Land's End
It is quite likely that many people in the United States first learned of Honduras and El Salvador when, settling down with their evening papers sometime in early July, 1969, they read of...
...Both of these groups represented an oligarchy which based its wealth on cattle or mining and which provided the offiaers of the army as well...
...Banco Central de Honduras, cited in Ibid., Table 6. 34...
...On May 18, 1975, the 38,000 member National Peasant Union (UNC) seized land on 128 farms throughout the country, withdrawing only when the government threatened to remove them by force...
...Maldonado, the progressive head of INA, to diplomatic exile in Washington, thus depriving the agrarian reform agency of its key leadership...
...They soon were fighting these workers' unionization plans and firing the principal activists who worked on the plantation...
...4 2 In December 1974, they pressured Lopez Arellano to retire some older colonels who still headed combat units, took control of the Supreme Council in February 1975, and forced L6pez' own resignation as chief of the military a month later...
...On the one hand, by moving toward civilian control, the military implicitly acknowledged that it was becoming increasingly unpopular...
...The Las Isletas Peasants Enterprise* was begun as a workers' collective on lands abandoned by Standard Fruit after Hurricane Fifi destroyed their plantations in 1974...
...As in the earlier law, the new legislation had a dual purpose...
...Roger Burbach, "Honduras: Challenging Castle & Cooke," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...21NACLA Report Soon after announcing it, the Honduran government halved the tax, thereby saving United Brands an estimated $7.5 million that year alone...
...On the other hand, they could force the cooperative to make such investments via quality-control clauses written into their sales contracts...
...A glance at the results of the reform after five years reveals that this willingness faded quickly as the government changed hands...
...the Workers Confederation of Honduras (CTH), a 45,000 member labor organization founded in 1964 by the main urban labor and peasant federations linked to ORIT...
...He was replaced by a junta led by General Policarpo Paz Garcia, the chief of the armed forces and head of the junta...
...Durham, Scarcity & Survival, p. 162...
...Melgar Castro's solution was to move in both directions at once...
...Agriculture dominated the economy, contributing 40% of the GNP in 1965 compared to 29% for El Salvador and 23% for Brazil...
...5. Du.ham, Scarcity & Survival, p. 25...
...Mary Jeanne Reid Martz, The Central American Soccer War: Historical Patterns and Internal Dynamics of OAS Settlement Procedures (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1978), pp...
...One was composed of the traditional oligarchs whose wealth was tied up in the land: cattle ranchers, large farmers and those linked to the banana companies...
...Unable to force Honduras to keep the Salvadorean settlers, El Salvador eventually had to open its borders to some 60,000 who poured back into their native land...
...New York Times, July 22, 1975...
...Washington Post, July 28, 1975...
...Rather, it would serve to relieve pressure on the land in the southern and western areas of the country, opening new opportunities for Honduran peasants to settle there...
...Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1975...
...For Honduras, the war was nothing short of monumental...
...1 3 For the next five years, INA would be a useful, if limited, ally of the peasants...
...In a 1967 petition to the Honduran president, FENAGH argued that, "It is foreigners who are usurping rural properties, especially foreigners of Salvadorean nationality...
...Inforpress Centroamericana [Guatemala], No...
...3 2 But, whereas in 1960 the companies controlled 81% of all banana lands, this had slipped to 69% by 1970.3Much of the land returned by the U.S...
...The agreement included the requirement that Las Isletas meet stringent quality standards entailing the use of high-cost fertilizers and pesticides, despite which Standard still rejected 20-30% of their yearly production as "unacceptable...
...Foreign investors swept in with projects in chemicals, petroleum, paper products, pharmaceuticals and textiles...
...Their mutilated bodies were found a week later in a dynamited well on the ranch of a wealthy landowner...
...Three factors would change this in the post-World War II period...
...But the nature of the decisive event was...
...Ironically, it was strengthened when Honduras pulled out of the Common Market because Honduran manufacturers no longer had to compete with a huge influx of consumer goods from El Salvador and Guatemala...
...Aided by some local cattle ranchers, the soldiers attacked the marchers, who were meeting in a training center...
...26, 1975...
...began to hire wage laborers to help them on the plantation...
...In the mid-1970s, Standard continued to hold 168,000 acres and the Tela Railroad Co...
...Gustavo Alvarez was on the payroll of Castle & Cooke...
...The case of "Guanchias Limited" provides an interesting insight into the emerging relationship between peasant cooperative producers and the U.S...
...Be that as it may, there was now pressure on the Honduran government to expel the Salvadoreans as "troublemakers" and "land usurpers...
...and Lt...
...A Honduran loss led to the expulsion of thousands more Salvadoreans from the Honduran countryside...
...But it was L6pez Arellano who paid the price for the Bananagate affair...
...Under it, a single, non-partisan candidate would run for president in the June 1971 elections, and a program of reforms, albiet minimal, would be instituted...
...See Guillermo Molina Chocano, "Honduras: El proceso electoral," Le Monde Diplomatique (August 1980), p. 2 7 . 21...
...Posas, Lucha ideoldgica, pp...
...The multinationals benefited from this arrangement in other ways as well...
...Ibid...
...A total of 120,000 minifundistas constituting 67% of the farming population occupied only 12% of the rural farmland, while 667 large landowning families held 27% of the land...
...4 1 Who pocketed the payoff...
...And, on June 25, they led a nationwide "hunger march" which was to converge on the nation's capital from five directions...
...Following a series of heated controversies between INA's director and the commission, Sandoval resigned in early 1977, thereby laying to rest the 1975 agrarian reform law...
...Salvadorean troops quickly pushed to the town of Nueva Ocotepeque and threatened to isolate the country completely by cutting off road transit to Guatemala and Nicaragua...
...Its coffers brimming with profits from record coffee sales in the 1945-1950 period, the country industrialized rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s...
...Further, as with the 1962 law, its application was dependent on the willingness of INA and the government to honor it...
...Prior to the storming of Las Isletas, Donald J. Kirchhoff acknowledged that his company had made $80,000-a-year "special payments" in four Latin American countries for over 15 years...
