00:00On Wednesday, June 3rd, the Honduran National Congress approved a law to protect the interests
00:04of the country's large agro-industrial corporations, violating the land rights of farmers and
00:10indigenous peoples. Our colleague Gerardo Torreselaya with more information.
00:16Thanks to its conservative majority, the Honduran National Congress passed the law for the
00:21strengthening and protection of the agro-industrial sector, which prioritizes land rights only for
00:26large national and foreign companies. This law completely nullifies the rights established
00:31in the agro-reform law and paves the way for a general strategy of evictions, criminalization
00:37of campesinos, and repression.
00:42They have approved the law to strengthen the agro-industrial sector, which also covers turims
00:49and other areas. The purpose is to make agricultural lands, regardless of their legal status,
01:02available to the agro-industrial sector. This includes the infamous 10 families who have
01:11been denounced. In other words, there will be significant conflict in the coming months,
01:16and there is no doubt that this is part of a neoliberal project to seize all the resources
01:21of the Honduran state at the expense of farmers, women, and indigenous communities.
01:29With this law, Honduras has returned to the legal framework of the military dictatorships that
01:35existed before the 1980s, which were based on protecting the interests of large transnational
01:40corporations in agricultural enclaves of the United States.
01:48There is a concern that instead of advancing respect for municipal autonomy, it practically
01:53takes us back more than 40 years to the dictatorship. The municipal law, in this last reform 12 years
01:59ago, stipulates that we can carry out expropriations for community services or public services, such
02:06as access to water, roads, electricity services. When they want to take you out of your house, when
02:12they want to take away your land, when they want to take away opportunities from producers, who,
02:17by the way, most of the land in Honduras is in the hands of a few, and who have to
02:22rent or lease
02:23to plant our products, we feel threatened them.
02:30On May 21st, in the community of Rigores, in the Department of Colón, 20 members of the Campesino
02:35Cooperative were murdered, and it's suspected that the motive of the crime was to evict them
02:40from the land where they farm. This new law will increase the level of conflict and make
02:45campesino groups even more vulnerable.
02:51We are already organizing to meet, to unite, and I do think there will be resistance, as
02:57there was in 1992 from the peasant and indigenous movement, because this is the second stage
03:03of this project, and the peasants and indigenous people will be left without any possibility
03:08or access to agricultural land.
03:14With this new law approved in the National Congress of Honduras, big companies can now
03:19take over as much land as they can by force. In recent days, we have seen in the country
03:24protests of students, teachers, and health workers. It's very much likely that very soon we'll see
03:29the streets of Honduras taken by protests of the campesino movement that will claim their right
03:35to access land and to face the neoliberal policies of this government.
03:39For Telesurion English from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Gerardo Torres Zelaya.
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