Honduras: new violence in Aguán land dispute

Honduras: new violence in Aguán land dispute
Submitted by Weekly News Update on Tue, 04/06/2010 - 08:24. A private guard shot Honduran campesino Miguel Alonso Oliva dead on Apr. 1 when a group of campesinos attempted to occupy an African palms farm in the northern Honduran department of Colón, according to the German-based organization FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN). The victim was a member of the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), a group based in the Aguán River Valley that has fought since 2001 for some 20,000 hectares of land it claims were bought illegally by a group of influential landowners, Miguel Facussé, Reinaldo Canales and René Morales . Morales holds the title to the farm where the Apr. 1 killing took place.

FIAN reports that this was the third killing of MUCA members in less than a month. José Antonio Cardoza and José Carías, directors of the Brisas de COHDEFOR cooperative in Bonito Oriental, were murdered on March 17, according to FIAN. (Prensa Latina Apr. 2, Apr. 4; Vos el Soberano, Honduras, Apr. 4)

On Apr. 2 MUCA charged that the military, police and paramilitaries were planning to remove thousands of campesinos "in a violent and bloody manner" from the land they are living on in the Aguán region, and that this operation might come as early as Apr. 6. The security forces to be used were trained in the Fourth Infantry Battalion facilities in La Ceiba, Atlántida department, MUCA said, under the command of retired captain Fernando "Billy" Joya Amendola. There was also training in a number of other locations, according to MUCA, including a factory belonging to Exportadora del Atlántico, a subsidiary of the Facussé family's food company, Grupo Dinant.

Billy Joya was a notorious leader of the Battalion 316 death squad in the 1980s. A Honduran court ordered him and nine others arrested in October 1995 in connection with the 1982 abduction and torture of six students; at the time he was living in Spain . Apparently Joya has been operating freely in Honduras at least since the military carried out a coup in June 2009. (Prensa Latina Apr. 4; Vos el Soberano, Honduras, Apr. 3)

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