titles from being sold or mortgaged without permission from the National Agrarian Institute (INA). To circumvent this inconvenience, President Callejas approved a municipal law in 1993 which allowed local governments to sell land titles for a period of three months only.16 This they did via hundreds of small transactions benefiting a handful of powerful businessmen, who had woken up to the profit potential of exporting palm oil for biofuels and processed food. The sales were rushed through with total disregard for ejidal and ancestral land titles owned by Garifuna communities. How did they get the deeds? Some campesinos sold up for the money, but far more were duped or intimidated into signing over the land. The wannabe palm magnates made alliances with local politicians to convince cooperative leaders that there was no hope of competing with modernization, so best to sell up and move on. To deal with those who couldn’t be convinced, the cooperatives were infiltrated and divided, and secret meetings known as misas negras (black masses) were convened under menacing military supervision. And if that failed, stubborn campesino leaders were tortured, abducted and killed, starting with the president and treasurer of the San Isidro cooperative in 1990. In other words, good old-fashioned corporate counterinsurgency.
Thousands of campesino families were evicted: they went from being landowners to pawns on their own land – a starting gun for a protracted bloody struggle that has yet to end.17
Facussé was the biggest beneficiary, gaining control over large swathes of Aguán and beyond for industrial palm oil production. The other major winners were the Salvadoran Reynaldo Canales and the Nicaraguan-born René Morales, whose legal affairs were handled by lawyer Roberto Pacheco Reyes, who later became the secretary of the Agua Zarca dam company, DESA. The three men rapidly acquired the majority of the cooperatives and began importing unregulated armed private security guards to work alongside the military to protect their interests. This toxic mix of ambition, political connections, bullish tactics and military alliances helped turned the Aguán into one of the deadliest parts of the country. The violence was fuelled by the West’s drive for ‘clean energy’. The big fat clean energy lie. But as always, it’s about the land.
Then the coup happened, and the struggle got harder, faster and deadlier.
Toncontín Airport, Tegucigalpa: 5 July 2009
Berta stood arm in arm with Miriam Miranda among the crowd waiting that Sunday afternoon to welcome back Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya. It had been exactly a week since an elite military unit bundled the Honduran president onto a military plane bound for Costa Rica, after having kicked in the front door of his private residence in leafy Tres Caminos.1 It was 6 a.m., and Zelaya was ordered to come downstairs holding his hands high, like a common criminal. ‘Shoot me,’ he dared them, still in his pyjamas, ‘if your orders are to kill me.’ Instead he was flown fifty miles north-west to the Palmerola military airport, which is also where the US war on drugs mission is headquartered. The deposed president stared out of the window at hundreds of battle-ready soldiers as the plane refuelled. The lights were out, the internet was down, radio and television sets stood silent, and church doors were closed.
Zelaya had been warned that a coup could be imminent, but he wouldn’t believe it. ‘You’re living in the Jurassic period,’ he told advisers. ‘This is the twenty-first century, the world wouldn’t allow it.’ But he was wrong. Zelaya was ousted in an old-fashioned coup d’état plotted by a powerful cabal of ultra-right business, political, religious and military players. It was still dark when the plane left for Costa Rica.
A week later, Zelaya was heading back to Honduras after crisis talks with the UN and Latin American heads of state. Berta and Miriam were anxious. The Garifuna contingent were drumming loudly and the air was thick with ceremonial smoke; the atmosphere was charged.
Zelaya thought it safe to return, but the coup plotters had other ideas. Congress had produced a fake resignation letter hours after Zelaya was deposed. The Supreme Court issued a secret arrest warrant based on trumped-up charges and named Congress leader Roberto Micheletti as his replacement, while on television Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez warned that Zelaya’s return could trigger a bloodbath.2 Ironically, in a country so long ruled by military governments, the armed forces had been the last democratic pillar standing until the generals also flipped. After that, it was left to ordinary people to flood into the streets, demanding democracy be restored and Zelaya allowed to serve the final six months of his term. As tension built, security forces surrounded the airport.
Word spread that Zelaya’s plane was approaching. A small section of the crowd ran past cordons towards the runway, where soldiers and army trucks were stationed to prevent the plane from touching down. Suddenly there were gunshots, followed by screams. Isis Obed Murillo Mencías, a nineteen-year-old grocery clerk, had been shot in the back of the head. He was the first victim of the coup.3 Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro, was in the crowd and called the military chief, Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, pleading for the gunfire to stop. ‘Are you going to shoot down Mel’s plane?’ she asked. ‘No,’ said Vásquez, ‘he’s not an enemy of Honduras. This is a political crisis; your husband is my friend.’ He explained he would not let the plane land because to do so would mean arresting Zelaya. ‘I won’t humiliate him and risk chaos,’ he told Xiomara, and hung up. Sparing her husband’s life was a modern twist on what was an old-school Latin American coup.
After the fatal gunfire, it was announced that a military curfew would start in an hour. Anyone on the streets after 6 p.m. would face arrest. Berta and Miranda watched Zelaya’s plane swerve up and away and embraced each other tearfully. The last time they’d been together at Toncontín airport, it was to welcome Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president. A week, they say, is a long time in politics and now Berta wondered if she would still stand for the vice-presidency if Zelaya wasn’t allowed back before the November elections.
‘We cried because we knew what this meant,’ Miriam told me years later. ‘Until then, we could still hope democracy would be restored. But when the plane wasn’t allowed to land, we knew the only option was resistance, which meant social movements would be repressed and leaders like us targeted. It was never about Mel or any political party, it was about fighting to restore the rule of law. We cried because at that moment we understood that it was going to be a long, hard struggle, and we were right. Berta is dead, and the struggle continues.’
Making Friends, Losing Friends
Mel Zelaya, wearing his trademark cowboy boots and white sombrero, was inaugurated on 27 January 2006 inside a packed-out national stadium, twenty-five years after the end of military rule. The fifty-three-year-old landowner had beaten National Party veteran Porfirio ‘Pepe’ Lobo Sosa by promising a new kind of Liberal government, centred on transparency and citizen participation. At the inauguration he announced an end to open pit mining, a new reforestation programme, help for small businesses, and energy reform to cut dependence on fossil fuels. The rousing speech left his grassroots supporters enthused, his rivals confounded, and the economic elites reassured by warm words from Carlos Flores Facussé, the business-friendly former president and political dealmaker. Zelaya thanked God, Cardinal Rodríguez, indigenous communities and the new president of Congress, Roberto Micheletti, before leaving feeling pretty pleased with himself.
Zelaya was still basking in the glow when US ambassador Charles Ford called to invite him to lunch at the embassy.4 After a couple of hours of diplomatic chitchat in Spanish,5 Ford gave Zelaya a sealed white envelope. ‘He said not to open
