El Faro first published this photo essay 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. Read the accompanying chronicle: The Palm Tree Revolution.
The dead fall in silence in Bajo Aguán, hidden among endless rows of palm trees. The fight for the precious palm oil produced in the region has turned Honduras' most fertile valley into a land of torture, threats, and unsolved murders.
The Aguán River, one of the most important in Honduras, runs for 275 kilometers along the northern fringe of the country until it flows into the Caribbean Sea, crossing the municipalities of Tocoa and Trujillo, Colón. Its basin, covering more than 10,000 square kilometers, defines one of the most fertile regions in Central America. A large part of the lower area of this basin is used for the cultivation of African palm for the production of a vegetable oil whose price, by 2012, had tripled in ten years.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
Two soldiers, responsible for guarding the director of the National Agrarian Institute of Honduras, stand guard in front of the San Isidro estate, one of the properties of businessman Miguel Facussé. The estate is in the middle of the territories that had been occupied since December 2009 by members of the Unified Peasant Movement of Aguán (MUCA). Since 2010, the presence of the military had increased in the Aguán Valley to “pacify” the area.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
A photograph of former president Manuel Zelaya, overthrown after the coup d'état in June 2009, hangs on the outside wall of a house in the campesino settlement of Guadalupe Carney, in the municipality of Trujillo, Colón. Former President Zelaya had become an iconic opposition figure in Honduras, especially for the National Front of Popular Resistance, which brought together various left-wing sectors. The Guadalupe Carney settlement was taken over by a thousand campesinos, members of the Campesino Movement of Aguán (MCA), in 2000. By 2012, it was the oldest occupied territory in the area.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
Two guards watch over one of the entrances to the campesino settlement of La Confianza, a territory dominated by MUCA. Although this organization denies possessing weapons restricted for military use, some automatic rifles can be seen in the hands of its members. According to the Honduran Public Prosecutor's Office, more than 50 murders related to the agrarian conflict had been recorded in Bajo Aguán in the last three years, but none had been solved. Most of the victims are farmers, but also guards hired to defend the lands of businessman Miguel Facussé.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
Although Byron Giovanni Cruz is only six years old in this photo, he had the courage to confront the group of police officers and soldiers who came to his house a year earlier, on Sep. 19, 2011, looking for his older brother, Santos Bernabé, who was 17. Byron remembers shouting at them: “Don't take him away, don't kill my brother!” but the uniforms paid no mind. A group of police and military officers took Santos to a local cemetery, where they beat, threatened, and tortured him for hours. They accused him of having participated in the planting of an explosive device on a nearby property and of hiding weapons. They covered Santos’ head with a plastic bag to suffocate him, then doused him with petrol and threatened to burn him alive. He was later transferred to the police station in Tocoa, where he spent the night in a room because he was a minor. He was released the following day without charge. The family never filed a formal complaint because they do not trust the authorities.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
On May 16, 2012, several cartridge cases were found near the body of Juan José Peralta Escoto. The cartridge cases were collected by MUCA peasants before the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Police arrived at the crime scene. They claim that the bullets contained in the cartridges were fired from an AK47 rifle. In this, one of the latest attacks against campesinos, Juan José Peralta (son) and Antonio Veliz were wounded. The car in which the victims were traveling was attacked in a border area between the lands occupied by the MUCA campesinos and one of the farms guarded by Miguel Facussé’s guards.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
Doris Pérez Vásquez, 28, took part in the mass occupation of farms at the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010, which opened a new chapter in the Bajo Aguán agrarian conflict. Together with other farmers in the area, some of them armed, they entered the La Aurora farm, forcing the private guards to retreat. A year and a half later, on June 5, 2011, a group of those same guards entered the grounds of the National Agrarian Institute where Doris andher family were taking refuge. When Doris tried to flee with her children, she was shot in the abdomen. She is the president of one of the six cooperative companies that exploit the occupied lands and one of the main leaders of the campesino movement in Bajo Aguán.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
A U.S. flag is used as a toilet door in the small hut where Vitalino Álvarez, MUCA spokesman, lives. Some of the leaders of the campesino movement in Bajo Aguán are not originally from the area and have a history of involvement in left-wing and revolutionary movements in other parts of the country. The land conflict became one of the hobby horses of the National Front of Popular Resistance, born in opposition to the coup d’état against Manuel Zelaya in 2009.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
