Honduras Coup d'tat

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Honduras Coup d'état
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• How it Happened

In the early hours of June 28, 300 military
entered the Honduran Presidential Palace,
disarmed the Presidential Guard, and arrested
President Manuel Zelaya. The President was
quickly exiled to Costa Rica while the parliament
swiftly appointed a puppet president, one of the
richest men in the country. The first word from
the deposed president was that this is a coup
d'état not only against Honduras but the world.
The first was a land reform, necessary in a
country where 7.000 people (around 0.1 percent of
the population) own 80 percent of the land. With
50 percent of the population below the poverty
line and more than 1.7 million people unemployed,
the social problems in Honduras are critical. The
land reform program was designed to increase
small farms, encouraging the poor to engage in
agriculture or alternative economic sectors. But
landowners fought with ferocity to block this
initiative. They also opposed President Zelaya's
programs for building roads, sanitation, and
social houses in the poorest areas of the
country, claiming these projects were
economically unrealistic.
The first was a land reform, necessary in a
country where 7.000 people (around 0.1 percent of
the population) own 80 percent of the land. With
50 percent of the population below the poverty
line and more than 1.7 million people unemployed,
the social problems in Honduras are critical. The
land reform program was designed to increase
small farms, encouraging the poor to engage in
agriculture or alternative economic sectors. But
landowners fought with ferocity to block this
initiative. They also opposed President Zelaya's
programs for building roads, sanitation, and
social houses in the poorest areas of the
country, claiming these projects were
economically unrealistic.
Manuel Zelaya championed three major reforms in
his country that earned him powerful enemies.
http//www.progress.org/2009/honduras.htm
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Some Facts
Many of the land issues in Honduras started in
the 1960s
Back then, efforts at reform focused on
organizing rural cooperatives. About 1,500
hectares of government-owned land were
distributed by the National Agrarian Institute
(Instituto Nacional Agrario--INA) beginning in
1960
A military coup in 1963 resulted in an end to the
land reform program.
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Some Facts
Due to the inability of poor peasants to get
land, they began to illegally squat on land and
begin to farm in the 1970s.
These actions spurred the government to institute
new agrarian reforms in 1972 and 1975. Although
all lands planted in export crops were exempted
from reform, about 120,000 hectares were,
nevertheless, divided among 35,000 poor families.
The Honduran government and two banana
companies--Chiquita Brands International and Dole
Food Company--owned approximately 60 percent of
Honduras's cultivable land in 1993.
Thats about 3.4 hectares per family.
A nice thought but, the land had to be developed
to produce. With such small pieces of land
farmers could not make enough to support
themselves and many ended up selling out to big
companies. Now we are back where we started.
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History of Trouble
There is also a history of violence on part of
the military, large land owners, and retired
military toward peasant farmers.
Thirty-eight farmers remain in custody in
Honduras after the army conducted a violent
eviction of protesters at the National Institute
of Agriculture (NAI). The farmers have been
charged with sedition and vandalism, which can
bring them up to ten years in prison. OCT 2009
This was just one of the dozens of reports I read
while researching this. In some ways these poor
guys got off pretty easy. There were many cases
of people being murdered, beaten then arrested
for murder, and being forcibly removed from there
lands. In many cases it was known who was
responsible for the murders, generally wealth
families who pay bandits to come in and kill
farmers and leave messages to prevent others from
moving in. In many cases the poor farmers have
government backed rights to the land, but money
talks and local officials are paid to do the will
of the rich.
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Other Reforms
Zelaya's second project was constitutional
reform. Beyond the country's social and
economical problems, the system had functioned
under oligarchic rule for more than fifty years.
The current constitution was forged under the
watchful eye of the military dictatorship. To
bolster the social and economic reforms he
proposed, Zelaya also put forth a referendum that
would extend presidential terms. When a poll
suggested that the referendum would receive more
than 70 percent backing, the Honduran elite
quickly turned into a trans-party alliance in a
plot to unseat the president
The third project that created enemies for the
President was the moral project, a campaign
destined to disclose high pay for officials and
launch corruption inquiry into high state
officials' fortunes. This measure cost the
president the support of his own Liberal Party,
made of influential characters with strong
economic ties. The board of the party decided
that Zelaya was a loose cannon and withdrew
support for his projects.
President Manuel Zelaya
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What its all about

• So what resource do you imagine is worth all
  these decades of violence?
• What is it they are growing that is worth this
  much pain?