Our Hope Is in Our Struggle: Reclaiming Land and Life in Honduras

Our Hope Is in Our Struggle: Reclaiming Land and Life in Honduras
Monday, 30 April 2012 12:57 By Consuelo Castillo, Lauren Elliot and Beverly Bell, Other Worlds | Report

In Honduras, as in most places, the government and the wealthy treat land as a commodity. In pursuit of the profits it offers, they have taken enormous tracts of land from indigenous peoples and small farmers, often through legally suspect if not outright violent means.

On April 17, several thousand Hondurans set out to take back some of this land. They occupied 30,000 acres of land that day, claiming a legal right to grow crops there. These occupations were part of the International Day of Peasants' Struggle, organized by the several million-member, world-wide, small-farmer organization Via Campesina. From Mozambique to Palestine to Spain, farmers and activists took to the streets, hosted teach-ins, and established land occupations. Over 250 actions took place globally on that one day.

While the April 17 action in Honduras made international headlines, it was just a snapshot of a much larger national movement for land reform that is rarely reported. Documented or not, it's making waves that can't be ignored. In 2009, the democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya, who had been making concessions to the grassroots' demand for agrarian reform, was ousted and replaced with a government whose favorite motto quickly became "Honduras is open for business." But despite, or perhaps because of the coup d'état - as Consuelo Castillo suggests in the interview below - the resistance is growing.

Four days after these land occupations began, the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) celebrated a long-fought victory: winning a community title to 741 acres of their ancestral land. COPINH and the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (OFRANEH) are two groups demanding the right to communal control over ancestral lands, rivers, forests, and agriculture. Over the years, they and others have reclaimed ancestral lands, and stalled or stopped free trade agreements, hydro-electric dams, mining exploration, and logging. Their victories have come through the strength of their movements and their marches, national mobilizations, and direct actions such as road blockades.

More:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/8823-our-hope-is-our-struggle-reclaiming-land-and-life-in-honduras