Tag Archives: Miguel Facusse

by | March 19, 2013 · 11:00 am

World Bank must end support for Honduran palm oil company implicated in dozens of murders

Note: Global Justice Ecology Project joins several other NGOs calling for an end to funding palm oil giant Grupo Dinant, which is implicated in murders and human rights abuses in Honduras.  GJEP is the North American focal point for the Global Forest Coalition and works closely with BiofuelWatch.  Jeff Conant, quoted in the article below, is the former Media Coordinator for GJEP.

-The GJEP Team

March 19, 2013. Source: Global Forest Coalition

Photo: Jeff Conant

Photo: Jeff Conant

Today several Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) condemned a statement by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, IFC which defends the record of a Honduran palm oil company, Grupo Dinant, implicated in dozens of murders as well as other human rights abuses. The IFC statement explicitly admits to supporting training for the company’s armed security guards.

The NGOs are : Friends of the Earth International, Global Forest Coalition, Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Urgewald, Rights Action, Rettet den Regenwald/Rainforest Rescue, Global Justice Ecology Project, and Biofuelwatch.

A World Bank Ombudsman  is currently investigating an IFC loan of $30 million for Grupo Dinant which was approved in 2009, at least half of which has already been disbursed.

This month, an Open Letter by 17 NGOs  and an international petition signed by over 63,000 people  have protested the loan and called on the World Bank to immediately cease their support for Grupo Dinant.
Continue reading →

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by | February 13, 2013 · 9:00 am

Honduras: Aguán campesino leader arrested

By Bill Weinberg, February 12, 2013.  Source: WW4 Report

A contingent of some 30 soldiers and police agents arrested Juan Ramón Chinchilla, president of the largest campesino organization in northern Honduras’ Lower Aguán Valley, the evening of Feb. 8 in the central park in Tocoa, Colón department. Police then drove Chinchilla, who heads the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), 60 kilometers to a court in the city of Trujillo, where he was charged with “usurpation of land.” After a two-hour hearing, the judges released Chinchilla conditionally at about 2 am; he is required to stay in the country and to report to the court every Monday.

The criminal complaint against Chinchilla originated with Exportadora del Atlántico SA, the agricultural division of Grupo Dinant, a food product company founded by the wealthy Miguel Facussé Barjum. The Aguán Valley has been subject to violent struggles between campesinos and large landowners like Facussé since late in 2009, when MUCA and other campesino cooperatives occupied a number of estates they said were on land reserved for small farmers under an agrarian reform program from the 1980s. More than 80 campesinos have died in the land disputes, and Chinchilla himself was captured and beaten by hooded men in January 2011 and held for two days before escaping.

According to MUCA, the court’s decision to release Chinchilla so quickly was the result of solidarity from media groups and from hundreds of campesinos who headed to Trujillo the night of Feb. 8 and threatened to block roads if Chinchilla wasn’t freed. But the case against Chinchilla remains open. MUCA spokespeople say 3,081 campesinos have been arrested in connection with Aguán land disputes in the last two years, while the government of President Porfirio Lobo Sosa has failed to prosecute the region’s landowners and their security guards for violence against campesinos. (Lista Informativa Nicaragua y Más, LINyM, Feb. 9, viaFrente Nacional de Resistencia Popular,  Honduras); MUCA communiqué, Feb. 10, viaHonduras Tierra Libre)

In related news, on the afternoon of Feb. 2 a group of armed men gunned down the campesino Juan Pérez near the El Tigre community, about three kilometers from Tocoa, as he was returning home from work. Pérez, the father of nine, was a member of the Campesino Movement for the Recovery of the Aguán (MOCRA). Three hours later Williams Alvarado was murdered in the community of Taojica; he was a MUCA member who worked at the Flor del Aguán cooperative in the Aurora settlement. (MUCA communiqué, Feb. 3, via Vos el Soberano, Honduras; Adital, Brazil, Feb. 4)

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by | January 23, 2013 · 10:30 am

Honduras: two more campesinos killed in Aguán

January 15, 2013.  Source:  Weekly News Update on the Americas

Two campesinos were shot dead on Jan. 11 in the Lower Aguán Valley in the northern Honduran department of Colón as they were walking out of an estate which they and other campesinos had been occupying for two months. A long-standing conflict between campesino groups and large landowners in the area has resulted in the deaths of some 80 campesinossince the groups began occupying estates in December 2009 to dramatize their demands for land. According to Wilfredo Paz Zúniga, spokesperson for the Permanent Human Rights Monitoring Center for the Aguán, the victims were José Luis Reyes and Antonio Manuel Pérez. He said unidentified people shot them at close range from a moving automobile. Continue reading →

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by | January 15, 2013 · 12:00 pm

Deadly conflict over Honduran palm oil plantations puts CEO in the spotlight

By Jennifer Kennedy, January 10 2013. Source: CorpWatch

Photo: CorpWatch

Photo: CorpWatch

Months before he was killed this past September, Antonio Trejo-Cabrera reportedly sought protection from Miguel Facussé, the owner of Dinant Corporation, a major Honduran snack food and agricultural company. Trejo had good reason to be afraid – he was a lawyer who represented peasant movements fighting palm oil plantations in the Honduras in the last three years – many of whom were subjected to violence and other human rights abuses.

A recent profile of Facussé in the Los Angeles Times describes the 89-year-old businessman as “a symbol of the old style of patriarchal power” that has “ruthlessly developed the country over the decades from a hot and dusty backwater to an international producer of bananas, cheap clothing and, more recently, biofuels.”

