CAMPESINO LAND INVASIONS IN HONDURAS
Komisar, Lucy
This town belongs to Roberto Suazo Cordova, the president of Honduras. The streets of La Paz are paved, though people in neighboring towns put up with rocks and ruts in dry weather and mud in...
...distrusts the program because grants of land are made to groups, and not to individuals...
...Do you have electricity...
...Surely, we're not guerrillas...
...They live in nearby villages in primitive shacks made of bits of wood, plastic, and palm leaves...
...In a good year, they can earn $200 from the crops...
...In the beginning there was a climate of greater liberty, and the government did not repress the peasant organizations...
...so they plow their fields with the metal-tipped wood sticks that farmers used a thousand years ago...
...Augusto Suarez, deputy director of INA from 1982 until April 1983, told me that the pressure of the military and the wealthy is preventing the reform law's application, and that the government gave neither money nor political support to the program and has cut INA's budget...
...The end of that period of reform is marked by the Olancho Massacre of 1975, when thugs hired by a landowner killed 11 people, including an American and a Colombian priest, who were marching to protest INA's failure for 14 months to act on a petition for expropriation...
...Now land occupations are increasing...
...The company sent cattle to trample their crops...
...The minister of natural resources, Rafael Leonardo Callejas, said he wanted the land for a livestock program, and INA transferred it to his agency...
...Most of the campesinos are illiterate...
...Most had lined, brown faces shaded with straw hats and wore torn shirts and dusty black boots...
...Suarez noted that the U.S...
...The campesinos come daily to work the plots they have planted with corn, beans, tomatoes, chile, onions, watermelon, and yucca...
...Out of 30, only two have not lost children to disease...
...They don't have the credit to rent oxen...
...115...
...It threatens to move out of the country...
...Stomach disorders and diarrhea are a constant problem, especially among children, because the water is impure...
...Several thousand peasants, members of three national campesino unions, have moved onto more than 50 properties, protesting the failure of the National Agrarian Reform Institute (INA) to enforce the land reform law and demanding title to the lands they occupy...
...The streets of La Paz are paved, though people in neighboring towns put up with rocks and ruts in dry weather and mud in the rainy season...
...The lands that are given are almost always given to peasants who carry out invasions...
...The peasants, a substantial sector of the population, supported the coup...
...Campesinos were required to file petitions for land with INA...
...A good part of the millions of dollars spent on the programs was stolen by the people running them, with the consent of some of the peasant leaders...
...Running water...
...Publicly he said the land invasions were illegal and that he would call on security forces to eject the invaders...
...The campesinos are pressuring harder since the ouster of General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez as head of the armed forces in March 1984...
...Ambassador [John Dimitri] Negroponte pressured the government to give the company fiscal incentives to plant what was lost," he said, noting that Negroponte had personally attended meetings on the matter...
...Eventually, INA comes in and tries to negotiate...
...It is the former United Fruit, which changed its name after the "Bananagate" bribery scandal of the '70s...
...Ubodoro Arriaga Iraheta, until recently the director of INA and now the president's top adviser, acknowledged that most of the land distributed by his agency was first taken by occupations...
...They laughed...
...We can't alternate the seven directors of the cooperative, because the rest can't read or write," explained Elvia Alvarado...
...They can't bring their families to the land because it is plagued by mosquitoes that carry malaria...
...Thirty members of the First of May UNC cooperative sat under an open wood shelter on boxes and rough-plank benches, to talk about their situation...
...In addition to land occupations, 350 families in Yoro, in the north, took over a municipal hall demanding communal land that had been appropriated by a big landowner, and over 300 peasants from the major campesino unions occupied an INA regional office, calling for the firing of the regional director...
...But it was given away as a gift...
...He said the U.S...
...It should have been used for state purposes...
...opposition to subsidizing interest rates on loans to small farmers...
...In 1984, the invasions have increased...
...Before, they had worked irregularly as farm laborers for $1.50 or $2 a day...
...In the standard scenario, the owner gets the security forces or his own paramilitary to throw the peasants out...
...And last June, 33 peasant families were thrown off 170 acres of United Brand's land they had occupied and cultivated for two years...
...Several had machetes hanging from their belts...
...Callejas turned around and sold it to Progasa, a private cattle company controlled by United Brands, for $221,500, with a down payment of $50,000 and the rest to be paid in 20 years at 3 percent...
...It's a constant war," said one...
...The land occupation of the First of May cooperative is part of a movement that began here 20 years ago...
...After the election of the current civilian government in 1981, the land reform started up again...
...They're forcing us to go to the mountains," he once said to General Alvarez...
...He says another handicap for the program is the policy of the United States, the country's main lender, which does not show here the same enthusiasm it has for land reform in El Salvador...
...He says officials have used it to line their own pockets...
...Suarez told me that Standard Fruit, the other multinational banana company, won't even talk about land reform...
...We were thrown out by the landowner twice and twice by the army," declared Elvia Alvarado, an organizer for the National Union of Campesinos (UNC...
...If you give peasants loans and charge 16 percent, these groups will never make it," he said...
...But we'd rather die from a bullet than of hunger...
...At least we have corn now," said one...
...Most of them were men, from 20 to 76...
...THE FIRST AGRARIAN REFORM LAW in Honduras was passed in 1962, but it was soon blocked by the military...
...They were rewarded with a new land reform law in 1974...
...In fact, the biggest beneficiary of the program has been a giant multinational: the New York-based United Brands...
...Privately he admitted, "The campesinos use invasions as workers use a strike...
...The Suazo family owns most of the farm land around La Paz, and for six years, 40 peasants have squatted on 122 acres belonging to Anarda Cervantes Viuda de Suazo, the president's sister-in-law, demanding that it be turned over to them under the agrarian reform law...
...Campesinos tired of INA's failure to act on their petitions began to invade land in the 1960s...
...The property, I was told, was worth over $1 million, and the sale was illegal...
...The landowner's forces and the army have repeatedly destroyed their plots and few machines...
...Marcial Caballero, head of the UNC, says the agrarian reform is "demagoguery, to deceive the peasants to get votes...
...And a major obstacle is U.S...
...The program is handicapped by lack of funds and political will, by refusal to touch the influential and powerful, and by incompetence and corruption...
...A peasant joked, "Yes, the river...
...That has changed...
...INA ran out of easy land to expropriate and didn't dare touch the powerful and the military, many of whom had staked out national land to which they had no title...
...Under the statute, land could be expropriated 113 for peasants if the owner didn't have clear title, had more than a certain amount of land, depending on the fertility of the region and the presence of state irrigation, and if the land was not fulfilling its potential...
...In 1979, United Brands returned national land to INA, receiving $200,000 in compensation for improvements it had made...
...showed a different attitude about government aid to private groups 114 when a strong wind destroyed a United Brands plantation in 1983...
...This worked for a while, but then the system broke down...
...In 1972, a campesino march in the capital was followed by a military coup against the civilian government, "to avoid chaos...
...He was transferred...
...At that time it was estimated that 300,000 peasant families in this nation of 4 million didn't have land, though many squatted on national land and simply lacked title...
...They are right...
...But since 1982, only 11,330 families have received land —125,000 acres—out of an estimated 150,000 families that need it...
...At least four peasants were shot to death by landlords in 1984, and several hundred have been jailed...
...But if our people keep on being beaten and jailed, they're leaving us just one way...
...We always return...
Vol. 32 • January 1985 • No. 1
