A Palm Oil Revolution in Honduras

El Faro first published this chronicle in Spanish in August 2012 and has translated it amid the negotiation of a Truth Commission in Honduras regarding the ongoing land conflict in Bajo Aguán. View the accompanying photo essay: Unending Shots in the Valley.

“Who said fear behind a palm tree?” —Saying of the Unified Campesino Movement of Aguán (MUCA) in Honduras.

At 11 o'clock on the night of December 25, 2009, Doris Pérez prepared for an ambush. She put on some jeans, a large checkered men’s button-down shirt, some rubber boots, and pulled a black cap over her brown hair.

Five hours later, she was carrying a machete in one hand. She advanced slowly and silently. The rays of the moon slipped weakly along the paths that separated one African palm from another. Thanks to the foliage of the palm trees, 25 meters high, she and the rest of the campesinos were stealthy shadows slipping between the dry branches on the path as best they could. The slightest noise, near the security guard station at the entrance to the farm, could thwart the mission.

In the Aguán Valley, northwest of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, an African palm plantation can become a labyrinth without walls. It forms endless paths and from any point evokes an infinite mirror: gigantic, almost identical palm trees, lined up one behind the other, one next to the other; hundreds on the right, hundreds on the left, and diagonally... A geometric sea of trees where only seasoned eyes know how to enter, leave, hide.

The labyrinth was a mystery to Doris, but she was not alone. She was just one of a group of 100 usurpers advancing, determined, to take La Aurora, one of the plantations owned by Exportadora del Atlántico, a company owned by Miguel Facussé, one of the most powerful men in Honduras. Most of the stealthy invaders were carrying machetes and caps like Doris. A few, the ones leading the expedition, also had balaclavas covering their faces. They were carrying firearms.

The assault was swift. “The campesinos are coming!” shouted a guard in the distance. Someone fired, others responded, and Doris hid behind the trunk of a palm tree. The National Division of Criminal Investigation (DNIC) in the municipality of Tocoa, department of Colón, suggests that it was the campesinos who pulled the triggers first. “The campesinos threatened us with firearms,” wrote the departmental head of the division, Nelson Aguilera, in a report drawn up a year and a half later, in May 2011. According to the campesinos, they only returned fire at the guards.

In Bajo Aguán, the versions of the confrontations are always divided.

Of the events that morning, suffice it to say that there were 25 armed guards against a hundred or so campesinos. The guards fled, weaving among the palm trees. When one of the campesinos at the front discovered the retreat, he shouted: “We won!” Doris joined in, hoisting her machete and jumping before melting into the embrace of Geovany, the young man at her side: “The campesinos won! We won! Long live the campesinos!”

* * *

The Aguán Valley is an immense green carpet that crosses the municipalities of Tocoa and Trujillo, in the Honduran Caribbean. It is an agricultural paradise where transnationals converge: the Standard Fruit Company, their vans ironing the Pan-American Highway day and night; powerful landowners like Miguel Facussé, with more than 16,000 hectares of land; an army of private guards to protect the highway and farms; and over 3,000 poor, landless campesinos.

Three years ago, in May 2009, the profound differences between these poor men and women and the millionaire landowners were made clear here. In a peaceful and surprising uprising, a thousand campesinos occupied the El Chile plant, one of the African palm oil processing plants belonging to the Dinant Corporation, Miguel Facussé’s flagship company.

The occupation caused millions of dollars in losses for Dinant because, in a world with a growing energy crisis, products derived from African palm oil generate millions of dollars in profits every day. Palm oil is the fourth largest export product in Honduras, and in the last 10 years it has placed the country on the list of the world’s top 10 producers. But beyond the economic, the symbolic value of what happened three years ago is imposing itself: For the second time in a decade, the campesinos of this area of the country were singing the same revolutionary song. They were demanding more land for the poor at the expense of taking land from the rich.

Doris Pérez and the rest of those who took part in that first occupation in 2009 and in those that have followed since, are inspired by others who first occupied land in Aguán in the year 2000. At that time, the region was trying to recover from the devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which left behind floods, swollen rivers, destroyed bridges, landslides, and death. More than a million people were affected, 5,000 died, and 8,000 disappeared. Honduras, the country most affected by the hurricane, was hungry and cold. Then, from all corners of the country, a mass of campesinos walked to the Aguán Valley, which in other times had been an Eden of agricultural productivity, employment, and stability, but which by the new century had become an intricate system of buying and selling, of campesino cooperatives bankrupted, swindled, and bribed.

The campesinos knew all this, but even so the families marched carrying machetes and a change of clothes, farm animals and children in tow. They said that if the land once belonged to the campesinos, it should return to them. They said that the state could not let them starve. They settled on the land of the former Regional Center for Military Training (CREM), the camp where the United States trained the armies of Central America in counterinsurgency tactics more than 30 years ago, in the 1980s. They settled and never left. After months of negotiations, the campesinos agreed to settle on a piece of land big enough to accommodate the crops, the buildings, and up to the third generation of those first settlers.

The campesinos of 2009, calling themselves the Unified Campesino Movement of Aguán (MUCA), emulated those occupations but added a new twist: They took up arms. The then-president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, tried to react and dilute the movement by accepting their motives, negotiating the partial handing-over of land, and promising future solutions, but the coup d’état that overthrew him in June 2009 thwarted any possible agreement.

The movement grew and organized itself. By the first half of 2010, 23 plantations had been taken over, in an operation that paralyzed production on more than 20,000 hectares of land, equivalent to the urban area of the capital, Tegucigalpa, or almost four times the size of Manhattan Island in New York. On December 10, 200 campesinos took over 950 hectares of the La Confianza estate; on December 22 the San Isidro estate fell; in the early hours of the 26th, Doris and her companions took over La Aurora; on January 5, 2010 the Concepción estate fell...

