Violence, which claimed 14 lives in August in the Bajo Aguán area of Colón, on Honduras’s Caribbean coast [SSR-11-08], escalated in September with an ambush of a patrol that claimed a further two lives and left three injured. Conflicting statements from government officials suggest that they still do not know who is behind the incidents.
On 16 September a joint army-police unit patrolling the Bajo Aguán ran into an ambush. Unseen attackers threw grenades at them and opened fire with automatic weapons. One soldier and one police officer were killed; another police officer and two soldiers were injured. A 300-strong contingent of police officers was immediately sent to search the area, but the attackers were not found. Within hours, however, the police had rounded up more than 50 ‘suspects’ for interrogation.
General René Osorio Canales, chief of the joint general staff, said of the attack: ‘This provides indications for the people to realise what kind of people are in this sector, were they are using large-calibre weapons and engaging in guerrilla actions.’ He added that the attack had not been improvised: ‘This had been premeditated and pre-established, because operations like these are not carried out all of a sudden.’ In August the general had suggested that there might have been Salvadorean involvement in the violence in Bajo Aguán. The commander of the army-police force deployed in the area suggested that Venezuelan and Nicaraguan ‘infiltrators’ might be the culprits, and security minister Oscar Alvarez (replaced by President Mauricio Funes on 10 September), said that they could be drug traffickers trying to move into the region.
There is one clue as to the possible rationale behind the ambush. On 7 September the Honduran congress had approved the purchase of seven rural estates in Bajo Aguán, covering just over 4,700 hectares, for the settlement of landless peasants. The estate where the ambush took place, La Consentida, was not included in this package, and two weeks before the ambush the Xatruch II forces had taken it over from squatters.
However, Julio Benítez, chief of police in Colón department, said, ‘We can’t go on assuming that this crisis is based on a peasant struggle for agrarian reform, on trying to recover lands. This case is totally different: these are armed groups who are committing crimes, killing people [...] The type of weapons they are using suggests that they could be a guerrilla group.’
On 20 September Defence Minister Marlon Pascua made the surprising announcement that the ambush had been carried out by criminals operating in the area who were wanted by the judiciary. ‘The intention of these gangs’, he said, ‘is to prevent us from entering that sector; that the patrols may not be able to do their job.’ Pascua ruled put the possibility that landless peasants were behind the attack, but said these might have been manipulated by organised crime and with ideological aims.
General Osorio cleared up the confusion created by conflicting official reports on the size of the force deployed in Bajo Aguán, in what has been codenamed Operación Xatruch II (after General Florencio Xatruch, who led the Honduran military against William Walker in 1856). This included 400 personnel already stationed in the area, from the army’s 15th and 14th battalions, the naval force and the police from Tocoa. Sent in from elsewhere were 300 army personnel and 300 police officers, all adding up to about 1,000.