...49-50...
...But it had the opposite effect on the peasant movement...
...Thomas P. Anderson, The War oftheDispossessed...
...In the late 1960s, he would ally with the reformers and, in 1972, again take over the presidency, this time drawing his support from the peasant organizations and encouraging a new process of agrarian reform...
...A well-run cooperative could result in better housing and social services for its members...
...Cruz named an old, reactionary politician, Horacio Moya Posas, to head the National Agrarian Institute (INA...
...Given that the two parties could still muster a considerable amount of influence, the reformers accepted the compromise, and Ram6n Ernesto Cruz, an old lawyer from the National Party, was elected president in 1971...
...Over the next two years, more than 600 peasant settlements were established...
...It would not initiate actions on their behalf, but its support of land seizures would spell the difference between success and failure...
...Posas, "Politica estatal," p. 84...
...3 8 And they also became intertwined with the major multinational firms engaged in ranching and meat processing: United Brands, Standard Brands, International Foods (Albertini International), Cawtle & Cooke and Agrodinfinlica...
...The Nationals and the conservative wing of the Liberals fully expected that elections would be their means for returning the country to the old mechanisms of political domination which had been shaken by the reformist attempt...
...Decree 8 regulations expired in late 1974 and were replaced in early 1975 by a new agrarian reform law which was written with the advice of specialists from the University of Wisconsin...
...There had been an important change between 1963 and the early 1970s which facilitated this strategy...
...Amilcar Zelaya Rodriguez, chief of military security...
...United Fruit), 133,000 acres...
...In the early 1970s, the members of "Guanchias Ltd...
...Mill...
...When the editor of the liberal daily, El Tiempo, published several stories linking high members of the military regime with the cocaine trade, he was arrested...
...1977), p. 144...
...At the same time, L6pez Arellano, who halted the reform in 1963, now sought its reinitiation as part of his own search for a new political base...
...On April 9, they reported that United Brands had paid a $1.25 million bribe to an official of the Honduran government in exchange for relief from an export tax on bananas.` 0 The new 500-a-box tax had been levied by Honduras a year earlier as part of a plan by the seven Central and South American banana-producing countries (the Union of Banana Exporting Countries) to recoup some of their losses due to escalating fuel costs...
...Finally, as in El Salvador, the large landowners resisted most attempts to change landholding patterns...
...The War and its Consequences If this was a soccer war, then the tens of thousands of Salvadorean peasants were the ball, kicked from one country to the other...
...They were freed from union contracts and other labor disputes on the plantations...
...Posas, "Politica estatal," p. 97...
...See Table 2.) Bananagate For most of the century, decisions made in the corporate boardrooms of the banana companies in the United States would determine the course of events in Honduras...
...On February 3, 1975, Eli Black, United Brands' chairman, tossed his briefcase through his sealed skyscraper window and followed it down 44 floors to the street below...
...A Reform which Satisfies Few As mild as it was, the 1975 agrarian reform law was condemned by the Private Enterprise Council (COHEP), one of the original supporters of L6pez Arellano's reform alliance in 1970...
...The Cooperatives and the Fruit Companies Aside from what seems to have been an honest concern for the increasingly desperate state of the peasantry, the government's eager 19NACLA Report promotion of peasant cooperatives was consistent with the evolving production strategy of the U.S.-based fruit companies...
...14NovlDec 1981 The government picked the inert National Agrarian Institute (INA) to implement its policy...
...It sought both to replace traditional low-productivity properties with modern capitalist enterprises and to contain the peasants' militant land seizures which had become epidemic after Hurricane Fifi destroyed nearly 60% of the country's agricultural production in September 1974...
...The industrial workforce tended to be organized along craft lines (tailors, shoemakers, butchers) or in small industrial groupings (food workers, construction trades, metal workers, miners...
...Previous NACLA Reports have documented the far from disinterested role of Castle & Cooke in this affair...
...pp...
...To the extent that the unions increasingly acquired the characteristics of a political pressure group, presenting demands which spread beyond the immediacy of labor-employer relations in a local workplace, they were considered the proper instrument to use in the political struggle...
...Wall StreetJournal, April 10, 1975...
...In its 1977-1981 "Country Report" on Honduras, AIFLD alluded to the militant leadership in the unions as a "new danger" and pledged itself "to actively seek to counteract the negative action and the danger of political and ideological infiltration as represented by antidemocratic forces at work that are trying to undermine the mere existence of the national democratic trade union organizations...
...It promised to distribute within a fiveyear period almost 1 /2million acres (600,000 hectares) to 120,000 peasant families...
...In Honduras, the level of revolutionary activity and reactionary repression was lower than in the neighboring countries...
...This time, moreover, they vowed not to leave...
...They have turned the have-nots against the haves...
...This sector had benefitted from government credits during the 1960s...
...4 4 And, it is hard to imagine that the president wouldn't have questioned the reduction in the banana export tax...
...Elections on the Agenda As the government of Melgar Castro struck out against the peasant and workers' movement, it announced that general elections would be held in 1979...
...Castle & Cooke continued to operate in Honduras under the name Standard Fruit...
...Above all, it remained tightly controlled by a handful of large landowners...
...Omitting only apple pie and motherhood, FENAGH's director charged that the new law "attacked private property, the democratic system, liberty 20NovlDec 1981 and indivduality...
...Its leaders languishing in jail, Las Isletas, was systematically milked dry over the next few years...
...3. Ibid., p. 50...
...In October 1975, he sent Col...
...A reform movement coalesced, based on a common opposition to continued rule by the traditional conservative political parties...
...The Horcones massacre caused the Church to pull back some of its priests from Olancho and discouraged some others from social activism...
...Now, with the approval of the Ministry of Labor, and funds and support from AIFLD, so-called "democratic fronts" arose in both unions...
...Democratic Fronts" The ranchers' and landowners' ability to halt the agrarian reform soon encouraged reactionary moves in other areas...
...Through violence and intimdation, they managed to gain control of both...
...New York Times, Nov...