The government of Porfirio Lobo, elected at the end of 2009 and installed on the following January 27, found itself faced with a runaway phenomenon and was no longer able to do much. The takeovers continued. The new president barely managed to position himself as an intermediary between the campesinos and the landowners, led by Miguel Facussé, owner of 12 of the 23 farms taken over. The mediation only managed to get the campesinos to hand over most of the land to its current owners and settle on just over 4,000 hectares, in exchange for a promise of sale, remeasurements, and legal action to determine whether it was legal for a small group of landowners to have so much land in their possession.

This is how the conflict developed: with the government negotiating with each group separately, and with the opposing sides coming to an agreement with weapons. The facts speak for themselves. The hatred that has grown in these three years between the two armed sides speaks for itself. The deaths that the Bajo Aguán conflict has claimed and continues to claim speak for themselves.

Like the three guards who, in January 2010, five weeks after the takeover in which Doris Pérez took part, returned to their guard posts in La Aurora believing that the police had evicted the usurpers. They came across the campesinos’ weapons, determined to preserve the conquered land at any cost. All three were shot dead. There were no casualties on the side of the campesinos. The authorities made no arrests. For none of the more than 60 deaths caused by the war in Bajo Aguán have there been any arrests. Not a single one. The guards, however, have avenged their own by force of arms, in other confrontations, in other ways.

War Zone

“There go those sons of bitches! Follow them, compa, follow them!”

Infected by the urgency in Vitalino's voice, I turn the wheel at full speed, we turn around and head back to Tocoa. The pickup we just passed, which has sparked the hunt, disappears around a bend. We accelerate. 80 kilometers per hour. We spot it again in the distance, on the straight stretch of asphalt. Half a dozen men are standing in the bed of the pickup truck, attached to an iron frame. Some of them are wearing balaclavas. They are armed, but from this distance we cannot tell if they are carrying shotguns, rifles or —who knows— toy guns. Vitalino Álvarez, “El Chino”, the MUCA spokesman, who is sitting next to me and continues to encourage us to catch up with them, says he saw long guns.

“They're carrying AK-47s, mate! Didn't you see them? Get in there, mate! Get in there so you can take their photo.”

In the back seat, the photojournalist readies his camera. The guards slow down near the entrance to Tocoa, at a turn-off where there is a gas station and which separates the city from the plantations. It's a 15-minute drive between Tocoa and Miguel Facussé’s palm plantations. The division between urban and rural evaporates.

They get 200 meters ahead of us when they reach the turn-off and turn right. Vitalino, my co-driver, rolls up the window and curls up in the seat. We are chasing the guards of the San Isidro estate, the property that borders the campesino settlement of La Confianza and the La Aurora estate. This plantation area is like a rhombus in which there are armed men on every corner. The guards control one of the four parts of the disputed territory. The campesinos control the other three.

The hooded men turn right and enter a dirt road, parallel to the Pan-American Highway. Vitalino shouts:

“Keep going straight, mate! We're not going in there! That's a hot zone!”

He barely manages to poke his tight, slanted eyes out of the window as the guards ride off, escorted by a cloud of dust. We missed a chance to photograph them. We turn around, slowly this time, and take the original road back to La Confianza. Vitalino does not come out of the shell of a passenger seat until we get back on the Pan-American Highway. It’s 6:30 in the morning on Tuesday, May 29, 2012. There are two days left to meet an ultimatum issued by the landowner Miguel Facussé.

Three years have passed since the first occupations in Bajo Aguán and the government has resolved nothing. Here bullets are still being fired and bodies are still falling. The list of those murdered exceeds, I repeat, 60. Most of the casualties are on the campesino side. The authorities have not made, I repeat, a single arrest. The landowner said two weeks ago that the campesinos have to vacate the 4,000 hectares to which they have retreated while they wait for the government to do something that will convince everyone and satisfy everyone. But these days nobody understands, not even the government, why the landowner is in such a hurry. The campesinos have responded that they will only be removed from this land no longer breathing.

Finally we pass through La Confianza, the most organized campesino settlement in Bajo Aguán, and come across the fence that separates the San Isidro estate from the lands that the people of MUCA call with revolutionary mysticism “liberated territory”. The road forks into a T that cuts through an ocean of palm trees. If we go to the left, Vitalino explains, we would come to the same “hot zone” where the guards we were chasing went. Nobody goes in there, he says. To the right is the Sinaloa sector, with the facilities of the National Agrarian Institute (INA) and the road to the La Aurora farm, both of which are in the hands of the campesinos. Opposite, 50 meters behind the fence protecting the San Isidro farm, a barricade stands out.

It is a wall of sandbags erected under the palm trees. There seems to be no-one there, but we still feel watched. We take photos. This is a “hot zone”, a land of suspicion, of paranoia. Opposite, we have the territory occupied by Facussé's men.

Vitalino invites us for coffee in a villa located between the two enemy territories. We joke that this place is the Casablanca of Bajo Aguán, like in the movie. Here, just a year ago, guards and campesinos would meet up at lunchtime. Today there is too much hatred for that to happen again. Here, in this Central American Rick’s, while the owner prepares fried eggs, makes coffee, and bakes tortillas, Vitalino tells us about a tough campesino woman, a leader of the movement. He talks to us about Doris Pérez.

* * *

At 6 in the morning on June 5, 2011, Doris Pérez prepared five chickens that her family and friends would eat later that day at lunch. First she wrung their necks. Then she plucked them. Finally, she removed their entrails.

She was finishing off the last animal when some young men warned her that the guards on the San Isidro estate were “doing a lot of shooting”. “Let them kill each other, we’re not doing anything to them,” she replied. The young men told her that she could get into trouble for talking to her. They left.

