Activists accuse World Bank of deadly dealings in Honduras

[Judi Lynn]

Activists accuse World Bank of deadly dealings in Honduras
Kate Woodsome
January 4, 2014 01:17

An internal report is set to raise the lid on funding for an industry that’s forcing farmers off the land.


WASHINGTON — A recent political coup. Drug trafficking. One of the world’s highest murder rates. With attributes like those, Honduras may not sound like an easy sell for international investment.

But that hasn't dissuaded the World Bank, whose mission is to encourage development in the countries that need it most.

The bank’s private lending arm, the International Finance Corporation, is spearheading several multimillion-dollar projects in Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Americas. However, some are questioning whether the money is doing more harm than good.

Human rights groups accuse the IFC of ignoring warnings that its funding for the Honduran palm oil industry is helping fuel a deadly land conflict that’s turning the fertile Aguan Valley near the country’s northern coast into a virtual military zone.

Farmworkers say they’ve been forced off land that’s mostly taken up by oil palm tree plantations. The controversy is casting doubts about whether the bank and its 182 member countries can respect their own code of ethics while doing business in politically unstable, corrupt societies.

More:
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/140103/world-bank-honduras-dinant-african-palm

[Demeter]

1. "Ethics" and World Bank" in the same sentence?

It's a joke, right?

[Peace Patriot]

2. What Demeter said.

n/t

[Judi Lynn]

3. Other magical touches in our world, from the World Bank :

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Rio Negro massacre convictions

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The BBC reports

A court in Guatemala has sentenced five former paramilitaries each to 780 years in prison for the 1982 murder of 26 indigenous Mayan villagers.

They received the maximum sentence of 30 years for each of the murders which took place during an infamous massacre of 177 women and children in Rio Negro.

The victims died refusing to move from the site of a new hydroelectric dam.

More:
http://earthandstarrs.blogspot.com/2008/05/rio-negro-massacre-convictions.html

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Rio Negro Massacres



Five massacres occurred in the Rio Negro (“Black River”) communities between 1980 and 1982. The people of Rio Negro (named after the nearby river) had occupied the region since the classic Mayan age and owned 1,440 hectares of land. During the energy crisis of the 1970’s the Guatemalan government looked for local energy alternatives, creating the state-owned National Institute of Electrification (INDE). In 1975 INDE unveiled plans to dam the Rio Negro, also called the Chixoy River, to provide the country’s electricity, which would flood 31 miles of the river valley. Funds from the Inter-American Development Bank, Italian company Cogefar-Impressit, and the World Bank were used in the construction of local roads and the dam itself.

The Rio Negro communities were notified that they would be relocated and the 150 families would receive two to three hectares of land. A local committee negotiated with INDE officials for a permanent settlement in Pacux, near Rabinal. After a violation of the agreement, 20 families moved back to their community, while dam construction began. During early construction, a French firm was hired to excavate Ancient Mayan objects, desecrating the sacred land in the eyes of the local communities.

Five years after the plan was proposed, in March 1980, violence broke out between the local community and the developers when two men were accused of stealing coffee beans from Cogefar-Impressit and arrested. A confrontation broke out between the village and three security officers chased the men back to their village. The officers were then rounded up by the villagers and brought to the Church where one officer was hit by a community leader. The officer then opened fire, killing seven villagers. The officers fled and one was injured and drowned crossing the river. That July two villagers asked to bring a written agreement to the dam site were found murdered a few days later and the written documents were lost.



In 1981, the Guatemalan government began destroying villages as part of the scorched earth campaign, and relocating communities in ‘model villages’ that could be easily controlled and monitored by the army and also provide cheap labor to neighboring towns. The government also created Civil Defense Patrols, made up of armed locals, often forcefully recruited. One such patrol was created in the village of Xococ, near Rio Negro.

In February 1982, villagers in Rio Negro were instructed to bring their identification cards to Xococ. When the villagers reached the town they were murdered by the Xococ Patrol. One woman escaped and returned to Rio Negro to warn the other villagers. The men of the village decided to flee and hide in the hills leaving the women and children in the village, under the assumption they would not be harmed. The next month Civil Patrols from Xococ arrived in Rio Negro, under the pretense of guerrilla activity in the area, and massacred the women and children, killing 177.

Two months later, 84 more people were killed in ‘Los Encuentros’, Rio Negro, and fifteen women were abducted. Then, in September, 92 villagers were burned alive, including survivors of previous massacres. Of Rio Negro’s almost 800 Maya-Achí inhabitants, 444 were killed in the massacres between 1980 and 1982.

More:
http://www.ghrc-usa.org/resources/important-cases/rio-negro/

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Rio Negro Massacres

The struggle and marginalization of the people of Rabinal is intimately connected with the region’s history in the civil war. In 1978, at the height of the conflict, the Guatemalan government began construction of a large hydroelectric dam across the Chixoy river in Rabinal. A group of indigenous communities were located on land that would be required for completion of the dam and so between 1980 and 1982, government paramilitary forces engaged in a series massacres and forced relocations of the native populations. These actions-which has since come to be known as the Rio Negro Massacres-were billed as a counterinsurgency activity against the indigenous guerrilla army. Despite numerous published accounts of the events however, no evidence has surfaced to suggest the existence of any opposing military group. The recent exhumation of mass graves has shown that a large number of those slain were women and children.

