July 11, 2008
- Congress approves law to speed up old campesino claims to idle land
- Director of agrarian reform admits his office is full of corrupt officials, but says he is powerless to fire them
New legislation passed in April may allow tens of thousands of campesinos to win titles to land left idle by large property owners. While campesinos have long had the legal right to claim idle land, even state officials admit that landowners have had enough sway over the government to prevent that right from being exercised. And now they may use that influence to pressure the Supreme Court into declaring the law unconstitutional. Meanwhile, some organizations say landowners, fearing that their property will be taken from them, have begun to assassinate campesino leaders. Although there is no hard evidence to support that claim, the director of the government’s agricultural institute – as well as an official for a campesino union – warn that the landless poor might resort to violence themselves if this new law goes unheeded.
Power of the Land. For the past twenty-eight years, the Institute of National Agriculture (INA) has effectively been a government body without a mandate.
“The INA was founded in 1961 with the express mission of redistributing land,” said INA’s current director Fransico Fúnez. ¨During the 1970’s INA was able to get some of that work done. In the early eighties, though, international loan institutions like the IMF pressured Honduras – and much of Latin America – into abandoning land redistribution.”
As of this year, though, the INA has recovered its mandate – somewhat. In April, congress approved a bill intended to make good on the so-called “agrarian debt” (mora agraria), the approximately 600 cases in which campesinos have petitioned for titles to idle land they have lived on for years, without any resolution by the government. The law creates a commission comprised of representatives of campesinos, land owners, and the INA itself, which will have ninety days to compile a list of all the unresolved petitions for land titles that were made more than two years ago. The government will then “forcibly expropriate” the land in the cases appearing on that list, compensating the owners for sixty percent of the land’s value, with twenty-five percent paid up front and the rest to be paid over ten years.
Despite this compensation scheme, land owners have strenuously objected. The National Federation of Producers of Agriculture and Livestock of Honduras (FENAGH) was supposed to serve on INA’s commission but has instead boycotted – arguing correctly that it is outnumbered by campesino organizations. It has also solicited the Supreme Court to strike down the law as unconstitutional.
Marco Polo Michiletti, FENAGH’s executive director, told CAR that “the law violates our basic human rights: our right to own property, our right to be heard in court, and our right to be justly compensated for our land.”
Campesino organizations have meanwhile complained that landowners are trying to protect their land illegitimately. One method, these organizations say, is murder. Four campesino leaders in the past month alone have been killed, most recently Lino Herrera, the regional director of the National Association of Honduran Campesinos (ANACH) in San Pedro Sula. Victor Bonilla, ANACH´s national president, said that these murders were ordered by “landowners who fear that they are going to lose their land with this decree, and want to scare people away.”
There is no hard evidence of this; nobody has been arrested for any of these cases, let alone large property owners. Still, according to INA director Fransisco Fúnez, “it seems like a very strong coincidence that this decree would come out, and then suddenly these people turn up dead.”
Another way landowners keep their land, according to campesino organizations, is that they enjoy exclusive access to INA. Most recently, sixty days after the new legislation was passed, COCOCH, the umbrella organization for most Honduran campesino groups, staged protests across the country, denouncing the fact that INA had made no progress in assembling the list of the “agricultural debt”. Protestors outside the national INA office in Tegucigalpa told CAR that many INA employees are bought off or personally connected to land owners.
“They are right,” said Fúnez, INA’s director since 2005. “INA is full of people who are totally malicious and have no interest in our work.”
“In fact, I’ve fired sixteen employees,” he added. “Every time the courts returned them to our offices, and they’re still here. These employees did not seem to be on board with the institution and I’ve had suspicions that some were bought off, but lacking any proof there’s nothing I can do.”
Still, he claimed the delays have been due to the fact that the Ministry of Finance had failed to transfer US$1.59 million to his office, making it impossible for him to send qualified – and clean – personnel into the field to assess these cases.
Agrarian Reform Abandoned. By coincidence, this law came before Congress just as the international food crisis was becoming big news at home and abroad. On the front pages of the Honduran tabloid press, the staple image of a body full of bullet holes has been increasingly replaced by a starving face from the country’s interior. Statistics seem to justify a shift in editorial policy: a report released by the UN’s FAO released in June claims that fourteen Hondurans die of hunger everyday.
While most of the blame has been pinned on the global crisis of escalating food prices, some say that much of the problem is a historical one originating in Honduras itself. After all, according to Fransisco Fúnez, about a quarter of the country’s agricultural land is idle. An adequate understanding of how land could be left uncultivated as people starve to death would require a full reckoning of Honduran history. As Fúnez said, “land titles granted by the Spanish crown, in certain cases, have survived to this day.” But much of the story lies within the past forty years, when several efforts at land reform were subsequently aborted.
INA was created in 1961, under the relatively progressive Liberal government of Ramón Morales. From the start, INA’s explicit task, Funez says, was to redistribute land, but it was later legislation passed in 1970 and 1972 that gave the institution the real legal standing to do so. Until 1980, INA was undertaking the process of redistributing 16% of the country’s agricultural land. Many of these cases went through – 2000 cooperatives won titles – but others got caught up in the courts and INA itself.
According to Fúnez, pressure from loan institutions effectively ended INA’s work in 1980, and many old cases were never resolved. Some of the cases currently under review, Fúnez says, date back to 1970. Furthermore, he claims he has found 144 cases in which the courts or INA manipulated hearings, unjustifiably ruling against campesinos when they tried to gain titles to idle land.
But probably the strongest blow to land reform – effectively a land reform in reverse – came in 1992 with the Modernization Law of the Agricultural Sector, which permitted campesino cooperatives to sell their land to local and international investors. Manuel Acosta Bonilla, the government official who oversaw much of this process, as the National Coordinator of the State Modernization Program, described in a 1998 interview with Astrolabio magazine how the law concentrated land in the hands of business interests.
“Banana companies offered the cooperatives 20, 30 million lempiras (US$1.06 million and US$1.59 million). Who could say no?” he said. “(The Modernization Law) only benefited businessmen (…) Most of the land they bought was abandoned, left idle. The purpose was not to produce, but to speculate on real estate.”
He concluded that “the displacement of campesinos has been enormous and rapid (…) and once again the campesinos were left without land.”
Warnings of Violence. There are different accounts for why, after years of neglecting the “agrarian debt,” the government came to pass this recent legislation.
Marco Tulio Rodriguez, a representative for the National Union for Rural Workers (CNTC) said the INA – Fúnez included – only came to recognize the necessity of writing the law when the CNTC seized INA’s buildings nationwide in 2006. And many campesino leaders told CAR that Congress only passed the law because this is an election year and politicians need to win the campesino vote.
Fúnez, however, says Congress passed the law, because representatives came to realize that its intention is “just.” He also believes that the Supreme Court will ultimately rule against FENAGH’s appeals to declare the legislation unconstitutional. He argued that the government is justified in only paying landowners sixty percent of the land’s value, because in most cases it is the state and campesinos who have invested in the land, not the legal proprietors.
He also said that he believes the Supreme Court will realize – and that FENAGH should realize – that “if there is even one government eviction of campesinos from idle land, this country is going to explode into social chaos.”
Tulio Rodriguez, who is strongly critical of Fúnez for favoring landowners, agreed with him on this point. “We’re going to come out with everything we have,” he said. “The police can come out with their rifles, and the campesinos will come out with their machetes. That would be the consequence if they don’t carry out this law.”
Matthew Brooke 