...In Guatemala, a month before Melgar Castro was ousted in Honduras, the Army massacred 114 peasants in Panzos, thus igniting a new phase in the ongoing war between the rich and the poor in that country...
...Many of the older, corruptiontainted officers, were purged...
...Jos6 Domingo Alvarez, the Air Force commander...
...For their part, the cooperatives can only be seen as a limited victory for the peasants...
...success meant reproducing the same exploitative relationships which had characterized their own relationship to the U.S...
...XI, No...
...Seventy-seven percent responded favorably while only five percent said no.12 The wave of land seizures placed the government in an unusual position...
...Thus, it was not unusual that the coup de grace for Honduras 1975 agrarian reform would be dealt from the New York offices of United Brands...
...Secondly, in the 1950s commercial crops-cotton, coffee and cattle-expanded, threatening the subsistence farmers...
...92-3...
...In the same year, industry contributed 12% of GNP in Honduras compared to 16% and 22% in El Salvador and Brazil, respectively...
...Miami Herald, June 15, 1975...
...While momentary circumstances and a policy of alliances with the workers and peasants would propel this new bourgeoisie into a position of state control, it remained fundamentally weak given the underdevelopment of Honduran industry...
...Top-level officers were charged with stealing relief goods which poured in after Hurricane Fifi...
...In December 1976, Sandoval announced the expropriation of an additional 28,000 acres from United Brands and 58,000 from domestic owners...
...In signing the contract, the cooperative also agreed to pay freight costs and accepted a per box price of $1.46, $1.19 less than the price offered through COMUNBANA...
...Honduras was gaining a reputation as a major bridge in the international narcotics traffic and many officers were spending considerably more than their salaries warranted...
...The Nationals and the Liberals both trace their roots to the last century where they originated with clerical and anti-clerical factions...
...Latin America Regional Report, Feb...
...United Nations, Estudio econdmico, 1977, p. 292...
...Later the government added to the cooperative's holdings, purchasing a large parcel from the Bogrin family, one of the largest landowners in the region...
...62-78...
...Their interests coincided in that both backed an economic system that protected landholding and favored exports...
...1972), p. 32...
...5 Far from an "off-duty policeman," however, Gustavo Alvarez was an all-too-active military officer...
...The burgeoning of cash cropping had two major consequences...
...First, neither the Liberal nor the National Party seemed to value the "labor vote," and consequently never put much effort into campaigning in working class areas...
...Its neglect of the 1962 agrarian reform law had contributed to the radicalization of the peasant movement...
...2 (March-April 1980), pp...
...Guillermo Molina Chocano, Honduras, de la guerra civil al reformismo militar (San Jos6, Costa Rica: Programa Centroamericano de Ciencias Sociales, n.d...
...Above all, INA began to follow the lead of the reactionary National Federation of Farmers and Ranchers (FENAGH), opposing all attempts to legitimize peasant land seizures, often violently...
...By June, when the Honduran and Salvadorean national soccer teams met in San Salvador, tensions were extremely high...
...Yet, on August 7, 1978, weakened by continual charges of corruption as well as by an ongoing struggle for power in the military, General Melgar Castro was overthrown in a bloodless coup...
...9. Del Cid, "Las clases," p. 145...
...To this end, the law encouraged the formation of peasant cooperatives and outlawed land seizures, threatening to exclude any peasant who took part in such takeovers from all benefits of the agrarian reform...
...The most vehement opposition to the land seizures and INA policy in general came from the National Federation of Farmers and Ranchers (FENAGH), an association of large landowners founded in 1966...
...and the armed forces, represented by General L6pez Arellano, their commander-in-chief...
...The Honduran military claimed the best air force in the region and bragged that it could mobilize 60,000 men in 24 hours...
...As late as 1970, nearly 70% of Honduran industrial production was in traditional areas: food production, clothing and other consumer items, as opposed to the production of means of production (machinery) or NACLA ReportNovlDec 1981 Capital city of Tegucigalpa grew rapidly in the 60s...
...It further promised to "assist the membership of many unions [that] presently are under nondemocratic leadership in re-establishing trade union democratic processes.'" 5 3 Las Isletas Las Isletas, however, was to serve as the centerpiece of the military's turn to the right: an example of a marriage of interests between multinational corporations, corrupt officers and a reactionary government...
...A worker-run cooperative offered obvious advantages in that its members could decide what to produce, how to produce it and how to distribute the profits, if any...
...Nor did the chairman of the corporation think this was problematic...
...It promptly rejected Sandoval's action and, as a consequence, his expropriation orders against national owners were never sent out...
...was begun in 1965 on land returned to the state by the Tela Railroad Co...
...L6pez Arellano: Once More with Feeling On December 4, 1972, as a "hunger march" of thousands of peasants demanding the application of the agrarian reform law neared Tegucigalpa, L6pez Arellano dispatched the Defense Minister to inform Cruz that his services as president were no longer required...
...1 9 The Plan for National Unity Political forces shifted rapidly in Honduras after the war with El Salvador...
...Changes at the Top The war also furthered a process of realignment in the'nation's bourgeoisie...
...Table 2 The National Plan of Agrarian Reform (1975): Proposed and Actual Distribution, 1975-1979 (hectares) % of proposed Distribution to Year Proposed Actual Actual Distribution Actual Distribution Distribution Distribution of Cultivable Land of Cultivable Land 1975 150,000 116,804 88,198 59.3 1976 150,000 26,923 18,787 12.5 1977 125,000 15,985 11,568 9.3 1978 125,000 5,413 4,396 3.5 1979 50,000 6,355 4,767 9.5 Total 600,000 171,472 128,436 21.4 Source: Instituto Hondureno de Desarrollo Rural, cited in ALAI, "Honduras: Balance de la Reforma Agraria...
...He was goaded on by the leaders of El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua who wanted him to crush the peasant movement before its influence infected "their" peasants...
...Yet, as with many of the military's actions over the past 15 years, the call for elections contained a mixed message...
...In January 1977, 23NACLA Report conservative forces had managed to remove the last group of young officers who, from a position of strength in the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, had directed the reformists' initiatives between 1972 and 1975...
...their relatives were employed as technicians at generous salaries...
