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Caribbean & Central America - May 2012 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Honduran land tensions back in the limelight

On 30 April the director of the national agrarian institute (INA), César Ham, said that a land reform proposal dating to 2008 would finally be taken up by the unicameral national legislature. He added that he also expected progress on a pending deal for the transfer of lands to peasants in the restive Bajo Aguán valley, in the northern department of Cortés. A day earlier, 84 acres of a palm oil plantation in El Progreso (in the neighbouring department of Yoro) were burnt out in an invasion by landless peasants, just days after Héctor Luis Castro, the head of the association of palm oil producers, warned that producers are moving from northern Honduras to Belize because of the mounting insecurity. Earlier in the month thousands of landless peasants invaded some 12,000 hectares of land to mark the International Day of the Peasant Struggle (17 April). These continuing shows of unrest underline Honduras’s failure to resolve its historical land question, an issue that is once again threatening to spill over ahead of the next general elections (November 2013).

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