Occupy Honduras

Rural campesino groups return to land they allege was taken from them by palm oil corporations.

by

Brisas del Aguán, Honduras—The tents were still being put up at the camp when I arrived on the afternoon of July 29. Set at the entrance of a vast, gridded palm oil plantation on the muggy northern coast of Honduras, next to the corporate management building abandoned upon their arrival, the four-day-old Brisas del Aguán occupation teems with movement as residents help one another construct their new homes. You could hear the sharp, metallic thwack of machetes hitting bamboo or logs, used to prop up black construction tarps as temporary roofs. Children chase ragged dogs as a smoldering haze of woodsmoke accumulates against the canopy of palm trees overhead. But you could be forgiven if—while reading the communique from the Dinant Corporation four days earlier—you imagined the scene would be far more sinister.

“Dinant was victim to an illegal invasion of their plantation at Brisas del Aguán,” the statement read. “The illegal actions of these invading groups heighten social conflict in the area, and are the motor of poverty in the communities.” It decried the fact that, with this new occupation, the amount of company-claimed land “usurped” by “criminal gangs” in this palm-producing region has risen to 5,094.62 hectares.

Dinant would have reason to be worried. Over the past year and a half, five different cooperatives of rural campesinos, or peasant farmers, have physically reoccupied the enormous palm plantations along the north coast of Honduras. Dinant is the largest land-holder of several palm corporations in the region. The goal of the campesino cooperatives is to be able to sell palm oil on their own, not for corporate conglomerates, and to diversify the region’s agriculture to what it was before the introduction of palm oil.

In a written statement for the Prospect, Dinant claimed that “armed and violent criminal gangs masquerading as poor campesinos [are] invading private farms in the Aguan” and that “these violent gangs are preventing some employees from going to work to earn a legitimate income, permanently damaging farms, and pocketing millions … [by] selling stolen produce.” Dinant says it is dedicated to human rights and the rule of law, and that the new occupations are “forcing hard-working families to leave out of desperation.”

Globally, the palm oil industry was valued at $50.6 billion in 2021 and is projected to rise to $65.5 billion in 2027. Promoted by the World Bank as an engine of development in the equatorial zones of the Global South, the fruit is used for everything from processed foods to shampoo to biofuels. Yet that production comes at a cost, with the industry facing long-standing accusations of labor abuse, environmental waste, and repression against those who oppose its expansion. As both a major producer of African palm in the region and as a country whose violence continues to send hundreds of thousands fleeing to the U.S.-Mexico border, Honduras is no stranger to the bloodshed and dispossession of the palm oil industry. Yet a collection of farmer cooperatives have decided to put an end to it.

“This land wasn’t Dinant’s, it was the Brisas Cooperative,” he says.

The lands they’ve retaken since last year, and particularly since the beginning of 2022, were previously managed by Dinant, which has been implicated in longstanding violence against campesino movements, and which the new occupants allege stole their agrarian reform farms during IMF-sponsored liberalization in the early 1990s. (Dinant has stridently denied both claims and says it’s the rightful owner to these lands).

Pedro Fuentes Ramos, an associate of the Brisas Cooperative, argues that the plantation was taken under false pretenses in 1993. “This land wasn’t Dinant’s, it was the Brisas Cooperative,” he says. And they have no intention of leaving.

RETAKING LOST LANDS

It wasn’t easy for some people to come back to Tumbador. Many of the compañeros were at this exact spot on November 15, 2010, when five members of the campesino movement, who were among a group attempting to retake the plantation after a 2009 military coup the previous year, were ambushed and killed by Dinant-contracted security guards, accompanied by elements of the Honduran military. Today’s occupiers, inspired by other movements and hoping the new liberal-leaning government of Xiomara Castro would be more willing to recognize land rights, set up camp just a few feet away from where the massacre took place. But the mood now is decidedly different.

“We feel more excited,” said Alexi Morales of the new land occupation at Tumbador. Like Brisas del Aguán, the residents, many of whom lived in disparate towns beforehand or worked on corporate-owned plantations, are cleaning ferns and vegetal refuse from the plantation to begin cultivating and selling palm fruit on their own. “That excitement is rooted in a decree the campesino movement has that says that 5,000 hectares of land [in the Bajo Aguán Valley] are ours. We have documents that show that the land is ours. That’s why we are here.”

There’s a case to be made that the narrative arc of the Tumbador plantation is a microcosm of the much larger history of labor abuse and land rights in the struggle over African palm plantations in the Aguán. Many of those at Tumbador are members of the MCA (Movimiento Campesino del Aguán), the first organized cooperative that physically retook land for peasant use back in 2000. The time of the massacre was an era in which members of the campesino movement were assassinated in increasing numbers, amidst ratcheted tensions and renewed land occupations in the valley. And it is here, again, under the hopeful shadow of a new government that many hope will recognize the rights of peasant farmers, that the MCA has returned to reoccupy the plantation, 22 years after the first occupation.

