Three men massacred in Aguan, Honduras

[Judi Lynn]

NEWS RELEASE posted on August 18, 2010 by dawn
Three men massacred in Aguan, Honduras
by Unified Campesino Movement of Aguan

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Dear friends of the Unified Campesino Movement of Aguan (MUCA),

With great grief we are informing you that today at 1pm our compañeros Victor Manuel Mata Oliva, 40, Sergio Magdiel Amaya, 18, and a child Roldin Marel Villeda, 15 were massacred in the area between El Bridge and the Panama Cooperative in the municipality of Trujillo, department of Colon.

The assassinated men were members of the Campesino Corporation of San Esteban and of the Unified Campesino Movement of Aguan. They were assassinated as they drove to Tocoa for a meeting in the zone known as the Margen Izquierda del Rio Aguan.

The assassination was an ambush from the side of the highway, it has been relayed that AK-47s were used and that the assassins are Miguel Faccusé's guards, who were driving a blue vehicle with a double cabin.

To the national and international community, MUCA denounces this act as another of impunity and crime that business groups are committing against campesino organizations. We denounce that Miguel Facussé is an all powerful businessman that the state of Honduras has permitted to create violence and terror against social organizations in the country with total impunity. We denounce that he has directly contracted guards for "security" from a company named Orion which persecute compañeros and compañeras campesinos.

http://www.mediacoop.ca/newsrelease/4480

http://www.elheraldo.hn.nyud.net:8090/var/elheraldo_site/storage/images/ediciones/2008/07/25/multimedia/preocupacion.-el-empresario-miguel-facusse-dijo-sentirse-asustadisimo-por-la-actitud-del-gobierno-contra-la-empresa-privada.-gobierno-declaro-guerra-a-empresarios/8830-1-esl-HN/Preocupacion.-El-empresario-Miguel-Facusse-dijo-sentirse-asustadisimo-por-la-actitud-del-gobierno-contra-la-empresa-privada.-Gobierno-declaro-guerra-a-empresarios_noticia_full.jpg http://www.latribuna.hn.nyud.net:8090/web2.0/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/miguel-facusse.jpg

http://hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net.nyud.net:8090/hs109.snc3/15718_432811533708_308660938708_5563372_2007428_n.jpg

Miguel Facussé

Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Tension remains despite accords at Unified Peasant Movement of Aguán land occupations

Ten to twenty people, from teenagers to older campesinos, stand guard near the gate separating the road from the beginning of the Marañones land occupation of the Movimiento Unificado Campesino de Aguán (Unified Peasant Movement of Aguán, better known as MUCA). Just past them, plastic bags, tarps, sacks and other material stretch between hundreds of trees providing shelter to the over 1,000 families. Though they are direly poor and conditions are harsh, the children and families that emerge are anything but the picture of desperation. Instead, they are national heroes who have re-taken lands formerly controlled by one of Honduras's richest men, Miguel Facussé. They, along with over 2,000 other families at six total occupations along the Aguán river, have withstood brutal killings, torture, arrests, beatings and ongoing intimidation in order to challenge one of Honduras's most powerful men and the coup regime he helped install.

The gates open and the committee guarding the entrance allows the delegation to enter. As the delegation walks towards the encampment, the MUCA activist accompanying it tells one of the men resting in the shade to assemble a few people to explain the situation. Within minutes, dozens of people emerge, with more and more joining them, eager to tell the story of this ongoing confrontation between some of Honduras's poorest and one of its richest. Just ten days ago, they explain, one of their young people, a boy of just 17 years old, Oscar Yovani Ramírez, was captured, tortured and brutally killed. As insult to injury, the police who came to pick up his body captured and tortured five more members of MUCA.

"We are clear that there is no difference between Miguel Facussé's private guards, the police and the army. They are the same," explains one MUCA member.

The struggle in Aguán dates back at least 15 years to when former President Callejas passed the Law of Agricultural Modernization, known to many campesinos as the "Law of Agricultural Liquidation." That law allowed lands previously designated for agrarian reform to be sold off to large land-owners such as Facussé. In 2005, peasants displaced from the area along the Aguán river in Colón along with other landless peasants who joined with them organized themselves into MUCA and began pressuring the government to turn the land back over to the landless peasants. For years they carried out actions ranging from hunger strikes to mass marches to highway take-overs. Under the Zelaya administration they finally found an ally in the government and on June 12th, exactly two weeks before President Zelaya was kidnapped and exiled by the military, they signed an agreement to get title to the lands for work in agricultural cooperatives. Needless to say, the military-coup regime did not uphold the agreement made under Zelaya.

Members of MUCA immediately joined the resistance and by December decided to take back the lands in question themselves. From December through April the over 3,000 families of MUCA set up camp on the lands and began cultivating them, amidst ongoing confrontations with the military, the police and the private guards of Miguel Facussé. In April tension reached a precipice as a massive military buildup in the region raised fears internationally of a massacre and bloody eviction. With all eyes turned on Aguán and the coup-continuing Lobo regime desperately striving to gain international recognition and legitimacy, the government finally decided to concede. Negotiations yielded an agreement giving most of the land in question to MUCA members that was elaborated on April 13th and approved by a vote of all MUCA members on April 17th.

But the threats, intimidations, murders and tortures have continued. While MUCA has followed all the provisions of the agreement, it is still waiting on the government to turn over 3,000 uncultivated hectares of land and it is still waiting to see when the aggression and human rights violations will cease.

