was pushing for in the country. Twenty months later and the military are still deployed, perhaps nowhere more visibly than the Aguan Valley. The region has become a key battleground between farmers with little or no land, known as campesinos, and wealthy landowners backed by military and police. The price of basic foodstuffs has doubled since the 2009 coup, and campesinos have ramped up a long-held tradition of occupying unused land or land in the hands of the country's richest people. A recent study found that there are roughly 300,000 Honduran families in need of land. Meanwhile, the majority of the land in Honduras's fertile Aguan region is in the hands of three men, all supporters of the coup, who are using Honduras's richest soil to produce palm oil for export. This is the community of Orica, where one of the groups of campesinos that organized after the coup are now planting corn and radishes on land they occupied seven months ago.

CAMPESINO (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): I used to make at most $2.50 or $3 per day. The rich man wants us to give him our lungs and grow old working for him, and we never prosper. Our families are always suffering.

CAMPESINO (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): We had to recover what was ours. I commend many who, as a result of the coup d'etat, took off their blindfold and now we're in the struggle.

CAMPESINO (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): We have a right to land. We occupied this land so that we could work it.

FREESTON: The government of Manuel Zelaya, just weeks before it was overthrown in 2009, agreed to grant land titles to some of the campesino groups in the region. In November 2010, the military occupied the region's National Land Reform Institute, a government ministry charged with distributing land to campesinos. Staff were forced to leave, and the military held the building for two months. During that same period, while the entire region was militarized, security guards of Miguel Facusse, the richest man in Honduras, ambushed and killed five campesinos working land they've held for more than ten years. Miguel Ramirez survived the massacre, despite being shot in the face with a high-caliber machine gun.