...When Standard pulled out, the plantations were totally unproductive...
...LAND'S END 1. See Robert Armstrong, "El Salvador: Why Revolution," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...43-45...
...By 1971 that figure had climbed to 50.8% .3 Unable to own or rent land, rural Salvadoreans had two options: they could migrate to the cities where industrialization had created jobs, or they could go to Honduras where land was more abundant and rents cheaper...
...While it is true that some Salvadoreans had moved into new agricultural settlements on national lands in violation of the agrarian reform law, there is no evidence to support FENAGH's claim that the Salvadoreans instigated the land invasions...
...2. (March - April 1978), pp...
...Honduras closed its borders to Salvadorean traffic and, within time, a demilitarized zone was established between the two countries pending a final truce (which was not reached until 1980...
...16 (Jan...
...But only in Honduras did the commercialization of agriculture disrupt communal forms of property-owning so late in the twentieth century...
...Its military had "proven" itself in combat, and the nation was soon able to supplant its Honduran trade with new markets in Europe and the United States...
...5 1 In 1976, he caved in to the peasants' demands and reappointed Rigoberto Sandoval Corea to lead INA...
...24NgvlDec 1981 off-duty policeman...
...From Abundance to Scarcity In the first half of the twentieth century it was not difficult for Salvadoreans to settle on Honduran lands for, as we noted, Honduras is a relatively large country...
...Dec...
...In 1975, Las Isletas produced 43,000 boxes of bananas, a figure which mushroomed to nearly one million boxes in 1976 and four million the following year...
...Latin America, March 10, 1972...
...Contrarily, those sectors of the traditional parties most fiercely opposed to the first phase of military reformism (1972-1975) were loudest in demanding a return to constitutionality as this was the only way in which they could gain control over the state apparatus...
...On October 9, 1975, the three organizations joined in a National Front of Peasant Unity and gave the government two weeks in which to distribute over 300,000 acres of land to 30,000 landless peasants...
...The Political Plan Disintegrates On February 18, 1972, police killed six peasants who had settled on unused land on a large estate in the Department of Olancho...
...On the negative side, however, the return of thousands of migrants to the already densely-packed countryside sharpened rural conflicts in that country, conflicts which would explode into revolutionary warfare in the late 1970s...
...Banana plantation workers remained the most thoroughly unionized sector of labor...
...The Horcones Massacre The agrarian reform law of 1975 and the earlier Decree Law 8 of 1972 were subject to a myriad of factors which, even given the willingness of some government officials to adhere to the spirit of the reform, could delay their implementation...
...Second, since the end of the 1960s, workers had begun to present their political demands through union organizations rather than the classical party channels...
...Los Angeles Times, Feb...
...Discua set out to break the powerful unions on the banana plantations...
...Such was not the case in Honduras...
...Many Salvadoreans had migrated to Honduras to work on the banana plantations before the layoffs of the 1950s or to the booming cotton estates in the late 1950s...
...26 The workers' anger highlighted their growing alienation from the traditional party system...
...Started in 1971 by Alejandro Orfila, the current Secretary General of the OAS, Agrodinimica is 60% owned by Latin Americans and 40% by ADELA Investments, a Rockefeller company...
...18 (Sept...
...but at heart they were as conservative, in a modern sense, as their opponents...
...Besides growing public rejection of their sharp swing to the right, military officers were beset by charges of large-scale corruption...
...3-4...
...In fact, the war grew out of decades of tensions produced by the uneven demographic and economic status of the two countries...
...Washington Post, July 27, 1975...
...Under the direction of the newly imposed "leaders," Las Isletas signed a long-term contract with Castle & Cooke through Standard Fruit for the marketing of their produce...
...Even before the elections, the two parties divvied up all the important posts in the public administration, a move which would raise corruption by government officials to new heights...
...XII, No...
...handsome commissions were paid on purchases of new machinery...
...2 4 Relations between landowners and peasants in Honduras, as elsewhere in Central America, were based on brutality and exploitation...
...Posas, "Politica estatal," pp...
...Miami Herald, April 24,1975...
...But, with the ouster of L6pez Arellano, the willingness evaporated totally and the reform program ground to a halt...
...By the early 1970s, a decade after the passage of the first agrarian reform law, land ownership remained as concentrated as it had been in 1952...
...4 5 Three weeks later, the UNC blockaded key bridges around the country...
...Yet the brief war between Honduras and El Salvador had about as much to do with soccer as the War of Jenkin's Ear had to do with Robert Jenkin's alleged loss of his appendage at the hands of the Spanish coast guard...
...The escalation of repression in the countryside sapped what little legitimacy remained of the Cruz government...
...It is quite likely that many people in the United States first learned of Honduras and El Salvador when, settling down with their evening papers sometime in early July, 1969, they read of Central America's "Soccer War...
...The other wing was smaller and less well articulated...
...INA agreed to pay the "Compafiia Agricola" a handsome price for the land in question...
...47-48 and Meza, "Crisis del reformismo," p. 43...
...Then, in early July, Salvadorean troops crossed into Honduras to "defend the human rights of their countrymen"' '-Salvadoreans who had gone to live in Honduras because they had no human rights in their own country...
...Much as Bolivia's defeat to Paraguay in the Chaco War (1933-1935) encouraged sectors of the Bolivian military to turn against traditional oligarchic rule in defense of Bolivian nationalism, so too did defeat pave the way for a process of reform in Honduras...
...Juan Alberto Melgar Castro, a conserevative who had replaced L6pez as military chief...
...United Nations, Estudio econdmico 1973, pp...
...Enough was enough...
...2 The workers, in particular, felt cheated by the political parties which had made a mockery of their own agreements...
...In 1950, 38.5% of Salvadoreans classified as agriculturally active could be considered either landless or land poor...
...INA figures cited in Slutzky and Alonso, Trasformations, Tables 1 & 2. 33...
...He quickly enacted a number of reforms demanded by his supporters...
...The leading force in this coalescence was the UNC which had led the upsurge of peasant activities in the 1970s...
...The military had been in power since 1963 except for a one-year break in 1971-72...