Pride and resilience ring in the voices that rise from that land despite the ongoing repression. It is the ultimate story of David vs. Goliath. It is a struggle not just over a piece of land, but for the re-founding of a country where just one year ago the oligarchy and its backers in the U.S. government thought they had finally stopped the rising tide of popular struggle in Latin America. In the eyes of the MUCA members guarding the entrance of these lands and in the playful laughs of the hundreds of children running around them however, one can see and hear that not even a military coup can crush the spirits of an awakened people.

http://hondurasresists.blogspot.com/2010/07/tension-remains-despite-accords-at.html

~~~~~
Honduras Commemorates Tense Anniversary of Unresolved Military Coup
Written by Adrienne Pine
Monday, 05 July 2010 10:39

Source: NACLA

On June 27, the streets of Tegucigalpa were oddly quiet. The suddenly sparse police presence contrasted with the rest of the year, and reminded many Hondurans of the eerie calm preceding last year's military coup.

The build-up to the anniversary of the June 28, 2009 military ouster of democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya has been the source of extensive public and private reflection in the country. Today—in stark contrast to previous years—human rights, militarization, the two-party system, neoliberal economic policies, and democracy are hotly debated in local and national meetings of the resistance, in mainstream and resistance newspaper editorials, in radio and television commentaries, in university conferences, bars, corner stores, and soccer fields throughout the country. The walls of nearly every town and city in the country are covered with anti-regime graffiti and demands for the refounding of the nation. The "Citizen Declaration" of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) calling for an inclusive constituent assembly to rewrite the Honduran constitution has garnered nearly 700,000 signatures, and is on track to surpass the number of votes officially received by Honduran President Porfirio Lobo in last November's elections.

In deep contrast to this boisterous dialogue among the Honduran people, ongoing efforts—led by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—to secure Honduras's reentry to the Organization of American States (OAS) and other regional bodies like the Central American Integration System, depend on a narrative of stability and reconciliation. This narrative argues that in contrast to last year's de facto regime led by Roberto Micheletti, the Lobo government is the outcome of a legitimate democratic election; has responded to human rights concerns by forming a human rights commission and promoting a "truth commission"; and has made notable progress in its goal of "national reconciliation" through reconstituting the fragmented Liberal Party of both Micheletti and Zelaya.

However Honduras is anything but “stable” and “reconciled,” and opposing narratives carry the weight of the bloody evidence accumulated in the months since Lobo’s inauguration. These tensions, and Honduras’s deep wound of conflict that persists, show much is at stake on this first anniversary of the military coup.

Those who oppose the Honduran state's international recognition point out that Lobo's presidency, which began January 27 following an election overseen by a repressive military and boycotted by a large majority of candidates and voters, has failed at reconciliation and justice. It has been marked on one hand, they say, by targeted, brutal violence against opponents of the coup regime including over 600 cases of cruel and unusual punishiment documented by the Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Torture, and (during the period between February 28 and May 15, 2010) 12 assassinations of resistance members and numerous additional human rights violations (CPTRT, personal communication; COFADEH, 5º Informe Derechos Humanos, Gobierno Porfirio Lobo, Febrero-Abril 2010, 28/05/2010); and on the other an increasing consolidation of power in the hands of the business and organized crime sectors that financed and promoted the coup, as is particularly clear in recent paramilitary attacks carried out on campesinos in Bajo Aguán and Zacate Grande in land disputes with multi-millionaire coup financier and large landholder Miguel Facussé.

More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/2577-honduras-commemorates-tense-anniversary-of-unresolved-military-coup

http://www.conspiracyplanet.com.nyud.net:8090/images/Bush-idiot.jpg http://i.telegraph.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01404/rumsfeld_1404848c.jpg http://cdn.newsone.com.nyud.net:8090/files/2009/08/hillary-clinton-pointing2.jpg

Heckuva job, Hillary.

[Peace Patriot]

1. Oh, jeez, this is so awful! These death squad murderers are doing the work of the U.S. government!

We now know that the U.S. was helping the fascists in Colombia to draw up lists of trade unionists, to be targeted by death squads. We will no doubt some day find out that the U.S. government was directly aiding and abetting these murders as well. These murders are horrible. But this makes them more horrible--that the U.S. set up this puppet government in Honduras, "of, by and for" multinational corporations and war profiteers, and one of the things that these multinational corporations and war profiteers want is dead leftist leaders--trade unionists, land reformers, campesinos, advocates of human rights--just like in Colombia.

This so sick and what is worse, our own government is supporting it, using multi-millions of our tax dollars to keep these sick fucks in power in Honduras.

We needn't wonder why our name is mud throughout the world. This is why. We don't support justice. We don't support democracy. We actively oppose them--or rather our lying, hypocritical government does. It has nothing to do with us--we, the people of the U.S. And that about sums up the state of our own democracy.

[Downwinder]

2. Somebody has to protect the clandestine airports

so drug shipments don't get off schedule.

[EFerrari]

5. This can't be true. Hillary said everything was fine now.

It's so sweet when our oligarchy hearts their oligarchy.

[Downwinder]

3. FNRP - Police repression growing- young girl among gaoled

http://www.quotha.net/node/1122

[Judi Lynn]

4. To think this total hell has formed in Honduras in just one year, too.

All it took was a plan, a ton of filthy lies as a rationale, and we discover the world's new most violent government.

So now they have sunk as low as taking children as a new avenue to torturing the adult population, just as they did at Abu Ghraib.

Thanks for the information. We need to know what our government is backing in the unredeemable war on humanity.