In Honduras, Land Struggles Highlight Post-Coup Polarization
Source: The New York Times
by Edgard Garrido Carrera
15 September 2011, TOCOA, Honduras — The settlement on the giant Marańones plantation looks like a refugee camp, where children play between rows of huts and chickens peck at garbage heaps. But the farmworkers living here plan to stay, laying claim to land owned by one of the country’s richest men.
At the gate, a handful of men sit guard with shotguns and machetes under a red flag painted with defiant words: “Justice, Liberty, Land.”
“If they give land to the people, the problem can be resolved,” said Marcos Tulio Paredes, one of the community’s leaders.
In the past few weeks, a long-running battle over land in Bajo Aguán, this fertile valley near Honduras’s northern coast, has flared. At least 15 people have been killed in recent weeks alone, including two of the workers’ leaders, and the people here are on edge, fearful that the unrest could spread.
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