...L6pez, then, joined with COHEP and the CTH in drafting a Colombian-style solution to the nation's problems known as the "Political Plan for National Unity...
...The consequences of the war were significant for El Salvador...
...Una Mision Cumplida...
...His suicide piqued the curiosity of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which opened an investigation into the company's affairs...
...With tensions at a flash point, INA stepped in with an offer neither side could refuse...
...This in itself would not have aroused the ire of Standard which, as we have seen, preferred to act as international marketer of locallyproduced bananas...
...INA's policy could achieve its sought-after compromise as long as it had cash in the bank and dealt with landowners who were willing to part with some of their (often idle) land in return for capital which they could invest elsewhere...
...Yet L6pez was the only Honduran official implicated in the affair who refused to allow an investigating commission to examine his foreign bank accounts...
...Adding to the misfortunes of the Salvadorean settlers, Honduran authorities were not too keen on helping any Salvadoreans...
...Yet it quickly became clear that the Hondurans had little muscle behind their threats...
...2 1 The two parties, fearful of losing their place in the political game, expressed agreement with the national unity proposal, but rejected the notion of a single candidate...
...At the same time, though, there was a consistency to his actions...
...Furthermore, most of the land distributed was either marginal or quite far from the major markets or means of transportation in the country...
...1977), p. 41...
...47ff...
...Unfunded almost since its creation in 1961, the INA in 1967 was granted an adequate budget and an activist director, Rigoberto Sandoval Corea...
...He added that the company had paid Army personnel in these countries, "much as you might hire an *In 1968, Standard Fruit and Steamship became a whollyowned subsidiary of Castle & Cooke...
...companies to the Honduran government was given to peasant cooperatives or productive associations which grew bananas for sale to the fruit companies...
...In the first place, the population in Honduras was expanding precipitously, quadrupling between 1887 and 1950 and doubling again between 1950 and 1974.6 Given minimal industrial development in the cities, this meant that the explosive growth had to be absorbed by the countryside...
...Finally, they were able to clean up their image by returning land to the government...
...In some, profitability depended on pressing family members into the work of the cooperative, "exploiting" themselves and their families by working long hours for low pay...
...The 80,000 member ANACH joined in as well...
...In the late 1960s, FENAGH began to blame the invasion on Salvadoreans...
...The National Association of Honduran Peasants (ANACH), created in 1962, was the largest, but least militant of the two, tied as it was to the U.S.-dominated ORIT...
...Victor Meza, El Tiempo [San Pedro Sula, Honduras], May 10, 1976...
...The killings shocked the nation which, unlike El Salvador, did not have the 1932 massacre of 30,000 peastants on its conscience...
...Didlogo [Guatemala], December 1980...
...Their enemies, who sought to secularize society, were [the Liberals], or reds...
...We have full information that they're Communists...
...Internationally, the UNC was linked to the Latin American Confederation of Workers (CLAT), a Christian Democratic organization...
...The Liberals, like their counterparts in the rest of Latin America, rnay have mouthed the slogans of laissez-faire and paraded a knowledge of J.S...
...Within months various forces had united to confront the government from a position of greater strength...
...Agrodinimica is the largest Central American exporter of beef and a major ranch and agribusiness developer and operator...
...The land was turned over to the peasants to form an agricultural-cattle raising cooperative known as the "Complejo Guanchias...
...National Party members marched under a blue banner and were, according to historian Thomas Anderson, "the clerical party, which tended to be conservative in most things, even those not pertaining to the Church...
...New York Times, April 24, 1972...
...Honduras and ElSalvador, 1969 (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), p. 44...
...As late as the 1 9 50s, land in Honduras was considerably cheaper than in El Salvador...
...Antonio Murga Frassinetti, "El semiproletariado rural: El caso de los cortadores de caf6," cited in del Cid, "Las clases," p. 137...
...Michael Jerome Cypher of the United States and Father Ivan Betancourt of Colombia...
...Many analysts see in this the reason why, in the 1960s, Honduras gave birth to the most militant and, before long, best organized peasant movement in Central America.'o The peasant movement was split into two main organizations...
...Between 1960 and 1968, El Salvador quintupled its exports to Honduras, using its neighbor as a captive market to vitalize its own industrialization...
...The new enterprise was run by a board of management selected by a general assembly of the workforce...
...Armed with more than a decade of experience in dealing with governments which changed direction rapidly, the peasant movement did not wait to see its limited victories swept away under a tidal wave of rancher hostility and bureaucratic indifference...
...17 P c a, rr 1 o arNACLA Report Many of L6pez's actions can be attributed to political opportunism, an ability to sense which way the wind was blowing and to go with the strongest gusts...
...The Horcones killings put pressure on both ANACH and the Honduran Federation of Agrarian Cooperatives (FECORAH) to act lest they be abandoned by their members...
...Roberto Robleda, "Algunos problemas del desarrollo industrial de Honduras," Economia Politica, No...
...Ltd.," Las Isletas continued to sell its bananas to Standard.* And bananas they certainly had...
...84-5 and Latin America [London], July 4, 1969...
...They could indirectly reap the benefits of government credits and international aid which were funneled into the cooperatives...
...This sector also had the most connections with other foreign capitalists...
...While Melgar Castro had no commitment to the agrarian reform process, he still faced a difficult choice...
...Needless to say, the National Federation of Farmers and Ranchers (FENAGH) thought it was penned by the devil himself...
...In February, goaded by Standard Fruit, encouraged by the government and supported by troops of the Fourth Army Battalion under Lt...
...It represented the interests of new industrialists centered in San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa and producing for the domestic market...
...it is defrauding the intentions of those of us who signed the document as a means of removing traditional party governments which are the cause of the partisan division of the Honduran people...
...Supporters of L6pez Arellano argue that he was "set up" by conservatives who were threatened by his reform programs...
...In 1963,he deposed the liberal reformer, Villeda Morales, harshly attacked the peasant organizations and, for a number of years, smothered the process of agarian reform...
...8. 1976...
...14, 1975...
