Weekly Report - 1 September 2011 (WR-11-35)

A spate of killings and a state of confusion. That is a succinct summary of the situation in Bajo Aguán, a region in the eastern province of Colón, where more than a dozen people have been killed in the last three weeks and 1,000 troops deployed. Powerful landowners blame peasant groups agitating for land reform; the peasants are suspicious of the military’s intentions in the region, especially given its longstanding alliance with the country’s reactionary political and economic elite; the military, publicly at least, claims that drug-trafficking networks are behind the violence and wants a vast swathe of the north and east of the country to be declared a no-fly zone.

Unravelling the confused events is not easy, especially given the different agendas: the government said that six private security guards were killed on 14 August in an attack by a group of armed peasants “invading” the Paso del Aguán estate of Grupo Dinant, a food production firm owned by one of the country’s largest and most powerful landowners, Miguel Facussé. Most other accounts agree that the death toll was six but that two of those killed were campesinos. Dinant guards have been accused of a number of campesino deaths in the past.

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