Half an hour later, five women ran past Doris, looking frightened. When, intrigued, she went to see what was happening on the other side of the house, which had once been used as a government office, Doris’ legs turned to mush. A group of armed guards were crossing the dirt road and were about to enter the INA, the sector occupied by the campesinos where Doris had been living for the past year. She crawled into the house on all fours and found three of her four children hiding under a bed. The eldest, 11 years old, who no longer fit in the space, said to her: “They're going to kill us today, mommy!” They both threw themselves to the ground as the house was riddled by gunfire.

A few minutes passed until the silence that usually follows the bullets convinced Doris that it was time to escape. One of the internal hallways of the house led to the patio, where some featherless chickens were left on top of a pile. There she gathered the trembling children: “God willing, nothing will happen to us, but we have to run with all our might.” She ordered them to file out one behind the other, as straight as possible. Doris imagined that if they ran in a group they would be an easy target. They had not advanced even 10 meters when the buzzing of the shots that fell on either side of the line, as they zigzagged through the bushes, proved her right.

Near the exit of the property they found the same ones who had fled when the attack began, huddled together, scared, frozen. “Get up, the guards are coming!”

And then Doris felt the bullet.

She still kept running with her children for a few minutes, until one of her comrades, who was coming to the aid of those fleeing in disarray, threw himself on top of her and threw her to the ground. “Careful, girl!” he said, before they both rolled on the ground. A bullet whizzed right where she was standing. That man, she believes, saved her life. He got up, took his rifle, and went to repel the guards. Before leaving, he told another man to help Doris, who was seriously injured. Only then did Doris touch her stomach and stain herself with her own blood; only then did she give herself permission to be weak. She felt something acidic in her stomach and vomited.

The bullet had passed through the cell phone she was carrying at her waist, held in place by tight jeans, and lodged in her gut. She believes that the habit of carrying cell phones there is what allowed her to survive. She now carries her new cell phone there, covering the bullet wound. “Imagine if they had caught me again,” says Doris Pérez.

* * *

The landowners’ guards have a well-earned bad reputation among the campesinos and NGOs that monitor human rights in Honduras. In the week of Miguel Facussé's ultimatum, a group of these organizations held a symbolic trial in Tocoa in which more than 15 testimonies were collected that attest to murders, mistreatment, disappearances, and persecution at the hands of these guards. Hundreds of inhabitants from the local communities and the MUCA settlements attended. They managed to get a representative from the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to sit at the head table.

Nobody told the story of Carmela Chacón. On May 15, 2011, the guards on the San Isidro estate kidnapped Pascual López, her brother-in-law. Pascual, 45, was looking after some of Carmela’s cows on a pasture located at the northern end of the farm, which borders another campesino settlement called Rigores. When the guards saw him, they shot him in the leg and then dragged him into the labyrinth of palm trees.

All this happened in front of the eyes of Jaime, a 12-year-old boy who was with Pascual that afternoon. It may be because he was on the other side of the herd, covered by a dozen cows, but they did not see Jaime, who when he heard the shots hid behind some bushes. A year later, the boy cannot get that image out of his head: a man dragged toward a plantation while he screams to be released, to be helped. Pascual, to date, has not been found. His sister-in-law still cries when she remembers him.

When the conflict began, the main newspapers in Honduras, the government, and a large part of society, when speaking of the war in Bajo Aguán, referred only to the terror caused by the “campesino guerrilla”. The violence perpetrated by the army of armed guards who guarded the landowners’ estates did not appear on any front page or in any government discourse. If you ask the authorities, they almost always say that the guards acted in self-defense. It took three years, and more than 60 deaths, most of them campesinos, for the campesinos to stop being victims of “the violence” —in the abstract— in a country devoured by crime and with the distinction of having the highest homicide rate in the world.

Now the newspapers have started to ask who is murdering the campesinos of Aguán, and to demand answers from the Dinant Corporation, which the campesinos accuse of ordering most of the killings. Dinant washes its hands of the matter. It blames the government for its inability to impose order. Now that it is the company's turn to respond, when a campesino farmer is found dead or has disappeared, Facussé’s company claims that it is not engaged in the systematic elimination of people.

The families of these campesinos do not believe Dinant.

Yamileth Valle is one of those who distrust them. In mid-March 2012, two prosecutors from the municipality of Trujillo entered the recently inaugurated cemetery of the campesino settlement in La Confianza. They intended to exhume a corpse, but they could not start the excavation because 16-year-old Yamileth Valle was sitting on the freshly sealed grave and would not get up. She had an angry look on her face, a stone in her right hand, and a dozen more around her feet. Yamileth challenged the prosecutors to try to dig up her father, Matías Valle, who had been murdered a month earlier, but she warned them that the stones were aimed for the head. The prosecutors did not try very hard.

Yamileth did not trust the prosecutors. She did not even believe they were prosecutors. Even today she has no way of proving it, but in the Bajo Aguán conflict almost no one tries to confirm her suspicions. That day, Yamileth feared that these men were on the side of her father's murderers, one of the top leaders of the MUCA. From the day of the murder, rumors circulated that the hitmen who killed him could not collect their payment because they had been asked for the head of Matías Valle as proof of payment.

In recent years, Matías Valle had become one of the main promoters of the campesino struggle in Bajo Aguán. A former soldier, he converted to the campesino cause after attending some assemblies that MUCA organized in his community, located very close to one of Miguel Facussé's farms. From the day of the murder, rumor had it that the hitmen who killed him could not collect their payment because they had been asked for the head of Matías Valle as proof.

