Honduras: Repression Must Stop

[Judi Lynn]

Friday 19 November 2010
Honduras: Repression Must Stop

TEGUCIGALPA - Honduran social organizations and human rights defenders called the international community to demand the end of repression in Honduras, a country where five farmers were killed this week. Honduran farmers Ignacio Reyes, Teodoro Acosta, Siriaco Muñoz, Raúl Castillo and Jose Luis Sauceda, members of the Unified Farmers Movement of Aguan (MUCA) were shot by private guards working for entrepreneur Miguel Facusse Monday this week.

In a communiqué published Thursday MUCA condemned the brutal attack and warned they will keep fighting for the restoration of their lands, usurped by landlords.

Lawyer Andres Pavon, president of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras (CODEH) proposed to take the case to the Human Rights Council and the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. "We must tell the international community, that there is impunity here, that we have exhausted the strength of domestic jurisdiction," he said.

Pavon will promote a demand against Facusse for the murder of 19 farmers since December 2009, and said that Facusse uses money from the International Monetary Fund and other entities to form his own army.

More:
http://insidecostarica.com/dailynews/2010/november/19/centralamerica10111903.htm



You remember this guy, don't you? Miguel Facusse. Jesus H. Christ.Background on Facusse:

Honduras

Miguel Facussé: Fencing off Paradise
One case, just one, that demonstrates how the most successful businesspeople of Honduras and the rest of Central America operate, and how the poor, their traditional victims, are organizing and learning to speak out.

Ismael Moreno

~snip~
On December 18, 2003, Miguel Facussé managed to strip the Cárcamo family of their land so he could give Gaviota beach as a wedding present to his daughter, who married the son of Coyolito Club member Freddy Nasser, another of the country’s magnates. If the whole of Zacate Grande is an island paradise, Gaviota beach is its most celestial expression. The Cárcamo family’s eviction kicked off the efforts of the Facussé family and other Club members to take over the whole island.

One witness described the Cárcamo family’s eviction: “That peaceful, almost heavenly atmosphere was broken by the motor of a vehicle that passed about 50 meters from the house. Around ten police officers came. And while the people in the house were checking out the rather unusual events, another 20 police officers suddenly came up from behind the house. Joining up with the first ten, they immediately surrounded the house, pointing their big rifles threateningly at Germán and Narda Cárcamo’s children and shouting: ‘Get out of here! This isn’t yours! Go! Go! You’re on this land illegally.’”

At that point the Cárcamo family recalled how the opulent Nasser-Facussé family had bought a neighboring property about three years earlier and had also tried to get its hands on their plot of land. Germán Cárcamo had told how they had offered him 80,000 lempiras (US$4,470) and then threatened to have him evicted when he rejected the offer, telling him a complicated story to make him believe that his land actually belonged to them.

The Nasser-Facussé’s legal representative supposedly told him, “Look, you’ve got a check here for 80,000 lempiras. You might as well take the dough, because you’re out of here anyway, with it or without it.”

More:
http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/2933