...for Honduras, the predominance of the banana companies and ranchers in the rural sector, and an absolute inability to develop an industrially-based economy with a requisite productive infrastructure...
...Wall Street Journal, April 9, 1975...
...4 9 "Never in the history of this country," one long-time observer reported, "have there been such massive and widespread land seizures...
...Even though only approximately 20% of its lands are suitable for any kind of agriculture, its growing population remained small in relation to the land available through the first few decades of the present century...
...This movement took shape at the end of 1970 with the formal alliance of the Private Enterprise Council of Honduras (COHEP), a business association which often reflected the interests of the new industrialists...
...The Army moved in, arresting some 200 militant members of the cooperative and guarding the 35 workers who declared themselves the new leaders...
...Roger Burbach, "Union Busting: Castle & Cooke in Honduras," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...More importantly, at least in terms of the social conflicts it created, the decree forced private owners to rent their idle lands to peasants on demand...
...156, 203, 231...
...By the end of the 1960s, some 600,000 rural Salvadoreans had acted, half going to the cities and half crossing into Honduras, most without the benefit of immigration papers...
...The case of the "Guanchias Cooperative" is illustrative...
...Enter the Agrarian Policy Commission...
...These included decrees against usury, the implementation of a "check off" system for the automatic deduction of union dues from paychecks, and the creation of a state system of subsidies for basic necessities...
...L6pez Arellano was the last to enter the coalition...
...Cited in Meza, "Crisis del reformismo," p. 38...
...Martz, Central American Soccer War, p. 90...
...3 FENAGH was particularly infuriated by L6pez Arellano's selection of Col...
...They were wrong...
...2 3 The government stopped expropriating the national and eido lands illegally held by corporations and private ranchers, and began to jail peasants who took part in land seizures...
...Undaunted by the company's threats, the peasants retook the land...
...4 It was further atypical in that it was predominantly a rural-torural movement...
...4. United Nations, Estudio econdmico de Amirica Latina, 1973 (Sv'tiago, Chile: UN, 1974), p. 345...
...But the country would be hard pressed to remain isolated from the nearby battles, particularly as the United States began to view it as a "bunker" for reactionary forces in the region...
...The government established by the Political Plan for National 18NovlDec 1981 Unity," the CTH argued in 1972, "has not responded to the wishes of the people...
...Melgar Castro fired the progressive Minister of Labor and replaced him with Adalberto Discua who had served in the ministry in the 1950s...
...Again, it was the younger, lowerranking officers who, untainted by the charges, were able to force a substantial reshuffling of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces...
...Smallholder lands are often far from market...
...The new management also began to siphon off funds to continue the services of its military protectors...
...222 (Dec...
...intermediary goods (chemicals, etc...
...He was removed in a bloodless coup by Col...
...The traditional parties in the early 1970s continued to represent the most conservative landowners and ranchers and those sectors of industry tied to foreign capital, in particular the banana companies...
...Gustavo Alvarez, a small group of Las Isletas members called a "special convention" to elect a new leadership...
...It first produced corn for sale to a local processing plant, but in 1968 planted 500 acres of bananas which it agreed to sell to Standard Fruit...
...Five peasants were shot to death and nine others disappeared...
...2 7 Their acceptance of a political rather than a purely economic role did not imply that they had adopted more radical positions...
...First, it drove up the purchase and rental price of land...
...He also created an Agrarian Policy Commission with the power to override any decision of INA's director, and stocked it with country's most powerful landowners...
...The following month, 15 peasants were killed by gunmen alleged to be in the pay of a powerful western landowner...
...2 2 With Cruz in office, the conservatives found themselves firmly in the saddle...
...It was founded in 1963, based on the peasant leagues begun by church activists in the departments of Valle and Choluteca...
...This was soon evident in the important area of agrarian policy...
...Land Hunger and Peasant Militancy Smallholders and renters in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras maintained an equally precarious grip on their lands...
...Yet it seems that the seedlings of corruption were grafted onto some of the reformers, as well...
...The general had again become the president...
...But the local ranchers were serving notice that, from then on, they would be playing for keeps...
...And, while Honduran exports also grew during the period, by 1969 the country was running a $20.6 million deficit in intraCACM trade, hardly what had been promised by common market boosters.' 5 In the final analysis, the war between Honduras and El Salvador was a logical consequence of the inability of rulers in each country to deal with their most presssing internal social and economic problems: for El Salvador, the rigid control by a few families of the nation's land...
...They were no longer vulnerable to the natural disasters which annually punished Honduras' banana plantations...
...Marta F. SAnchez Soler andJames A. Morris, "Factores de poder en la evoluci6n del campesinado hondurefio," Estudios Sociales Centroamericanos, No...
...Shane, "Hoofprints," pp...
...4 7 The landowners also launched a furious attack on the Church, charging that "foreign communists" had infiltrated its ranks and that it was "exciting the faithful to be disrespectful and disorderly...
...Ibid., p. 154...
...Broadly speaking, we can identify two wings of the upper class...
...This is not to suggest that the companies forfeited their status as the nation's largest landowners...
...In fact, most of the country's major federations were still led by ORIT and AIFLD-linked organizations which, at best, put forth modest economic demands and, at worst, helped the government break the more combative sectors of the labor movement...
...They wanted partisan elections for president, with the winning party receiving an automatic one-seat majority in congress...
...Melgar Castro ignored the deadline, and tensions in the countryside continued to build, with landowner reprisals following sporadic land seizures...
...United Fruit and Standard Fruit, sensing that their continued and overwhelming dominance of the cultivable land in Honduras would create serious political problems for them, began returning land to the Honduran government in the mid-1950s...
...Dec...
...That was no longer always the case as the 1960s drew to a close...
...5 8 The local military, the government and Castle & Cooke were driving a once prosperous worker-managed enterprise into the ground...
...Posas, "Politica estatal," p. 78...
...By 1971 it was producing 35,000 boxes of bananas a week.34 Standard Fruit was able to buy more fruit from the new cooperative than it had produced when it owned the land...
...Annual per capita income in Honduras in the early 1970s stood at $216 compared to $324 in El Salvador...