In recent years, Matías Valle had become one of the main promoters of the campesino struggle in Bajo Aguán. A former soldier, he converted to the campesino cause after attending some assemblies that MUCA organized in his community, located very close to one of Miguel Facussé’s farms. At first, Valle came to listen, but he soon began to make his voice heard and ended up becoming the link between the campesinos of Aguán and the campesino organizations in the rest of the country. He was the main organizer of the peaceful revolt that culminated in the takeover of the palm oil extraction plant of the Dinant Corporation in May 2009 — the first campesino takeover, which sparked the armed conflict between the poor campesinos and the landowners’ guards.

The identity of the man who ordered the death of Matías Valle may, forever, remain an unsolved mystery. Yamileth assumes that the hitmen were Miguel Facussé’s men. On the morning he was murdered, Valle was waiting for a bus at a stop when two hitmen on a motorbike shot him repeatedly. Three of the shots hit him in the chest. Matías Valle lay on the dirt floor, his eyes completely closed, in front of some beer and soft drink crates full of empty bottles.

A wake was held for him in his community. That night, a friend spread the rumor that the hitmen, who were guards on one of the farms, needed to cut off the head of the corpse in order to get paid for the job. That is why a niche was opened in the Quebradas de Arena cemetery for a body that would never be buried. The family decided to do it in another community called Suyapa, but the rumor also reached them there. Matías Valle was buried on the grounds of La Confianza because it is a liberated zone and the police and prosecutors know that they cannot get there without rolling down the windows of their cars and, above all, without permission from MUCA. The grave was dug in the shade of African palms.

The Guerrilla’s Dream

If there was not so much at stake, the deaths in Bajo Aguán might have meant little in Honduras, the most violent country in the world. Its homicide rate in 2011 was 82 per 100,000 inhabitants. Diluted in those figures, the murders caused by this conflict could well go unnoticed.

But what happens here matters. Millions of dollars are at stake, represented by thousands of hectares of agricultural land cultivated with African oil palm. And a political project is at stake.

In 2009 the profound differences between Manuel Zelaya, a president who broke the mold of the Honduran elites, and the country’s powerful business class were made manifest here. It is curious that in order to understand the Bajo Aguán conflict one must review the role of a former landowner-turned-politician who was overthrown in a coup d’état. In June 2009 Zelaya, a farmer and son of farmers from the cattle-raising region of Olancho, had turned his back on the traditional wing of the Liberal Party, which had brought him to the presidency, and had become an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. He had also positioned himself as a populist defender of campesino causes in Honduras.

On June 17, 2009, in a meeting with a thousand campesinos from Bajo Aguán, held in the city of Tocoa, Zelaya dropped a bombshell for the country’s political-business sector: He promised to remeasure the landowners’ plots and hand over the surpluses that were outside the law, together with other idle lands, to some 100,000 campesinos who were claiming arable land. The MUCA leaders who participated in the signing of that agreement could not have been happier. Zelaya pulled strings in Congress and passed the decree that would make his promises come true. The Bajo Aguán conflict seemed to be solved. But the campesinos’ joy would be short-lived.

11 days after that promise, on Sunday, June 28 of that same year, the army, after conspiring with the country’s economic elite and the majority of Congress, took Zelaya from his home in the middle of the night and put him on a plane to Costa Rica. There the ousted president arrived in exile. There he got off a plane, dressed in pajamas.

“That made us realize that we had to act by force, given that the system had collapsed. There was no other way out,” says Jhony Rivas, one of the political leaders of the MUCA and the negotiator at the table of the Porfirio Lobo government, who three years later is still trying to resolve the conflict. What happened in Bajo Aguán after the coup? Until August 2009, two months after the coup, the campesinos did nothing. They joined the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP), a movement that embraced countless unions, NGOs, and associations ranging from human rights defenders, teachers, trade unionists, students, workers, politicians and campesinos opposed to the coup d’état.

The FNRP was a visible new Left and wanted Zelaya back. By August 2009 it was already clear that he would not be. So the campesinos decided to act.

“If something is going to explode, it's going to explode in Bajo Aguán. There are trained communities there, communities with weapons,” a belligerent FNRP activist in Tegucigalpa told us that August. This activist, at that time, was one of those in charge of the communications system. He had contacts with most of the leaders of that resistance.

Three years later, in Bajo Aguán there is a war between two fronts: the campesinos and the landowners’ guards, and the state is merely a silent witness.

In September 2011, General René Osorio, head of the Honduran Armed Forces, described one of the sides in this war as “guerrilla”. He was referring to the campesinos.

* * *

Dusk falls on a grey Bajo Aguán. A storm is approaching. A drizzle announces it, dampening the forehead of Vitalino Álvarez, “El Chino”, the man with whom we were chasing a pick-up of guards. We have just crossed the control booth at the main entrance and a man with a pistol on his belt and a rifle in hand asks Vitalino who we are. He asks with a serious gaze, distrustful.

“They're coming with me, mate. They're coming to see the settlement,” explains Vitalino. The security team is on full alert.

We enter La Confianza. Men, women, and children watch us closely from dozens of manaca huts, as the huts made of African palm branches tied together with nylon and covered with mud are called here. The campesinos have dreamed that this will one day become a beautiful neighborhood. The streets are already marked out: There is a school with corrugated iron roofs, a Catholic church, an Evangelical church, the foundations of a communal house, and grass for a soccer field.

The money for all this has come from the sale of African palm fruit that the campesinos have harvested on the occupied farms. The MUCA leaders estimate that in 2011 alone they achieved a production of 114 million lempiras, around 6 million dollars. The administration of these funds falls to a community assembly. The MUCA members have become millionaires, so to speak. On the occupied land they provide employment for hundreds of families and with the profits they pay salaries of around 1,300 lempiras a week, 68 dollars, for an eight-hour work day.

