Is blood and sacrifice enough? The Honduran peasant movement's model of change

3500 milliones blog] I spent three days last week trying to understand the peasant (campesino) movement in Honduras. It was the perfect field trip in many ways, split between a flying visit to the Bajo Aguan region up on the lush Northern coast, site of the most intense land struggles in recent years, and a series of back-to-back debates with NGOs, academics and movement leaders back in the capital, Tegucigalpa. The ‘asentamientos’ of peasant squatters were extraordinary. Some were rebuilding among the wreckage of their former homes, [caption id="attachment_9404" align="alignright" width="300" caption="credit: Esteban Melendez"][/caption] destroyed by landlords’ bulldozers a few months ago. Elsewhere hundreds of families were living under blue plastic sheets (right) in the middle of a huge African Palm plantation (the biofuels boom has come to the Bajo Aguan, bigtime). Another felt like some kind of social movement utopia – 600 highly organized families, with land all neatly parcelled out, plots set aside for schools, health posts and churches (evangelical and catholic), poultry and fish projects and plans for much more. It reminded me of Brazil’s MST even down to the red banner welcoming visitors (see below). What emerged in a series of conversations held under trees or on rough wooden benches under tin-roofed shelters was an all-too familiar picture of Latin American land struggles. A cycle of invasion, eviction, targeted repression of leaders, interminable lawsuits and negotiations with untrustworthy government officials. But in the Bajo Aguan it’s got particularly nasty in the last few years – dozens of assassinations or deaths during evictions, a lot of blood spilt, all turning the region into a cause celebre in Honduras and beyond. Unlike most of Latin America, Honduras retains a majority rural population, with some two million small farmers, so what happens in the Bajo Aguan really matters. The focus of my questions was the change strategies of the peasant movement and its supporters, and I have to say I found it pretty depressing. The campesinos seem resigned to isolation and betrayal, abandoned by the state, unable to get credit or technical assistance, and subject to the attacks of their opponents. ‘There’s no law, we are abandoned’ said one, and yet they cling to legal process as one of their few strategies, despite repeated evidence of the corruption and incompetence of the courts. The heavy presence of drug traffickers in the region adds to the problems by further undermining the rule of law – peasant leaders say the going rate for an assassination is about $1,000. I asked about the alliances they had built up or were planning, and again, the tone was pessimistic. ‘We are alone. The landlords, military and police are all together and the state does nothing.’ The peasant leaders saw little chance of building alliances at local level with, say, municipal officials, or the Churches. Their preferred allies are NGOs and international bodies. And the movement itself is horribly fractured, with a long history of splits and leaders being bought off by the government or big landlords. Their change strategy is built on sacrifice: ‘We’re not here [on the land] because they want us to be, but because of the blood that’s been spilt.’ Some hope that the deposed former president Manuel Zelaya will do well with his new Libre party in the 2013 elections, and that the ‘correlation of forces’ will shift in the peasants’ favour. It’s easy for me to say, but this all seems too defeatist. There must be fractions of social and political elites more open to alliances, even short-term tactical ones. Churches, both catholic and evangelical (I met some very active evangelical pastors among the activists in Bajo Aguan), industrialists standing to benefit from a less impoverished domestic market, those worried about Honduras’ extraordinary levels of social violence (it is one of the murder capitals of the world).

Any thoughts of alliance building have been complicated by Honduras’ 2009 coup and the subsequent ‘resistencia’ in favour of deposed president Zelaya. Campesino activists, convinced Zelaya was their last best hope, arrived in Tegucigalpa and led the resistance that ultimately allowed Zelaya to return to Honduran politics (though not yet to the presidency). That earned them wider recognition, but the coup polarized politics still further, triggering yet more splits in the peasant movement and among some of them, a refusal to talk to anyone seen as a ‘golpista’ (which seems to include almost anyone in a position of influence). As for the model of change, all this made me think of Jonathan Fox’s work on ‘transitions to accountability’ in Mexico. Fox found that progress depended on a cycle of conflict and cooperation – a conflict would break out, and then a more progressive section of local state officials would talk to more approachable protest leaders and a period of reform would ensue. When those reforms ran out of steam, or new issues emerged, conflict would reemerge and the whole cycle would start again in a process of ‘interaction between the thickening of civil society and state reformist initiatives’ (see diagram, below). In Honduras, unless something extraordinary happens in the elections and their aftermath, it’s easy to see the conflict half of the cycle, but there are few signs of cooperation and resolution. ]]>