...It didn't take long for the reformers to realize that they had been taken...
...Having overthrown Villeda Morales in 1963 and "constitutionalized" his presidency through a bogus procedure in 1965, he now toyed with the idea of engineering his "reelection" in the upcoming 1971 voting...
...One column had just reached Jutacalpa, about 85 miles north of Tegucigalpa, in Olancho, when the Army moved in to stop it...
...And, second, the commercial estates threatened to absorb the various non-private forms of tenure 13NACLA Report (eidos, national land, etc...
...Thus, the decision to return to constitutional rule could be viewed as a progressive move...
...This was hardly a typical migration, for the Salvadoreans actually moved from a poor country to a poorer one...
...8-12...
...2 If these figures were more characteristic of feudal baronies than twentieth century nations, they were growing steadily worse...
...AIFLD, Country Labor Plan, Honduras, 1977-1981, pp...
...They faced a rout...
...Only after the OAS threatened to slap an economic boycott on El Salvador did that country agree to pull its troops back, content in its psychological victory...
...8. Cited in Durham, Scarcity & Survival, p. 122...
...8 This structure was reflected if not paralleled in the workforce...
...16, 1976...
...3 ' They had grown powerful over the 1960s as meat products became one of Honduras' major exports (fourth behind bananas, coffee and wood...
...Miami Herald, July 23, 1975...
...In others, such as "Guanchias Ltd...
...In neighboring El Salvador, this equation would have been utterly contradictory and virtually unthinkable...
...According to Latin America Newsletters, " 'Loans' were made to the families of local officers...
...September 5, 1980...
...2 9 While some researchers claim that Decree 8 seriously affected private holders, in fact, more than 70% of the lands adjudicated to the peasants were national lands, while only 19% were private property...
...Thus, elections were one way to give a democratic facade to a conservative regime, a move seen as highly desirable by the U.S...
...El Salvador was by far the more developed...
...Houses were built for local officers, and over $8,000 was spent on arms for a gang of pistoleros...
...government...
...FENAGH's opposition to the agrarian reform was understandable since the organization represented cattle ranchers and meat packers who uniformly owned more land than allowed by the new law...
...Under Moya Posas, the agrarian reform, which had again picked up steam in the late 1960s, now wheezed to a halt...
...And, given the limited sales alternatives which local banana producers had in the early 1970s, the cooperatives were forced to accept the price established by Standard or United Brands...
...And appeals could take up to five years to settle...
...Sandoval Corea had been forced out of that job in 1971 by pressure from FENAGH...
...The Ranchers React Not every landowner, however, was as farsighted, and many showed that they were made of the same stock as their Salvadorean counterparts...
...1 6 By late May, more than 11,000 refugees 1516 had re-entered El Salvador, propelled by the Honduran government's edicts and the vigilante tactics of the goon squad, Mancha Brava, which was organized by the National Party...
...3 Yet, if the 1975 law stepped on more landowners' toes than the 1962 law had done, it still provided them with ample opportunity to apeal any expropriation...
...fruit companies...
...6. Ibid., p. 108...
...4 " The government charged three Army officers and two landowners with the murders, which became known as the "massacre of Horcones" after the ranch where the bodies were discovered...
...This prompted the Salvadorean government to seal its border with Honduras, hoping that the latter country would have to resettle the migrant Salvadoreans...
...On April 30, 1969, Honduran authorities gave the Salvadorean settlers 30 days to get off the land...
...The multinational didn't have to invest in irrigation, flood control, pesticides, or other costly attempts to improve productivity...
...Under Melgar Castro, the country swung sharply to the right...
...The United States would play an increasingly important role in Honduras over the next two years as the country negotiated the turbulence of the Central American whirlwind...
...If their defense was weak, it was mostly because they felt they didn't need to justify their actions: "Local and foreign communists are responsible for this whole thing," said Noel Mercado, a leader of the ranchers in Olancho...
...April 1977), pp...
...Guanchias Ltd...
...In a survey conducted in the early 1970s among smallholders and landless workers, a researcher asked whether, given the chance, m these people would participate in a land invasion...
...In 1950, 85% of the total population was rural...
...Posas, "Politica estatal," p. 92...
...Posas, "Tendencias ideol6gicas," pp...
...And, only two weeks later, Nicaragua's Sandinistas occupied the National Palace in Managua in the first major battle of a war which would end with Somoza's ouster in 1979...
...They had hoped that the crisis brought on by the war with El Salvador would have forced the Liberals and Nationals to change their mode of operating...
...Three days prior to the change in government in Honduras, El Salvador's ArArchbishop Oscar Romero, in an audience with the Pope, blasted his country's oligarchy and called for a redistribution of land...
...But his major program was agrarian reform, which he saw as the regime's "fundamental task...
...As opposed to the 1962 reform law, this one did place limits on the size of most land holdings (500 hectares, except those dedicated to export crops...
...But, as opposed to neighboring El Salvador or Guatemala, rarely had they flared into murderous violence...
...2. Durham, Scarcity & Survival, p. 38...
...In other words, the companies began to move away from their traditional role as direct producers of the fruit in favor of a more advantageous role as marketer...
...2 0 L6pez Arellano's peregrinations through the halls of Honduran power are a source of great wonder, to say the least...
...The defeat suffered by the Honduran troops during the short conflict revealed a command structure which was inefficient, backward and corrupt...
...13, 1981...
...Miami Herald, July 7, 1978...
...By 1972, United Fruit had already returned approximately 135,000 acres...
...In classic Latin American populist fashion, L6pez sought an elusive middle path, lashing out against the Left when it became too uncontrolled, and striking at the Right when it became too intransigent...
...Being no revolutionary, L6pez Arellano would search for the satisfaction of the peasants' demands for land without alienating the interests of the landowners or the banana companies...
...The Honduran military was no stranger to charges of corruption...
...To many, it became obvious that the possibilities of change were limited as long as they had no control over the prices and marketing of the commodities they produced...
...28 Finally, the ORIT-linked union movement, as opposed to some smaller, militant unions, thought that the best interests of its members would be served by supporting the new industrial bourgeoisie...