Compared to the 38 dollars a week they earned working for the landowners on these same farms, with work days of more than 12 hours, the campesinos say they are satisfied.

The MUCA claims that the payment of wages consumed 60 percent of what the movement earned in 2011. The rest was invested in continuing to build La Confianza and in maintaining the organization. And maintaining the organization includes buying weapons. So far in the conflict, the police have picked up rumors about the campesinos’ weapons all along the length of the Aguán river. Only rumors, because they have caught no weapons of war. These rumors say that AK-47s are hidden in the foliage of palm trees buried on the riverbank, or in boxes under the huts in the settlements... There are photographs that feed the rumor mill: two years ago, a photographer from La Prensa captured the image of a group of hooded men carrying what are presumed to be military rifles.

More rumors. A journalist from the National Resistance, who never publishes anything under his real name, who travels all over the country to monitor how the Resistance is moving, invites us to believe him and not to believe him when he talks about the secrets of Aguán: “In one of the areas taken over there is a military training camp, but as you will never be able to get there, and as journalism lives on confirmations, what I am telling you is useless.”

The truth is that today Vitalino wears a cap on his head, a backpack over his shoulders, and a nine-millimeter pistol tucked into his waistband under his shirt. “It's in order,” he says; in other words, it's a legal weapon, registered in his name. He protects himself with the gun when he leaves the perimeter guarded by the security team, because the MUCA spokesman says he cannot go unarmed when he travels to other places. “The compas have demanded it of me.” The comrades have bought it for him. Then he asks us not to talk about the other weapons, not to photograph the other weapons, not to write about the other weapons.

Vitalino is not a campesino — at least not a campesino who grows African palm. He is a political activist who, before the coup d’état, worked in construction and ran a small shop. He now works full-time as a spokesman for MUCA and as the movement’s liaison with the national and international press. “Hasta la victoria siempre!” Until victory always, reads his business card. Vitalino has always been a politician. He is a survivor of the most repressive decade in a country that annihilated, in the 1980s, all attempts by the Left to use arms to get rid of the “oppressors” of the country. In Honduras there was an attempt to form a guerrilla group, like in El Salvador, like in Nicaragua, like in Guatemala. But it failed. Vitalino now dreams of a second chance.

At that time there were two famous guerrilla cells linked to the Communist Party of Honduras: the Popular Forces of Liberation “Lorenzo Zelaya”, and the Cinchoneros. The members of the former were called “Lenchos”, in honor of the pioneer of campesino struggles, assassinated in 1935. Those of the second owe their name to Serapio Romero, a campesino who made horse girths and straps for a living. A century and a half ago, Romero led a revolt against the president of the day. He was captured and beheaded, by court order, on July 20, 1868. “I belonged to one of those cells, but I'm not going to tell you which one,” says Vitalino, as we sip soft drinks at the foot of the shack he shares with his partner, a dark, curly-haired brunette with full lips.

In one corner of the plot of land he occupies in La Confianza, Vitalino has a latrine, of which the sheet metal door is covered by a striking United States flag. “The fact is that the empire has so thoroughly shit on our villages, compa, that we have to play a prank on it,” laughs Vitalino, bearing his teeth. As he would have it, one must think while one shits.

* * *

Vitalino is not keen to reveal many secrets. He is not originally from Bajo Aguán. His real home is seven hours away, in another department. His children and the mother of his children live there. “This is my other family. I've already formed that one; it's already walking on its own. Now they need me more here,” he says. In his own way, Vitalino protects his own, intercedes for his own. And they thank him for it.

“Chino! Chino!” shouts a little blonde girl who comes out to meet us, with open arms, in the drizzle. We continue our tour of La Confianza and the girl hangs onto Vitalino, who carries her and hugs her while acting as our guide in this utopia of a self-regulating community. “Proven robbery and theft is punished with three times the value of what was stolen, and it will be noted in the personal file of the sanctioned colleague. Att. Disciplinary and Surveillance Board,” reads a sign hanging on the door of the community administration.

We move on. A boy splashes around almost naked in a puddle that has formed on the dirt road. Vitalino gets annoyed. We are visitors and he wants everything to shine in the MUCA flagship settlement, but a grinning child, with muddy shorts, breaks the spell. He shouts at the child’s mother and waves at them. They sweep him away. “Do you want to see where we make cheese?” Vitalino asks us as the mother and child scurry into a hut. “That thing you can see over there, in the distance, is the boulevard. It's almost finished.” On a wide dirt avenue, a dozen lampposts lined up in a straight line await the arrival of the cement.

A reporter from the local television station in Tocoa is busy interviewing the seven-year-old girl with blonde hair, bright eyes, and long eyelashes. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” she asks.

“A member of the cooperative because I live very well here,” replies the girl, smiling but embarrassed, moving her feet and squeezing her fingers, looking at the muddy ground.

Vitalino smiles with pleasure. “These children already know what the acronym MUCA means. We are preparing them from an early age,” he tells us.

In the schools in the settlements, as well as teaching them how to add and subtract, the children are taught the history and values of the campesino movement.

The reporter interviews Vitalino. “This is a fight we will never give up,” we can hear while we concentrate on the blonde girl who is now playing on a mound of sand. “What is the MUCA? What does it mean?” we ask her.

The girl raises her index finger and turns 360 degrees, while she responds, smiling, with her gaze lost somewhere in the settlement, which from here looks immense: “All this is MUCA.”