A child shows his middle finger to a local television cameraman visiting the La Confianza settlement. This settlement “liberated” by the Unified Campesino Movement of Aguán was inaugurated on July 20, 2011, commemorating the national holiday Lempira Day, named after the national currency. In this settlement lived 615 families working the land that this movement seized from businessman Miguel Facussé, one of the richest men in Honduras.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
Two soldiers from the Honduran Army keep watch over the border between the land taken by MUCA and that still controlled by Miguel Facussé. “Comrades, I brought this delegation because we all know this is a dangerous area,” said Minister of Agriculture César Ham, justifying the military presence during a visit to Bajo Aguán at the end of May 2012.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
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A MUCA campesino works on one of the farms that this group has occupied in the Bajo Aguán area, on the right bank of the river. The fruit is harvested by cutting the “clusters” of the African palm using a kind of long-handled scythe known as a malayo. The MUCA estimates that in 2011 it earned around six million dollars from the cultivation, harvest, and sale of African palm fruit.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
A bunch of African palm fruit freshly cut by one of the MUCA farmers. In the decade leading up to 2012, Honduras became one of the ten largest producers of palm oil in the world, the second most produced vegetable oil in the world after soybean oil. In 2011, the Central American country increased its palm oil exports by 20 percent.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
A child cuts leaves from the palm branches that will later be used to build the walls of the ranch where his family lives. The MUCA campesinos cut down the palm trees in this area to expand the community cemetery. At the moment of this picture, the only corpse buried in the cemetery was that of Matías Valle, a former MUCA leader murdered in February 2012. In Bajo Aguán it is common to see children doing farm work with their adult relatives.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
A guard post built like a trench with canvas and sandbags on the San Isidro estate, one of those still under the control of Miguel Facussé. The guards of Corporación Dinant, Facussé's company, are feared in the area even by the authorities. Although none of them had been convicted by 2012, the guards had already been accused of responsibility for a massacre, several attacks, and murders, such as the death on Aug. 15, 2011 of four employees of the Pepsi company and the owner of a local business, when hey were passing in a truck in front of the fence that delimits the San Isidro estate.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
Members of the Unified Campesino Movement of Bajo Aguán gathered in a general assembly to discuss the organization’s response to the threat of imminent eviction. Although many of the campesino farmers who were members of the cooperatives were opposed to it, MUCA ended up accepting the government’s proposed payment terms for the land. However, a month after the agreements were signed, MUCA reported the murder of two more farmers and the disappearance of a third; and then another of Miguel Facussé’s farms was taken over.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
Two children peek their heads out of the door of Cecilia Urquilla’s café, “Niña Chila”. The café is located right in the middle of the San Isidro farm, controlled by the guards of the Dinant Corporation, and the territory dominated by the MUCA peasants. On June 5, 2011, a stray bullet, presumably fired by the guards during an attack on the farmers taking refuge in the facilities of the National Agrarian Institute, hit the table at which 11-year-old Josué, Cecilia's son, was studying.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
A child plays with a toy gun in a shop in the Nueva Vida community, near the Rigores campesino settlement in Trujillo, Colón. In this same place, on Apr. 15, 2009, two leaders of the local campesino movement were riddled with bullets while they were resting and sipping soft drinks. Benigno Villanueva, a 72-year-old man, was wounded in the attack. Villanueva could no longer walk after a bullet went through his right knee.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
The son of Doris Pérez Vásquez shows a bullet hole in the house where his family lived, before the attack on the National Agrarian Institute of Honduras on June 5, 2011. The sister of one of the bullets that caused that hole in the wall hit Doris Pérez in the stomach. The bullet went through the cell phone she was wearing on her belt. The fact that the phone cushioned part of the impact probably saved her life.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
A young man walks in front of the ruins of what was once the home of Rodolfo Cruz, community leader of the Rigores settlement in Trujillo, Colón. In June 2011, prosecutors, police and security guards violently evicted the area: they beat women and children, destroyed houses with tractors, and set fire to the shacks and rubble.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
An inhabitant of the La Confianza settlement protects himself with an umbrella as he rides his bicycle along the dirt roads that the campesinos have laid out. In La Confianza, the MUCA leaders are trying to create a “utopia”, based on the equitable redistribution of profits and land to the peasants and their families. The utopia has been fed, so far, by the hostile land seizures that began in 2009.(Photo: Edu Ponces)El Faro
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