Hondurans Reject Handing Over Land To Private Capital

[Judi Lynn]

Published 14 October 2020 (6 hours 13 minutes ago)

Farmworkers claim that the measure could take away the livelihood of some 450,000 rural families.

Representatives from several Honduran Campesino organizations announced that they would carry out protest actions against the approval of decree PCM 030-2020. This norm, called the "Banana Law" by rural activists, would give land plots to national and international private capital.

According to the campesinos, this decree is a retreat from the agrarian conquests obtained in recent years. It motivates the transfer of land (which is cultivated by small farmers) to the hands of the highest bidder.

As part of the initiative's actions, the Campesino movement presented an appeal of unconstitutionality against decree PCM 030-2020 before the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ).

. . .

From the peasant movement lawyers' point of view, the decree gives land to national and international agribusiness for 30 years, becoming a harmful decree for those it purportedly represents.

More:
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Hondurans-Reject-Handing-Over-Land-To-Private-Capital-20201014-0016.html

[sandensea]

1. Past is prologue in Latin America

This is all very reminiscent of the Juan Melgar Castro dictatorship, which during its 1975-78 tenure rolled back much of the land reform enacted under his predecessor (Osvaldo López Arellano) at gunpoint.

The best known example was a successful worker's co-operative founded by peasants in 1974 on abandoned Standard Fruit lands - which was violently disbanded by the Honduran Army on Melgar's orders.

Melgar was in turn himself overthrown in 1978 - though not for his abuses, but instead by generals who were chomping at the bit to make Honduras a major cocaine trans-shipment point.

Which, with Reagan administration help, it certainly did.

Reagan's point man? Ambassador John Negroponte - the neocon who later became a household name for his role in Bush's Iraq invasion. He famously expelled the DEA's Honduras office, just as cocaine exports were taking off in '83.