August 9, 2008
- Three hundred campesinos kill 10 police commissioner’s family and workers
- Government, six years late in paying indemnification for land, takes much of the blame
On August 3, a group of about 300 campesinos killed ten people living in a police commissioner’s home in the department of Colon. The circumstances of the violence, which also left one campesino dead, are in dispute. The campesinos say they have been subject to almost constant harassment since they first began to occupy the police commissioner’s land eight years ago; the commissioner, Henry Osorto, who was not present during the violence, denies this. In any case, the conflict is seemingly minor, as only about 36 hectares of land are in dispute. The government was supposed to have paid Osorto for that land six years ago, but the funds were never forthcoming. And now Honduras´ most militant campesino group will likely see its top leaders arrested.
Massacre or shootout? At around 6 pm on August 3, the police were finally permitted to enter the scene at Henry Osorto’s house, located in the community of Silín in the northeastern Colon province. By then the house was burning furiously and, according to some reports, intermittently erupting into explosion as heavy armaments ignited inside. All but one of the eleven occupants were dead, from gunshots, smoke asphyxiation, or burns.
Surveying the scene now, it is difficult to understand how the authorities could have been so late in arriving. The house is not 20 meters from a major highway. The police, for their part, say the roads were blocked by the campesinos who had allegedly slaughtered Osorto´s family and employees. Though the campesinos deny that they set the house on fire on purpose, the first investigators to evaluate the scene by daylight claim they found a bottle of gasoline near the house.
The head investigator for the police, Carlos Castro, said there are many unanswered questions about what happened that day. One is whether the campesino Arnulfo Guevara was killed by gunfire coming from the Osorto house, as the campesinos insist he was, or whether he was hit by friendly fire.
This and other issues will be clarified, Carlos Castro said, by the testimony of the sole survivor on the Osorto side, Henry Osorto’s fifteen year old nephew. Castro said the police will arrest as many people as possible, and have already drawn up a list of fifteen suspects.
It is not known whose name appears on the list, but many people believe the campesinos’ leadership will be singled out. Mario Posas, a prominent expert on agrarian issues, told CAR that “the police are going to try to blame just a few people as the real perpetrators, but it’s quite clear that this was an act of collective violence. The vital thing is to figure out why 300 campesinos would do this.”
Blood for Blood. The land in dispute, for most Hondurans, is known simply as the CREM (the Regional Center for Military Training) and it is notorious. During the 1980’s, the US used the site to train the Contras and the Salvadoran military. Two decades later, it is home to Honduras’ most renowned, and now bloodiest, land dispute.
How it made the transition from one to the next involves several infamous, intertwining episodes in Honduran history. The crucial juncture came in 1991. In that year, the port city of Trujillo chopped up the CREM and sold it for US$50 thousand to a number of buyers. Among them was a lieutenant who had served in the CREM by the name of Henry Osorto.
This sale was illegal, the Honduran government later acknowledged – the city of Trujillo did not have the authority to sell land owned by the federal government. The government then subsequently decided in 1993 that the site, illegally occupied as it was, would be a good place to situate landless campesinos.
The problem was that in Honduras getting the law enforced in your favor requires power, and that was something campesinos in the region badly lacked. In 1998, however, the devastation of Hurricane Mitch changed local power dynamics considerably when campesinos from all over the country, having lost what little they had, heard that the government was redistributing land and descended on Silín.
About 800 families bound together, forming the Campesino Movement of Aguan (MCA). The MCA petitioned the government to grant them the titles to this land, but those titles were not forthcoming; and so in May 2000, the MCA invaded the CREM and occupied certain parts of it. Soon there were skirmishes with the Osorto family. Henry Osorto´s brother was killed, Ak-47 in hand, in September 2000.
In 2002, the government finally agreed to pay the various owners of the former CREM to leave. Many of the payments went through, but, as the director of the National Agrarian Institute (INA) acknowledged last week, much of the money was misappropriated. The result was that the Osorto family and several other land owners in the CREM were never remunerated, and so they have never left.
Not having been paid, Henry Osorto defends his legal right to the land. He also denies that he is the powerful land owner he is sometimes made out to be. Roque Rivera, a local activist who has aided the MCA since its inception, said that Osorto is right. “Henry Osorto is a relatively minor landowner, and it’s precisely for that reason that his land has been redistributed,” he said. “You’ll never see the really big players lose anything.”
The MCA´s Story. Even though CAR did not arrive in Silín until six days after the violence, many people who admit to killing Henry Osorto’s family and employees had not been arrested. It is not clear why that is, but a group of the community’s leaders eagerly took advantage of their freedom to give an account of the previous Sunday’s bloodshed. That eagerness, it seems, owes to their sense that the national media has systematically ignored the reason why three hundred of them stormed Henry Osorto’s home.
One of Guadalupe Carney’s top leaders, Santos Cruz, claimed that while the violence can be traced to the community’s turbulent start in 2000, tensions with Henry Osorto had run particularly high in past months. Congress approved a law in April intended to hand thousands of acres of private and public idle land to the landless poor, and landowners have allegedly responded by murdering key campesino leaders across the country.
That law dedicated an entire article to the CREM, requiring the government to pay Osorto and others US$3.97 million. Only part of the money would have been paid up front – the rest was to be paid in bonds – but Henry Osorto and other landowners on the CREM rejected those conditions.
Nevertheless, a leader in Guadalupe Carney, Irene Ramirez, made a triumphant statement to the media on June 9, declaring that campesinos had scored an important victory against landowners. Two days later he was killed in the nearby city of Trujillo.
Although there is no evidence that Henry Osorto was connected with the Ramirez murder, the residents of Guadalupe Carney took his responsibility as a matter of course. They have spent eight years fighting the government and Osorto for the land he lives on, and they say it could have been no one else. Two days later came their response. They seized land possessed by Henry Osorto’s brother, but whose legal ownership is disputed by the MCA.
Apprehension grew over the next weeks. Meanwhile the MCA maintained its vigilance over the disputed property with a rotating lookout system. According to personal testimony, at 5 am one morning, a group of four men, two women, and two children awoke to the approach of about ten heavily armed men wearing ski masks. This was the morning of August 3. When the men opened fire with AK-47’s, the witnesses say, they ran, only narrowly escaping from being hit. A nine year old girl was left behind, and reportedly kept captive for fifteen minutes before being released.
That afternoon 300 campesinos converged below the hill on which Henry Osorto’s house stands. Cruz says the group carried machetes and small weapons, but not AK-47’s as the police have speculated. He said they were intermittently shot at with heavy arms, but did not return fire for most of the afternoon. Finally, according to the MCA, one of campesinos, Arnulfo Guevara, was killed by a gunshot.
“When we saw Arnulfo get killed, we lost our heads – went a little crazy – and yelled ‘let’s go,’” said Santos Cruz, adding that no single person led the charge – that the decision to attack the house was made collectively.
Cruz and others said they did not know how the fire started. But soon some of the occupants tried to leave the burning house for air, at which point, according to Cruz, it was easy to pick them off.
Matthew Brooke 