Land Grabs Are Partly To Blame For Skyrocketing Violence In Central America
Land Grabs Are Partly To Blame For Skyrocketing Violence In Central America
Global firms and local elites are taking land from farmers, which pushes them to cities, where jobs are few.
01/16/2017 09:43 am ET | Updated 13 hours ago
Saskia Sassen
JOHN MOORE VIA GETTY IMAGES
Thousands of Central American migrants ride atop trains, known as La Bestia, or the Beast,
through Mexico to reach the U.S.
In 2013, San Pedro Sula in Honduras was the worlds murder capital, with a murder rate of 187 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, driven by a surge in gang and drug trafficking violence. Nationwide, the year before, Hondurass murder rate was 90 murders per 100,000 people ― the highest in the world.
Whats behind this ongoing surge in gang and drug trafficking violence? The answer is multi-faceted but a key element has been overlooked again and again: Local elites and foreign corporations gained control over much of the land that could grow crops, forcing smallholder farmers off their land.
After a land grab, large cities are often the only places farmers and others from rural parts of the country can go. But the cities offer few economic options for the migrants, and in response, they too often are targeted by gangs that make up a murderous urban sub-culture. Thus, many Central American refugees showing up at Americas door are both refugees of urban violence and, before that, of land grabs.
Honduras is a prominent example. Land grabs accelerated there in the 1990s after the government passed the Agricultural Modernization Law, which privatized collective landholdings. This favored large landholders and destroyed the claims of smallholders, who typically do not have modern-style contracts affirming their land ownership. According to Tanya Kersson, author of Grabbing Power: The New Struggles for Land, Food and Democracy in Northern Honduras, a few powerful landowners grabbed more than 21,000 hectares in a short period between 1990 and 1994. This accounted for 70 percent of peasant lands in the Lower Aguan Valley, one the most fertile areas in the country and the site for much of the land conflict in Honduras.
More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/landgrabs-central-america_us_586bf1a6e4b0eb58648abe1f?section=us_world