A WAY OUT OF POVERTY

Palm oil first came to Honduras in the late 20th century, from West Africa. The majority of African palm ends up being boiled down to a tasteless ingredient used in processed foods. Harvesting the fruit is by no means easy, as the enormous spine-covered mound must be laboriously hacked down from the top of the tree by workers staggering beneath a fifteen-foot pole fixed with a machete-like device at the end. All throughout the Aguán Valley, in the late mornings, you see sweat-drenched workers with the long poles balanced over their shoulders riding home on bikes from their exhausting morning work; many of them show scars, where the spines of falling fruit have gouged into their hands.

Proportionally, palm oil yields a higher harvest than vegetable oils used for processed foods—better than rapeseed, soybean, or sunflower oil. Honduras, for example, produces 3.92 tonnes of palm oil per hectare, as opposed to 0.37 tonnes per hectare of soybeans.

Above all, palm oil offered to Honduras the economic allure of an export-oriented crop that could sell well on a global market dependent on processed foods and goods. The World Bank promoted the crop as an attractive mechanism for inviting foreign investment in the poor tropical countries where the trees grew well, a panacea for economic development and climbing out of poverty. Between 1965 and 2011 the World Bank would invest over $2 billion in infrastructure funds to develop palm oil across the Global South. Later, the World Bank's private lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), would invest millions of dollars in funding palm oil corporations like Dinant. (The IFC now faces a lawsuit from families of peasants in the Aguán who Dinant allegedly murdered while the company was under IFC support.)

According to statistics from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the world went from producing 2 million tonnes of African palm fruit in 1971 to 71 million tonnes in 2018. By 2015, according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development, it had become the most consumed edible oil on the planet.

Honduran palm oil cultivation began in earnest in the early 1980s, growing at a more-or-less steady rate before temporarily plateauing in 2007 at a yearly harvest of 275 megatonnes, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

THE SEIZURE AND THE KILLINGS

It was in this stage of growth, in the early 1990s, that some allege that palm oil corporations like Dinant seized the lands that became their plantations through fraudulent transfers. These cooperative farmlands were divided up and dished out to subsistence farmers in the 1970s, in an attempt by liberal-minded military regimes to stave off potential revolutions. At the time, African palm was only one product among others to be cultivated. But amid structural adjustment measures pushed by the IMF after the end of the Cold War, campesino groups and human rights workers allege that the owners of palm oil companies illegally seized those lands by intentionally circumventing the protocol for sales encoded in Honduran agrarian laws.

The biggest spike in palm production coincided with the murderous repression of campesino groups that began with the 2009 military coup, which ousted democratically elected, liberal-leaning President Manuel Zelaya. After the overthrow, the military installed a series of right-wing regimes that took the simmering violence against campesino groups—who’d begun to physically occupy plantations in a desperate bid for land rights—and turned it into a counterinsurgency. Between 2009 and 2016, a network of death squads linking corporate private security forces, U.S.-trained Special Forces soldiers, and criminal groups allegedly assassinated over 150 people in the Aguán Valley. The majority were members of the peasant cooperatives. When they weren’t being killed, members of campesino groups were still tear-gassed, slapped with arbitrary arrest warrants, and harassed by the authorities.

Palm production grew alongside the wave of targeted killings. After 2009, the industry expanded at a staggering annual growth rate of eleven percent for several years, topping out at a yearly harvest of 620 megatonnes for 2016. Excluding an erratic drop to 450 megatonnes during the first pandemic year of 2020, the industry has plateaued at that level, with 600 megatonnes produced thus far for 2022. Killings by paramilitary groups allegedly tied to US-trained Special Forces and former Dinant security guards have continued since then; the actual number is likely up to 180. (Dinant has publicly denied any connection to these groups). And criminalization and police harassment continue.

In this space, they’ve set about planting and cultivating a crop that has less to do with satisfying global supply chains than creating a self-sustaining community: corn.

When I spoke to members of the Los Laureles cooperative in Tocoa in late May, they had just received notice that they were targeted with órdenes de captura, or “capture orders,” for the crime of usurpation. The penal code in Honduras for usurpation means that, if proven guilty, one faces the same punishment as those convicted of associating with criminal groups.

For David Ramírez, an associate of the Laureles Cooperative, it is clear that Dinant—which claims the rights to their land, as it does to Brisas and Tumbador—would be behind these capture orders.

“In the first place, the zone of the Bajo Aguán is their fundamental economic area, where they have the most economic activity — where the largest economy in Honduras is concentrated,” he said. “It’s the way empresarios (businessmen) seek to criminalize the campesinos so that we cease to continue in la lucha.”

A SUSTAINABLE VISION

Almost a year ago, the compañeros of the Los Laureles cooperative, who have occupied Dinant-claimed land since 2021, cleared a section of African palm next to the turbid brown waters of the Aguán river. In this space, they’ve set about planting and cultivating a crop that has less to do with satisfying global supply chains than creating a self-sustaining community: corn, the staple of rural farmers in Central America.

On one golden afternoon late this last May, José Margarito Fúnes walked through the several acres of corn along the banks of the Aguán river, explaining to me how the new crop will go into tortillas for consumption in the cooperative, and creating feed so they can begin to raise and sell cattle.

“None of the people here are members of criminal groups,” Funes said of the narratives about the cooperatives, shucking a stalk of corn from one of the hundreds of plants now along the river. “We’re fighting people. People with families, fighting for what belongs to us.”

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