Honduras continues to be a country occupied by the army, the police and private security forces hired by big landowners, said the leader of the National Front of Popular Resistance of Honduras, Carlos H. Reyes.

Reyes said this in a recent press conference held by the front and the peasant organizations of Bajo Aguan. They blamed Porfirio Lobo’s administration and Juan Orlando Hernandez, the current speaker of Congress and candidate to the presidency for the National Party “of the ongoing murders and disappearances and other human right violations against the peasants organized in Bajo Aguan”.

They also condemned the policy of militarization of the territory, the constant harassment of peasant communities by private security forces hired by landowners and palm oil producers in the area, and they mentioned the urgent need to hold talks between the different branches of government and the peasant movements.

Four peasants were killed and five were injured only in the past three weeks. The number of rural workers killed as a result of the agrarian conflict in less than three years is 52.

“The social and political crisis the country is going through is reflected in this agrarian crisis”, said Reyes. He accused landowner Miguel Facussé of hiring private security forces linked to these crimes. Reyes believes that there is a “state of emergency” in Bajo Aguan because of the presence of military forces in the area.

Reyes thinks that the passing in 1992 of the Law of Modernization and Development of the Agriculture Sector led to “concentration of land in few people, the worsening of the social and agrarian conflict and increasing poverty, exclusion, violence and repression”.

He also said the regime’s institutions are “useful tools for the landowners” and defended a massive mobilization of the front against these “antipopular and antinationalist processes in Honduras”.

The Honduran government is about to pass explosives and fire arms control laws that will lead to an overall disarmament in Valle Aguan, something that would increase the police presence in the area and which has been rejected by the Unified Peasant Movement of Aguan (MUCA).