Vol. 76/No. 20      May 21, 2012

“There were about 45 land takeovers nationally,” Marvin Morales, a leader of the two-year-old Peasant Movement of San Manuel, told the Militant in a phone interview. “We organized the largest with 1,500 families near San Pedro Sula.” The movement is one of 13 different peasant groups that organized the nationwide actions.

After a few hours the police and army came and ordered the peasants to leave, Morales said, arresting more than 100 people. But other land occupations lasted longer and some took place over the course of the next week.

Some of those involved in the takeover in San Pedro Sula have been employees of the big sugar plantations, Morales said. “They have to cut 200 meters [656 feet] of cane to earn $4 or $5, making at most $15 a day.”

According to Morales, the land they are demanding in San Pedro Sula was given to the Honduran government by the U.S.-owned Standard Fruit Company in 1939. The Honduran government promised it would be part of a land reform. Instead, large capitalist landowners are using it to grow sugarcane.

“Sugarcane provides hard currency for the owners,” Morales said, “but we want to grow what we need to eat: corn, rice, yucca, beans.”

The landlords are in violation of the agrarian laws, which in this region set a limit of about 600 acres per landowner, Morales said.

“We’re supporting the land takeovers,” stated Johnny Rivas, a leader of the Unified Peasant Movement of Aguán. MUCA organized a group of cooperatives in April 2010 for 3,000 families after occupying seven farms totaling some 11,000 acres that were part of the palm oil plantation of Miguel Facussé, one of the 10 largest landowning families in Honduras.

The group has been in negotiations with Facussé and the government over buying the land. “They want us to pay $7,000 per hectare [1 hectare=2.5 acres] with 6 percent interest,” Rivas said, “but that’s just not possible.”

Under pressure of a 1954 strike by banana workers and fear of the example of the 1959 socialist revolution in Cuba, which inspired working people and peasants throughout Latin America, the Honduran government initiated a limited land reform in 1962. From 1962 to 1984 small parcels of land were given to some 52,000 peasant families.

More than half of Honduras’ population lives in the countryside. According to a July 2000 report by the U.S. Agency for International Development, 40 percent of the agricultural land is owned by 2.7 percent of farmers, while some 70 percent of farms are smaller than 10 acres.

In a phone interview from Tegucigalpa, José Lizardo, executive director of the Federation of Farmers and Cattle Ranchers of Honduras, the main organization of capitalist farmers, claimed the figures are false. He said accurate figures on land ownership don’t exist.

La Via Campesina, which works with peasant associations around the world, said some 27 percent of the rural population in Honduras—126,000 families—do not have any land or permanent employment. Thousands more eke out a living on tiny plots.

“We are open to dialogue with peasant leaders,” Lizardo said. But the peasants have to “go through legal channels.”

Peasant leaders say they have tried going through the courts and to government agencies, without success. “More than 50 leaders and peasants have been killed because of their participation in land fights over the last two years,” Morales stated, mostly in the northern part of the country.

“The problem is that the courts and the ministers are not on the side of the peasants,” he said. “To be a peasant and ask for land turns you into a criminal.”  
 
 
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