* * *

It is two in the afternoon and in Bajo Aguán the heat is causing a thousand campesinos surrounding the minister of the National Agrarian Institute, César Ham, to break out in a sweat. Ham is a sociologist from the National University of Honduras who over time became a bureaucrat and one of the leaders of the center-left Democratic Union (UD) party. When Manuel Zelaya was overthrown, Ham was one of the main opponents of the coup and of the de-facto government of Roberto Michelletti, but he did not give up the chance to stand as a UD presidential candidate in the elections won by Porfirio Lobo. The FNRP does not forgive him. They accuse him of legitimizing the electoral process and, with it, the de facto government. It got worse when Ham agreed to join Lobo’s “unity government”. In 2010 he became Minister of Agriculture. He has been tasked as mediator in the land conflict in Aguán. Thus far, without results.

Ham is a tough and distrustful man. He does not trust the campesinos and he does not trust Miguel Facussé’s guards. Two hours ago he entered the INA, the place where Doris Pérez almost lost her life, guarded by a military convoy of three Humvees armed with M-60 machine guns. When they entered, the soldiers pointed their barrels at the farmers. A group of about 30 farmers responded by pointing their cell phones back. They said that this “intimidation” should be photographed. The soldiers withdrew from the scene and parked in front of the San Isidro farm, still pointing their machine guns. The meeting is about to end and the soldiers are still patrolling the perimeter. Ham has come to give the campesinos another ultimatum: Either they sign a sales agreement with the government, and take out a low-interest loan to pay Miguel Facussé for the occupied land, or they will be evicted. “It's now or never, compañeros,” —comrades— “you have to sign,” says Minister Ham.

He is met with silence. The farmers do not understand why the government has been infected by the landowner’s haste. Before he leaves, a woman farmer rebukes the minister: “Why do you call us compañeros? Look how you come to visit: pressuring us, intimidating us with those men and those weapons?”

“Comrades,” he responded, “I would have liked to go to the La Aurora estate to meet you there, but let’s not kid ourselves: It's a dangerous area there and here, and one just wants to be cautious.”

Ham gets into his truck and crosses La Confianza to look for the Pan-American Highway. Not even a minister under guard with three Humvees dares to take the road that runs along the San Isidro estate, the hot zone. In this area one must be cautious.

* * *

The minister left 10 minutes ago and we want to meet the landowner’s famous guards. The Aguán war has already claimed a dozen casualties on their side. They, too, will have something to say. Despite the warnings of Vitalino Álvarez and the caution of César Ham himself, we decide that it’s now or never, so we cross the street in the hot zone. We move at 10 kilometers per hour. From both sides of the street, the labyrinth of African palm trees watches us.

After a few minutes we see them. There are about eight or ten of them. Maybe a dozen. There is no time to count them. Some are sitting on a kind of bench and others are standing. They seem to be posing for a postcard photo, with the landscape of palm trees in the background. They are carrying weapons; they look like shotguns. Around them there are water bottles. The group is a turquoise blue patch in the middle of the black of the shadows of the palm trees and the green of the foliage. The shirt of their uniform is an unmistakable bright blue.

We are going to stop. We raise our hand to wave. They have seen us arrive and now they can make us out through the open window of the passenger seat. That’s when we hear a shot. A shot? In this area one must be careful — the minister himself said so. So for all intents and purposes the bang was a shot. We accelerate. The rear tires buckle. Did they buckle? We speed off in a cloud of dust. Were we alone in the cloud of dust?

A day later, we told the police chief of Tocoa, Daniel Reyes, what had happened. “A weapon with a silencer? Maybe a shot at ground level. 50 meters? You say there were palm trees? The sound could have been drowned out by the palm trees... But look, let me tell you something... What you did was reckless. We don't even go that way! And if we do, we coordinate with them first. Didn’t Don Vitalino warn you that it's a hot zone?”

On that road, in that hot zone, on August 15, 2011, five people were murdered. Three men and two women. They had just left the occupied INA facilities. Nobody knows why they took the street in the hot zone. Nobody told them they should be cautious. The truth is that a pickup truck intercepted them and from the truck they were riddled with bullets.

Four of those killed were employees of the Pepsi bottling company, who had been painting billboards. The fifth was the owner of the business that benefited from the company's advertising. There are no suspects for this massacre, much less anyone who has been caught. No-one has been arrested for the deaths in Aguán. No-one. Three days later, in Tegucigalpa, we told the same story to the financial manager of Dinant Corporation, Roger Pineda.

“Honestly, I don't know what to say. The truth is that people are on edge,” he said. “It's not justified, but [the guards] must be paranoid, especially when they see strange people. Well, you've managed to capture the essence of the atmosphere there, haven't you?”

The Landowner Has Back Pain

Judging by a photo hanging in the lobby of his office in the city of Tegucigalpa, in which he is seen with a blue sash across his chest, one would think that Miguel Facussé Barjum is the president of Honduras and is very old. From the photos on a stool in his office, the landowner is a gray-haired, good-natured and smiling grandfather. And from the massage machine set up in front of the window, where he undergoes two daily sessions of therapy, Facussé is an 85-year-old man who has to bend over backwards to try to soothe his severe back ailments.

Facussé is all that and more. He is one of the most powerful businessmen in Honduras and his detractors say he is a key player in the appointment and dismissal of presidents. His influence extends throughout the Central American isthmus, where his company, Dinant Corporation, has strong investments. He floods Honduran kitchens —and television commercials— with the popular vegetable oil Mazola and the pasta brand Issima. In shops and supermarkets he introduced the Yummies brand, specializing in Zambos banana chips, Zibas potato sticks, and Taco onion rings. Facussé's investments extend as far as Mexico to the north and Colombia to the south. On May 4, 2011, a fan gushed on the company’s Facebook page: “The great Tsar of brands.” Dinant produces and exports snacks, soaps, bleaches, pastas, and palm oil. It has also successfully invested in biogas, biodiesel, and biomass. All of the latter thanks to African palm.