Jesus Tecú Osorio was young boy living in the village of Rio Negro when government soldiers came upon the settlement. Osorio watched as his family and community members were raped, beaten and murdered, and Jesus himself was seized for domestic servitude. Osorio was released two years later, and after the war ended, he defied military coercion and spoke out about his experiences. Amidst death threats and other strong-arm tactics Jesus began legal proceedings against the officers who had overseen the massacre and held him prisoner. In 1996 Reebok honored Osorio with the Reebok Human Rights Award. Osorio used the $25,000 prize money to start Fundación Nueva Esperanza (The New Hope Foundation) which now operates a school in Rabinal and is our strongest partner organization.

http://vocesymanos.org/about-us/where-we-work/

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Published on Saturday, March 24, 2012 by Common Dreams

Legacy of a Massacre: The World Bank and the Chixoy Dam

by Lauren Carasik



https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/24-5

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World Bank-Funded Biofuel Corporation Massacres Six Honduran Campesinos

Martes 23 de Noviembre de 2010 16:32 Annie Bird, Rights Action

Massacred While Working Their Fields

Approximately six months ago, campesino farmers in Trujillo, Colon organized in the Campesino Movement of the Aguan, the MCA, were awarded provisional title to a farm which neighbors their community, as part of a long standing negotiation with Dinant Corporation, a biofuel company, whose land claims are illegitimate.

Since that time, the small farmers worked the land. In recent weeks they had noticed incursions into their land by armed security forces employed by the biofuel company, Dinant.

On Monday, November 15, the farmers went to their fields but were then attacked by Dinant security. Six were killed in the massacre and two more are in critical condition.

The massacre occurred the same day that the de facto Honduran president Pepe Lobo had planned to meet with the director of the US government development fund, the Millennium Challenge, in Denver to ask for funding for so called "renewable energy" - in Honduras, principally biofuels and dams.

World Bank And Other "Development" Groups Share Responsibility for the Massacre

The "renewable energy" plan Lobo is shopping around may be the result of an Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) funded technical support grant (T-1101) to the de facto government ushered in after the June 28 military coup. In November 2009, under a coup government and amidst grave human rights violations, the World Bank's (WB) International Finance Corporation gave Dinant Corporation a $30 million loan for biofuel production, and now shares responsibility in the massacre.

Policies supposedly intended to stop climate change are in reality fueling climate change. The world must invest in a renewable way of life, not destructive "renewable energy". Scientists have analyzed that biofuel industry together with the climate change prevention mechanisms currently promoted could actually result in the destruction of half of the planets forests.



Miguel Facussé

More:
http://www.resistenciahonduras.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1619:world-bank-funded-biofuel-corporation-massacres-six-honduran-campesinos&catid=103:human-rights&Itemid=352

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Profiting From Genocide: The World Bank's Bloody History in Guatemala
Friday, 08 March 2013 00:00
By Cyril Mychalejko, Truthout | News Analysis

The World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) supported genocide in Guatemala and ought to pay reparations, according to a recent report by Jubilee International.

This well-documented accusation surfaces as the Central American nation becomes the first country in the Americas to try a former president for genocide and crimes against humanity in a domestic court. But the prosecution of war criminals and the accusations against International Financial Institutions (IFIs) have so far done little to protect vulnerable communities from the ongoing expansion of mining, oil and other economic interests invading their territories and violating their human rights.

"Generating Terror," the Jubilee Debt Campaign’s report issued in December, examines how international lending and debt by IFIs such as the World Bank and the IDB helped legitimize Guatemala's genocidal regimes of the late 1970s and early 1980s and essentially subsidized their terror campaigns.

"The lending of Western States and banks and the multilateral banks they control (importantly including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Inter-American Development Bank) was an important element in sustaining the long period of military rule which followed the coup against President (Jacobo) Arbenz in 1954," the report states. "Particularly worrying, however, is the very dramatic increase in lending that coincided with the highest waves of terror, which reached genocidal proportions in the late 1970s and early 1980s."

Jubilee's report uses the Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam project as a case study.

More:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/14823-profiting-from-genocide-the-world-banks-bloody-history-in-guatemala

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Land Grabs, the Latest Form of Genocide in Guatemala

Escrito por Leonor Hurtado | 12 / June / 2013

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In the last decade, the expansion of oil palm plantations and sugarcane production for ethanol in northern Guatemala has displaced hundreds of Maya-Q´eqchi´ peasant families, increasing poverty, hunger, unemployment and landlessness in the region, according to a new Food First report by Alberto Alfonso-Fradejas, “Sons and Daughters of the Earth: Indigenous Communities and Land Grabs in Guatemala.”

There is a major contradiction here: at the same time that the former General Ríos Montt is convicted for genocide, the Guatemalan government allows the oligarchy, allied with extractive industries, to displace entire populations without concern for the human cost. In many cases, these land grabs result in the murder and imprisonment of rural people who resist the assault.

Genocide against the indigenous peasant population in Guatemala no longer has the face of a military dictatorship supported by the United States. Now it is the corporations, the oligarchy and the World Bank who push peasants off their lands.

In today’s Guatemala, land and resource control is increasingly in the hands of a small oligarchy of powerful families allied with agri-food companies. At the center of this power are fourteen families who control the country’s sugarcane-producing companies (AZAZGUA); five companies controlling the national production of ethanol; eight families that control the production of palm oil (GREPALMA); and members of the Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations (CACIF).

Together these powerbrokers are accumulating land and wealth with the support of investment from international institutions such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (BCIE). The convergence of multiple global crises—finance, energy, food and environment—has directed corporate investment into land-based resources such as agrofuels, minerals, pasture and food. The situation in Guatemala is extremely violent, part of a global trend where agrarian, financial and industrial interests are grabbing control of peasant lands and resources.

More:
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/9678