Facussé joined the biofuel rush by planting African palm trees, backed by funds from bilateral and multilateral loan agencies like the World Bank. The palm trees yield a fruit which can be processed to produce biofuels that is in high demand by governments who want industry to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels like coal and petroleum in order to meet international obligations to mitigate global warming under the Climate Change convention. Continue reading →

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by | November 8, 2012 · 3:20 pm

Stop World Bank funding of death squads in Honduras

By Annie Bird, November 8 2012. Source: Rights Action

Photo: Upside Down World

Note:  The World Bank is being called upon to suspend its $30 million loan to the Dinant Corporation of Honduras, an African palm oil corporation that belongs to one of Honduras’ wealthiest persons and largest landowners.

As examined in the following report by Annie Bird of Rights Action, Facusse’s security forces are believed to be responsible for the murder of over 80 campesino land rights activists and their supporters in the Aguan region of northern Honduras; murders that have taken place since the 2009 military coup.

Rights Action is urging the international community to add their voice to the call, by writing to the President of the World Bank demanding an explanation as to why it continues to invest in the military junta-controlled country, where the rule of law, the most fundamental element of a rights protective framework necessary for just development, is not functional.

You can send letters (which are far more effective than petitions or emails) to

President Jim Yong Kim
The World Bank Group
1818 H Street NW
Washington, DC 20433

The Dinant Corporation and subsidiaries of the Jaremar Corporation, both Honduran African palm oil corporations blamed by campesino movements for the murder of approximately 80 campesinos in the Aguan river valley region since the June 2009 military coup, have received millions of dollars from the World Bank since the coup.  Most recently, on November 2, 2012, Orlando Campos, Reynaldo Rivera Paz, and José Omar Paz – all former members of a campesinomovement which contests rights to the “ Panama farm” against Dinant Corporation’s illegitimate claims – were killed in a drive-by shooting as they waited for a bus. The following day, in an unprecedented arrest of a death squad member, police officer Marvin Noe García Santos was arrested for these assassinations.
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by | September 25, 2012 · 9:00 am

Lawyer who helped peasants recover lands murdered in Honduras

September 23, 2012. Source: Latin American Herald Tribune

TEGUCIGALPA – Honduran attorney Antonio Trejo, who represented peasants who have attempted to reclaim land in the Caribbean province of Colon, was murdered by unknown killers in Tegucigalpa, a human rights group announced Sunday.

Trejo was the legal adviser to the MARCA land reclamation movement and was shot to death Saturday night near the Toncontin International Airport, the Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees in Honduras, or Cofadeh, said.

According to the versions of the murder published in the local media, Trejo attended a wedding on Saturday night in the southern capital neighborhood of America near the airport and when he left the noisy venue to answer a cell phone call he had received he was riddled with bullets by gunmen waiting outside.

Click here for link to original article

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by | August 29, 2012 · 12:00 pm

URGENT ALERT in Solidarity with Garifunas in Vallecito, Honduras: Paramilitary groups threaten massacre

August 27, 2012.  Source: Honduras Resists

In the region of Vallecito (Limon in the province of Colon) 6 Garifuna farming cooperatives have launched a land recuperation this week. See the statement below from OFRANEH with urgent actions to be taken right away.

There is also an ongoing support petition for Garifuna land rights on line. To sign the petition electronically click on this link:
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/defend-the-sovereignty-of-honduras-and-the-culture-and.html

From Triunfo de la Cruz to Vallecito and beyond, the Garifuna communities face threats and violence as the developers for mega-tourism projects in Tela Bay and Trujillo and the agri-business oligarchs like Miguel Facusse try to drive them off of their ancestral lands. La Voz de los de Abajo has visited these communities in permanent resistance (see blog entries from our delegations  and supports the self-determination of the Garifuna people).  This is the link to a previous Honduras Resists post on Vallecito  
http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8955810357788117702#editor/target=post;postID=829488233228946353

Six Garifuna cooperatives that have recovered lands, such that they possess titles of full dominion in the community of ICOTEA, Vallecito, Colon department, (Honduras) lands that have been invaded by latinos in collusion with Miguel Facusse,(the largest landholder in Honduras) with the complicity of Cesar Ham, minister of the National Agrarian Institute (INA), are experiencing at this moment the threat of paramilitaries mobilized on motorcycles and 4 x 4 vehicles with heavy weapons of war who could massacre the peaceful Garifuna inhabitants who are resisting the displacement from their ancestral territories of which they have legal ownership title.

We urge the national and international community and in particular organizations that defend human rights to send messages to the Honduran government, to stop what could be a new blood bath.  We ask the national and international media to collaborate in disseminating this urgent news.

We hold the current regime of landlords and military led by Porfirio Lobo Sosa for whatever happens to the Garifuna people organized with OFRANEH.

Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña), OFRANEH
Civic Council of Popular Organizations of Honduras (Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares de Honduras) COPINH
Agricultural Missions, Inc (AMI)
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Send messages of denunciation of this imminent threat to the following (in English or Spanish):
-Presidente de Honduras, Sr. Porfirio Lobo Sosa:   pepe@pepelobopresidente.com
-Minister of Ethnicities (Ministro de las Etnias), Sr. Luis Green: luisgreen65@yahoo.es
-Attorney General of the Republic (Fiscalía General de la Republica), Sr. Luis Alberto Rubí: lrubi@mp.hn,  gsuazog@mp.hn
-Minister of the National Agrarian Institute (Ministro del Instituto Nacional Agrario), Sr. Cesar Ham: cham@ina.hn,  hrodriguez@ina.hn
-Minister of Justice and Human Rights (Ministra de Justicia y Derechos Humanos),  Sra. Ana Pineda:  info@sjdh.gob.hn,  i.quintanilla@sjth.gob.hn
-President of the Supreme Court (Presidente de la Corte Suprema), Sr. Jorge Rivera Avilés: presidencia@poderjudicial.gob.hn

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