Facussé is still known in Honduran political circles as “Uncle Mike”, a nickname that gained relevance when his nephew, Carlos Flores Facussé, governed the country between 1998 and 2002. But for the campesinos of Bajo Aguán, this businessman is “the landowner”. The nickname has a logical basis: According to Dinant, before the land seizures Facussé had 16,000 hectares in Honduras used for the cultivation of African palm. That’s not counting the properties they claim to own in Nicaragua. The nickname also carries a hint of resentment that comes out in the voice of the campesinos every time they talk about the conflict: “Whose land is it?” “The landowner’s.” “Where did you work before joining MUCA?” “In the landowner’s palm grove.” “Who killed your husband?” “The landowner’s guards.” “Why didn’t you report the murder?” “Because the police are with the landowner.”

In his office are two other objects that define him: a small picture, with a graphite drawing, in which an African palm tree stands out proudly, and a scale model airplane that rests on a filing cabinet next to the desk. “He's fascinated by them!” says Anabela, his assistant for the last 25 years. In Honduras they say that Facussé often makes his light aircraft available to presidents and the Central American political elite. There are also those who say that many of these light aircraft land for suspicious purposes on the palm plantations of the landowner. Especially after the WikiLeaks organization revealed some hundreds of confidential cables from the United States Embassy in Honduras in 2011.

In one of these documents from the trove of Honduras cables published by El Faro, dated March 4, 2004, the embassy reports the landing, unloading, and subsequent destruction of a drug plane on a Facussé farm, located in the municipality of Trujillo.

Drug trafficking plays an important role in the Bajo Aguán conflict. According to the Army, it is thanks to the narcos that the campesinos have armed themselves to the teeth. According to the campesinos, some of the confrontations in which guards and even police have died have in fact been revolts between drug traffickers and the guards or police who confront them. The only certainty is that it has been proven that the drug traffickers use the farms closest to the Caribbean Sea to land their light aircraft or unload narco-speedboats. The only certainty is that this region is dominated by drug trafficking.

According to the same U.S. diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks, in March 2004 it was Miguel Facussé himself who reported to the authorities that a drug plane had been shot down by the guards when it was flying over his farm. Aside from the different versions of the event gathered by the US embassy, then-Ambassador Larry Palmer closed the cable considering “of great interest” the fact that, in the 15 months prior to the report, other drug shipments had tried to land on the same property of Miguel Facussé:

“In July 2003, a go-fast boat crashed into a sea wall on the same property and engaged in a firefight with National Police forces,” wrote the ambassador. “Two known drug traffickers were arrested in this incident and 420 kilos of cocaine were recovered. Earlier in the year, another air track terminated at the same property and appeared to have used the same airstrip.”

* * *

It is Monday, June 4, 2012. The deadline for the campesinos to sign a purchase agreement with Facussé or vacate the land has expired, and although the police have already received the eviction orders, on government instructions they have not acted and are standing down. The MUCA, cornered, has announced that it will sign the agreement and buy the usurped land. At the headquarters of Corporación Dinant, an office complex on a hill in the center of Tegucigalpa, nobody is celebrating. Facussé is not home. Despite the promise of his public relations team, the businessman has appointed someone else to speak on his behalf: the financial manager, Roger Pineda. The landowner does not like to talk to the press.

Pineda is an agricultural engineer and banking expert who has been working for Facussé for 16 years. He is a well-mannered man who speaks fluently, like a candidate trained in the thralls of an election campaign, and perhaps that is why he reminds me of overweight, middle-aged legislators who know they are winners because there is someone much stronger propping them up. Pineda is Facussé’s representative and spokesman for the conflict in Bajo Aguán. He is the one who faces the press for his boss. He has not traveled to the area since September 2011 because he says he has received death threats. A week ago, on the advice of the company's security department, he reinforced his truck.

Pineda claims to have a clear picture of what is happening in Bajo Aguán, but before sharing it with us he offers up copies of complaints of usurpation and a report drawn up by the National Directorate of Criminal Investigation of the Honduran Police, detailing all the attacks against the Exportadora del Atlántico in Bajo Aguán. Pineda shows us photocopies of newspaper articles about armed and violent campesinos. He speaks of guards who have disappeared, of guards who have been tortured “and had their ears ripped off like savages.”

“There are also serious accusations against the guards of this company,” we prod.

“But where have these been taken to court? Where is the evidence? We have based our accusations on verifiable reports made to the offices responsible for prosecuting crime. The statements of the campesinos, on the other hand... What is the basis of their accusations?”

“Have the guards of this company never fired a weapon at a campesino?”

“Whenever they have used a firearm it is to defend themselves. Our guards have always died inside the farms, not outside them.”

“What happened on the El Tumbador farm?” we ask.

“There is no clear conclusion about what happened, but our guards were carrying pistols and shotguns. However, the campesinos had AK-47s. As I said, we handed our guards over to the authorities but there was, and to date there is, no certainty about what happened.”

On November 15, 2010, on the El Tumbador farm, located in the municipality of Trujillo, five campesinos were killed and another half-dozen seriously wounded after a takeover that ended in tragedy. The 100 campesinos who tried to take over the farm ended up fleeing in terror.

According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the five who were killed were shot outside the farm, which was being guarded by Dinant security. One of the victims, 23-year-old José Luis Sauceda, a father of two, was shot several times in the head.

“What kind of weapons do the company's guards use?”

“Legal weapons: shotguns and pistols.”

“They don't use military-grade weapons?”

“There are photographs, from the press, where you can see that it is the farmers who are using illegal weapons. I don’t know what happened on that occasion in El Tumbador... I suppose that they themselves, in desperation, were caught in the crossfire.”

