of the role of international financial institutions and free trade agreements in local land struggles, forced migration, biodiversity and natural resources. COMPA’s six original objectives remained central to Berta’s struggle to the end.
It’s Always about Land
Every conflict in Latin America is, at its heart, about land. Why? Because the distribution of land is directly linked to the distribution of wealth. In Honduras, both are scandalously unequal. This is the most unequal country in Latin America,5 with the most regressive tax system, and the gap between the richest few and the poor majority keeps growing. Over two-thirds of the population live in poverty.6 While big cities are marked by gang violence and precarious employment and living conditions, the great majority of the poor are landless peasant farmers and indigenous or Afro-descendant Garifuna and Miskitu peoples. The most arable plains are in the hands of a few: approximately 70 per cent of farmers hold only 10 per cent of land in small plots, while 1 per cent of farmers hold 25 per cent in massive estates.7 Redressing land inequalities was a central issue for Berta and COPINH, and that meant taking on the country’s elites.
The Elites
Las élites, las familias, la oligarquía, los turcos … catch-all terms used interchangeably for the small group of transnational families whose vast wealth and political power allow them to influence, some would say dictate, public policies to benefit their economic interests. The origin and trajectory of the Honduran elite are unique in the region. These ten or so families played only a supporting role during the first half of the twentieth century, when Honduras was subservient to US capital and geopolitical objectives. Back then, local landowning elites – who got rich and powerful primarily from timber, cattle, cotton and sugar plantations, and mining – were still the biggest cojones in town, yet they were in fact the poorest and politically weakest rural elites in Central America. So, in the 1990s, unlike their peers in Guatemala and El Salvador, Honduran landowners found themselves outwitted and unable to evolve fast enough to take advantage of globalization and international capital. Instead, waiting in the wings was the incipient bourgeoisie, composed largely of Christian Palestinians (mostly from Bethlehem) and eastern European Jews.
The ethnic mix of this elite class – most with surnames like Kattán, Canahuati, Násser, Kafati, Atala, Larach and Facussé – is the result of the liberal migration policies of the late nineteenth century. With the Ottoman Empire in decline, there was a wave of migration of Christian Palestinians to Central America, and a handful of families settled in Honduras during the 1870s and 1880s,8 when the liberal government was trying to attract immigrants with knowledge of modern agricultural techniques to jump-start the economy. Most came via Turkey, where they sought refuge first with Turkish passports, hence the umbrella term ‘turcos’ for them all. But the new arrivals rejected generous farming incentives in favour of commerce, to slowly establish themselves as the new merchant class. Initially, they jostled for market position in the shadow of Americans who controlled trade through general stores stocked with cheap merchandise arriving on empty banana cargo ships. But the Arabs brought knowledge of external markets lacking among local landowners, and quickly applied commercial rules (buy cheap, sell dear) to the import-export market.9 The traders accumulated wealth independent of politics, until the late 1980s and early 1990s when structural adjustment policies – free-market privatization programmes favouring big business – were imposed by international financiers to guarantee loans and debt payments (aka the Washington Consensus). This sparked a massive transfer of state wealth to the private sector, and opened up unparalleled access to global markets, credit and political power for the transnational merchant elites. Soon they were acting not unlike the banana companies, running Honduras like a collection of private fiefdoms and ‘counselling’ presidents, ambassadors and the military.
The main gold-rush industries to emerge were manufacturing in the maquilas, African palm oil for biofuels and processed food, and coastal tourism. Then, armed with their new capacity to amass capital, the elites smartly diversified, opening banks, newspapers and meat processing plants, as well as investing heavily in energy projects and mines. The locally prominent landowners didn’t miss out entirely on the benefits of globalization: by positioning themselves as the bridge between international investors and new transnational elites, they became the boots on the ground, so to speak, in both business and politics.10 This economic and power shift happened hot on the heels of the US-backed counterinsurgency war which alleged military and business interests determined to protect the status quo. The most formidable manifestation of this symbiotic relationship was the anti-communist, some say fascist, Association for the Progress of Honduras (APROH), founded in 1983. This club, joined by most major Honduran industrialists, promoted deregulation, free trade and a ruthless response to social movements demanding better wages and conditions. APROH’s founding president was General Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, commander of Battalion 3-16.
Since then, the rural poverty generated by land inequality has been compounded by climate change and natural disasters like Hurricane Mitch in 1998; rising food prices; systematic land grabs by agribusiness and tourism developers; and shocking levels of violence perpetrated by state security services and private militias contracted by organized criminal gangs, corrupt politicians and seemingly reputable businesses, at times all working together.
Paradoxically, it was this complex set of harsh conditions which sparked new grassroots social and political movements like COPINH and campesino collectives challenging land distribution in the Bajo Aguán. This pitted the campesinos against feudal king and political heavyweight Miguel Facussé Barjum.
Facussé trained as an aeronautical engineer in Indiana, in the American Midwest, and started his career by converting war planes into commercial carriers, but he built his fortune and notoriety through Dinant Chemicals.11 In the 1980s, during the Contra years, he served as chief economic adviser to the Liberal president Roberto Suazo Córdova and vice-president of APROH;12 he even endorsed selling off Honduras to foreign investors to resolve its fiscal woes. This was Facussé’s breakthrough decade, a time when political connections and capitalist instinct helped him take lucrative advantage of a controversial debt restructuring programme.13 This, and other economic policies blueprinted in the Facussé Memorandum,14 acted as a springboard to convert the evolving merchant class into a cash-rich globally oriented agro-industrial bourgeoisie, perfectly positioned for foreign investors.
But Miguel Facussé was no political ideologue. He believed in making money, and that is what drew him to the fertile Bajo Aguán. The Bajo Aguán was dominated by banana plantations in the first half of the twentieth century, but the population and crop production nosedived in 1974 after Hurricane Fifi destroyed everything, including the railway, and the fruit moguls abandoned the region. Fifi accelerated major agrarian reforms designed by military dictator General López Arellano, who used public funds and post-hurricane international aid to rebuild the region and entice landless peasants to farm uncultivated plains in exchange for community land titles. The general became an unlikely campesino hero, sanctioning technical and financial support to more than 4,000 farming families organized into eighty-four cooperatives. It paid off: by the 1980s the lower Aguán valley was one of the most diverse crop regions in Honduras, known as the grain basket of Central America. But the glory days were short-lived thanks to the imposition of inedible, invasive African palms.
The lofty palm species was aggressively promoted from the early 1990s by World Bank–funded modernization programmes.15 The palms were lauded as the ultimate cash crop which would finally lift peasant farmers out of poverty. Then the official line changed: campesinos were no longer capable of farming palms, because they were too tall and required machinery to extract the fruit and oil. Technical assistance and credit from the government plummeted just as global prices crashed, a devastating combination which asphyxiated the farmers. This wasn’t down to Lady Luck: the plan was always to let the cooperatives fail, affirmed campesino leader Yoni Rivas. Waiting in the wings to pounce was Facussé.
Agrarian
