'No One Investigates Anything Here'

摘要

In a nation infamous for violence, no region has seen more politically motivated killings than Honduras's Lower Aguan Valley. Since January 2010, 153 campesinos, or small farmers, have been murdered there, according to the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguan (or MUCA), and the perpetrators are almost never brought to justice. This fertile agricultural area has long been a site of land conflicts. In the mid-1990s, corporate landowners rewrote agrarian reform laws and then began buying-and in some cases stealing-land owned by small palm oil businesses and cooperatives set up in the 1980s. In early June 2009, then-president Manuel Zelaya told the campesinos that the government would purchase the land and sign it over to them. Days later, Zelaya was deposed in a coup. The campesinos organized a number of land occupations in protest. A 2010 government-brokered deal promised a settlement with MUCA, one of several campesino organizations. Officials pledged to secure for the local farmers some 27,000 acres and offered additional health care, education, and housing services-though to date, the government has not delivered the land or any of the social services.