Honduras: Thirty-five campesinos killed in Aguán
[Translation of an article from Diario Tiempo of San Pedro Sula for December 2. See original article here and related article here.]
San Pedro Sula – Campesino leaders in Bajo Aguán charged yesterday that an army of Colombian mercenaries has been organized to assassinate citizens who defend the lands granted to them by the Instituto Nacional Agragio (INA – National Agrarian Institute).
Vitalino Álvarez, Yoselyn Avilez and Adolfo Cruz, members of the Movimiento Unificado Campesino de Aguán (MUCA – United Campesino Movement of Aguán), and José Mario López, general secretary of the Sindicato de Trabajadores del INA del Bajo Aguán (Union of INA Workers of Bajo Aguán), traveled to San Pedro Sula to hold a press conference on Tercera Avenida in the Guamiliti neighborhood, to “denounce the repression and to refute the media campaign” being waged by some newspapers.
According to the campesinos, Miguel Facussé has armed 300 men with AR-15, M-16, AK-47 and M60 rifles and they, together with members of the armed forces and the national police, have fired on workers on the lands granted to them by the INA.
The campesinos accuse the armed forces and Facussé of killing 35 campesinos, 16 of them members of MUCA and 19 members of MCA (Movimiento Campesino del Aguán), as well as other citizens not belonging to either organization.
“We have heard paramilitaries who speak with Colombian accents but wear the uniform used by the army when they are on missions outside the country, the one that carries only the Honduran flag,” declared Vitalino Álvarez.
The members of the organizations chose to travel from Colón to San Pedro Sula because communications media and journalists will not go to the site of the disputes to collect the accounts of the groups in conflict.
Deaths and weapons
On the morning of November 15, campesinos Ignacio Reyes, 50, Teodoro Acosta, 40, Siriaco Muñoz, 56, Raúl Castillo, 45, and José Luis Saucedo, 32, members of MCA, were found dead in the village of El Tumbador, Trujillo.
The campesinos said during the press conference that authorities of the armed forces and the national police had found no illegal weapons in the buildings they had “searched carefully” after the crime and that President Lobo Sosa had said the campesinos had AK-47 rifles.
“That’s all a lie. We campesinos do not have that kind of weapon because we are people who want peace. We have tools, like machetes. But they have come to our houses and have torn apart beds and homes,” Avilez said.
The campesinos reported in a statement that on November 23 the police and the military “took the INA installations by force in search of weapons… and they found nothing” and then later plundered the office. “They took many documents.”
The campesinos declared that the lands they are defending belong to cooperative enterprises and not to Facussé, “as many communications media have tried to make all Hondurans believe.”
The campesinos organized the street press conference with the support of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP).
“A genocide of the Aguán campesinos is being prepared. We want the international community to know about it so they can keep watch on these assassins,” said Jimmy Soto of the FNRP.
Tags: Bajo Aguan, campesinos, Colombia, Honduras, Instituto Nacional Agrario, mercenaries, Miguel Facusse, Movimiente Unificado Campesino de Aguan, Movimiento Campesino del Aguan
December 6th, 2010 at 9:22 pm
So sorry to hear about these deaths of innocent people. The usual attempted suppression of any small advance that may benefit people and not the stronghold that the powerful want to maintain.