“The head of the municipal police in Tocoa says that in the confrontations between guards and campesinos they have never found shell casings or shotgun or pistol ammunition. He says that the confrontations are with long weapons.”

“Well, of course! They are the ones the campesinos use!”

Roger Pineda takes out one last photograph, a color enlargement. In the image, a man carries a red banner with the acronym MUCA painted in white. In the corner of the banner, the face of Che Guevara is drawn in black. For Pineda, there is a political motivation behind the actions of the campesinos.

* * *

One Saturday in 2010 —Pineda does not remember the date— a man who had seen him on television approached him at the entrance to a supermarket. By that date, the first quarter of 2010, the 23 farms in Bajo Aguán were still occupied. The man asked Pineda if they had already solved the problem, and Pineda replied that they were trying to solve it. Then the man stared at him, seriously, and Pineda was startled. Then he was surprised. “Tell me the truth,” the man said, “I have 45 blocks of land and I want to know if I’m going to lose them or not.”

“Then it hit me why the MUCA had done this, especially to Don Miguel,” says Pineda. “What they have achieved is to create in the minds of the population a state of immediate defenselessness, based on the following logic: people see the scenario and ask themselves: If they threw out the big one, or one of the biggest, why won't they throw me out, too?”

Pineda is convinced that there is a group behind the campesinos that is using force as a strategy in a political campaign, but he dares not put a name to his assumptions. “I don’t know, I couldn’t say.”

Pineda closes his hypothesis by citing other facts. According to him, the war in Bajo Aguán has opened up other fronts. By June 2012, in several regions of the country, including the Sula Valley in the department of Cortés, campesino movements had taken over thousands of hectares of sugar cane plantations. The Honduran sugar industry reported losses of over 300 million lempiras due to the land seizures. The campesinos in that area have copied the organization of the land seizures in Bajo Aguán.

The Saddest Men in the World

The second-to-last time we saw Jhony Rivas, the political leader of MUCA, Vitalino Álvarez, the spokesperson, and Doris Pérez, the campesino woman who took La Aurora and was shot at the INA, was on Friday, June 1, 2012, at the seizure of the bridge over the Tocoa River, which serves as the entrance to the municipality. The ultimatum of the landowner and the government had expired the day before.

Vitalino was wearing a cap, a T-shirt, and had his nine-millimeter gun at his waist; Jhony Rivas had a folder in his hand and two guards at his sides; Doris Pérez was wearing a hat, a tapered, button-down checkered shirt, tight jeans, and black high-heeled boots. She looked like a fashionable cowgirl.

Vitalino dreamed that in the march the campesinos would parade with their machetes raised and the malayo scythes with which they cut the fruit of the African palm. The malayo is a 25-meter-long aluminum tube with a curved blade attached and sharpened at the tip. “Have you seen the Chinese army on parade, compa? It gives an impression of power,” he told us days before the march. But at the march very few campesinos carried machetes. Only he and Jhony Rivas’ guards were visibly armed. That Friday, MUCA assured its campesinos that no one could put pressure on them, that the struggle would be taken to its logical conclusion.

Two days later, on Sunday June 3, we met up with them again in Tegucigalpa. They were being held in a hotel guarded by the MUCA security team. After the march on the bridge, the campesinos’ negotiating team, led by Rivas, had mobilized urgently to mull things over. They ended up accepting the agreement offered by the government, with a certain feeling of defeat.

Doris Pérez was glad to see us, but quickly returned to the melancholy smothering the place. She told us that they had been pressured with the use of force, with threats of eviction, that they signed without wanting to sign. Vitalino and Jhony Rivas said the same.

Vitalino improvised a press conference and Johny Rivas launched into his speech. Halfway through his remarks, one of the top leaders of the Popular Front of National Resistance of Honduras entered the room. He saw us, greeted us, and left. It was Rafael Alegría, one of the men closest to the deposed president Manuel Zelaya, who today is promoting the presidential candidacy of his wife, Xiomara, through the Libre party, an extension of the FNRP.

The press conference went on for an hour. Logic seemed to dictate that they should be happy: now La Confianza and more than 4,000 hectares of land were going to be theirs; there would be no more threats of eviction and the deeds would be in their name; the conflict was, in theory, resolved; and the confrontations, violence, and murders would cease. But Jhony and Vitalino were sad. In that hotel, far from celebrating that they had gained land for more than 600 campesino families, they acted as if they had lost everything.

* * *

A man walks slowly along a dirt track, alongside an African palm plantation. That plantation is the labyrinth of the Paso Aguán estate, another of the properties of the landowner Miguel Facussé. The campesino is Gregorio Chávez, 69 years old. Gregorio is an active member of MUCA. Someone approaches Gregorio and Gregorio disappears without a trace. He disappeared on the afternoon of Sunday, June 3, the same day that MUCA decided to call a truce in the conflict. To date, Gregorio is still missing.

* * *

A group of hooded, stealthy, armed men make their way through African palms. It is the early morning of Sunday, July 8. A month has passed since the campesinos, the government, and Miguel Facussé agreed to the truce; a month since Gregorio Chávez disappeared on the Paso Aguán estate. The campesinos advancing through the palm trees know that an agreement has been signed, and they know that there is one more person missing. Of course they know. Perhaps they hope to find the remains of Gregorio Chávez as they move forward. But their objective is another. The group takes one step after another, dodging the dry branches in the road as best they can. The slightest noise, near the security guard station at the entrance to the Paso Aguán estate, could thwart the mission…

Note: On August 1, 2012, the Honduran Congress approved a ban on firearms in the Aguán region. The ban, however, exempted private security guards, the landowners’ guards. Eight days later, three campesinos were riddled with bullets by an armed group near the Paso Aguán estate. For this crime, as for the rest, there were no arrests.