War Against Peasant Farmers Heats Up in Honduras

This piece was originally published in Upside Down World.

“There is a war here in the Aguán,” says Juan, surveying the distant fields of African palm from the vantage point of his recently planted field of beans and corn. A young Honduran farmer, wearing a beaten cowboy hat and a bandana bearing the name “National Front for Popular Resistance,” Juan lives in an encampment of 60 families, dedicated to growing basic grains and reclaiming their food sovereignty. “But the war is not against the drug traffickers, other countries or even organized crime,” he says. “It is a war against the campesinos.”

In the Lower Aguán River Valley in northern Honduras, more than 3,000 families have claimed their right to the basic necessities of a dignified life: land, food, health, education. Living in make-shift tarps and temporary thatch-roofed huts, with nothing but machetes to clear the land, they daily face off against the goliath forces of the Honduran oligarchy, their private guards, and 1,000 Honduran military and police forces deployed by the coup regime to militarize the region – the local security apparatus of big business and the State. Read the rest of this article here…

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