...4 3 On April 22, L6pez found himself out of the presidency as well, a casualty of the United Brands' bribe...
...6 Lt...
...Even the Liberals abandoned the "national unity" government, attacking Cruz's Interior Minister, Ricardo Z6fiiga (who went on to be the National Party candidate for president in the 1981 elections), and losing their ministerial posts in the process...
...8 (Nov.-Dec...
...Further, the deportation of large numbers of rural dwellers was not seen as contradictory to the government's renewed support of agrarian reform...
...13, (Oct...
...fruit companies...
...The National Peasant Union (UNC), on the other hand, played a leading part in the organization of the land seizures...
...The conservative junta immediately promised that elections would be held in 1980, a move which, according to many observers, was dictated by the Carter Administration in return for aid...
...48 22NoviDec 1981 Corn-a chief peasant staple...
...At the same time he expropriated approximately 57,000 acres from United Brands and 84,000 from Standard Fruit, cancelled all contracts under which the two firms exported bananas and established a state agency, COHBANA, to oversee the production and financing of local banana growers...
...Three factors lay behind this...
...The reformers who seized control of the military after the 1969 war with El Salvador justified that action by citing the need to purge the armed forces of its crop of bad apples...
...Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the conservatives had finally rid themselves of an old nemesis...
...Shortly after taking over the presidency, L6pez Arellano issued Decree Law 8, an emergency measure which gave the peasants immediate, if temporary, use of arable national and 6 ido lands held by INA until their rightful owners could be determined...
...Nevertheless, by the mid and late 1960s, it had been pressured by its members to play a more active role in the land invasions which were sweeping the countryside...
...5 2 AIFLD did not hide its attempt to influence the internal affairs of the Honduran unions...
...Latin America, April 11, 1975...
...It continually took the government to task for supporting land seizures even though the government's record on this was spotty...
...Among the dead were two students, five peasant leaders and two foreign priests, Rev...
...XIV, No...
...As with "Guanchias *A peasant enterprise (empresa asociativa campesina) is a productive unit in which all means of production are held collectively, the land is worked collectively and the workers' management decides on the generation, accumulation and distribution of any surplus...
...In the 1970s, both parties would become sufficiently discredited as to encourage L6pez to base his power on a new coalition of forces, the new industrial bourgeoisie supported by the reformoriented labor and peasant movements...
...Honduran officials charged that El Salvador's development in the 1960s had taken place at the expense of Honduras, a well-founded accusation...
...Rather than solve their countries' internal problems, they sent their soldiers to fight one another...
...Posas, "Politica estatal," p. 64...
...7. Rafael del Cid, "Las clases sociales y su dinimica en el agro hondurefio," Estudios Sociales Centroamericanos, No...
...In 1967 the "Compaiifa Agricola y Ganadera de Sula" violently expelled a group of peasants living in the Guanchias region from the lands they had been occupying...
...In 1971, the largest 1.5% of the farms in the country held almost 50% of the total land, whereas the bottom 50%, tiny minifundia under three acres, held less than 5% of the land...
...Throughout most of the 1960s, L6pez worked with the traditional political parties, consecrating the old alliance between the armed forces and the National Party...
...Two haciendas in southern Honduras, for example, added some 54,000 acres to their holdings between 1952 and 1966 in this fashion...
...See Posas, Lucha ideoldgica...
...But this was easier said than done, as the Honduran president confronted one of the best organized peasant movements in Central America...
...Finally, given the multinationals' nearmonopoly control over marketing, the cooperatives often found that their ability to fundamentally affect their own lives was severely limited...
...SITRATERCO (Tela Railroad-United Fruit) and SITRASFRUCO (Standard Fruit) had become increasingly militant in the 1960s, displacing their original AIFLD-trained leadership with more progressive leaders...
...We have had operations in Latin America for many years," he noted contentedly, "and there are certain areas where some services just aren't available...
...But the collective, whose leadership included some of the most militant former workers on Standard's plantations, actually refused to accept bribes or be intimidated when it came to setting a price on the fruit...
...The hardliners soon turned their attention to the workers' movement...
...Mario Maldonado, a progressive who had been greatly influenced by the Peruvian military reformers, to serve as INA's director...
...The cooperative received substantial credit aid from INA and the National Development Bank...
...But, by 1969, it is estimated that Salvadoreans represented nearly 20% of all agriculturalists in Honduras and owned over 500,000 acres of land.s Many Salvadoreans had been in Honduras for years, having bought land when it was relatively cheap and expanded their holdings as they prospered...
...5 In many cases when the military expelled the peasants from the land they had seized, they simply reoccupied it...
...Ejido land, for example, declined by 39% between 1952 and 1965.' Often the large haciendas would extend their boundaries simply by enclosing new land with barbed wire, thereby denying eido members access to the land they had worked for generations...
...But the very success of some cooperatives often created new sets of contradictions...
...In 1971, 76% of the economically active population was engaged in agriculture while only 8% was in industry, a scant 67,000 workers...
...or leftists, or extremists, or whatever you want to call them...
...5 " And, cruelest cut of all, in early1977 Las Isletas contemplated exporting its produce through COMUNBANA, the marketing arm of the Union of Banana Exporting Countries, instead of through Standard...
...The Bogrins, for example, became prominent bankers...
...Latin America, March 3, 1972...
...investments more than doubled between 1950 and 1967, and El Salvador's trade began to reflect the growing importance of its manufacturing sector.' If the country's urban-industrial sector changed dramatically in the 1950s and 1960s, the countryside didn't...
...Following the war, the Honduran officer corps would come increasingly under the influence of a group of younger officers who drew their inspiration (and, in some cases, training) from the military reformers in Peru and Panama...
...After an investigation, a Honduran fact-finding commission said the bribe had been given to Economy Minister Abraham Bennaton Ramos at a secret meeting in Switzerland...
...Members of Las Isletas hired very few outside laborers-only 80-and most of these were brought in as full members of the collective...
...23-32...
...Wall StreetJournal, Nov...
Vol. 15 • November 1981 • No. 6
