CENTRAL AMERICA: Land Disputes Could Explode, say Peasants

By Thelma Mejía Reprint | | Print |

Thelma Mejia

TEGUCIGALPA, Feb 6 1996 (IPS) - Festering disputes over land rights in Central America could explode into open revolt similar to that in the Mexican state of Chiapas, according to peasant groups in the region.

They point to a year-long land conflict that pitted a group of peasants from northern Honduras against the U.S. banana producer, Tela Railroad, as just one sign of a ticking time bomb.

The “tacamiches,” as the peasants are popularly known, have resisted efforts by the company to force them off land they have farmed for morte than 50 years.

The Honduran government has sided with Tela Railroad in agreeing that the company has legal title to the disputed land, but the tacamiches claim it used underhanded means to gain possession and that the lands have lain fallow for a long time.

The government peacefully evicted the peasants from the area last week. President Carlos Roberto Reina declared he was enforcing the law and said he regretted that the tacamiches had rejected an alternative proposal to move them to other lands and provide them with houses and money to raise crops.

Nicaraguan peasant leader Sinforiano Caceres said that tacamiches “are everywhere….a time bomb that can changes names according to the place or country where they’re found.”

Caceres, president of the Central American Association of Peasant Organizations for Cooperation and Development (Asocode), asserted that regional governments have tried to ignore the agricultural problem for many years.

“They shouldn’t be surprised if another Chiapas breaks out,” he warned. “Governments need to change their agrarian policies or they’ll find themselves facing a series of social movements that are not ideological but arise from the lack of land and the hunger that smites our people.”

Asocode has just held its annual congress in Honduras and gave the governments of Central America a six month deadline to change their agrarian policies or face a a series of “social mobilizations.”

Honduran Peasant Organization Coordinating Council member Rafael Alegria told IPS that the popular mobilization strategy is “a final call for attention from the governments because we’re not far from a ‘Chiapas’.”

The Zapatista insurgency that broke out two years ago in Chiapas is a symbol of the problem of land tenancy in Latin America, he said. “This problem has worsened in Central America with the so- called economic adjustment policies.”

He said these policies had resulted in marginalizing small- scale producers and causing impoverishment among about 80 percent of the 20 million peasants in Central America.

“The governments talk about joining the global economy, but all we’ve seen is a globalization of poverty because of the adjustments, and until the problem of land and production is resolved, the global market will remain remote,” he declared.

Given the backwardness of Central American agriculture, Alegria believes that aspiring to globalization is “utopian, if one considers that the region’s countries can barely reach the Mexican market.”

A Costa Rican Asocode member, Wilson Campos, said that agricultural imports were killing traditional farming culture in the region.

“We pay a high price for the techniques and methods they force on us because our natural environment is dying,” he declared.

The last four decades have been characterized by “timid” efforts to distribute land in the isthmus. And the so-called “agricultural adjustment” of the 1990s threaten to detonate a social explosion.

According to Asocode, the most representative regional peasant group, regional legal reforms in recent years have effectively “buried” agricultural reform.

In its “Tegucigalpa Declaration,” Asocode describes a Central America characterized by “low intensity” democracy and “high intensity” agrarian conflicts.

“More than two thirds of the Central American population is now poor and the time has come for the governments to learn about us landless peasants: how many we are, how much support we provide the economies, and above all, how much weight we carry,” Campos said.