World Bank facing renewed pressure over loan to Honduran palm oil firm
World Bank facing renewed pressure over loan to Honduran palm oil firm
Campaigners want support for company accused of links to murder, kidnapping and forced evictions to be withheld
John Vidal
theguardian.com, Wednesday 12 March 2014 10.17 EDT
World Bank directors will be urged by Honduran peasant leaders and civil society groups to withdraw support for a major palm oil company accused of links to killings, kidnapping and the forced eviction of small farmers.
The bank's European directors, meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, will be handed a report by Human Rights Watch, published last month, that suggests the Honduran government and police have failed to investigate 29 murders and kidnappings in the Bajo Aguán region since 2009. Human Rights Watch said evidence suggested the involvement of private security guards working for palm oil companies in 13 of the killings and one case of abduction.
The region of northern Honduras has been the setting for long-running, violent land disputes for nearly 10 years, with large tracts of farmland contested between campesino groups and agro-industrial businesses growing palm oil. A total of 92 people have been killed since 2009. The majority of the victims have been campesinos, but security guards employed by private firms have also been killed.
The alleged involvement of guards working for Dinant – a company that makes palm oil and has received $15m (£9.03m) to develop its plantations from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank's private lending arm, with the promise of a further $15m – prompted an investigation last year by the bank's internal watchdog, the Office of the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO).
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/mar/12/world-bank-honduras-loan-palm-oil-company-dinant
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From an earlier thread:
WikiLeaks Honduras: US Linked to Brutal Businessman
Miguel Facussé, a biofuels magnate entangled with the drug trade, is waging a bloody war against campesinos—with American support.
Dana Frank October 21, 2011
Since 2009, beneath the radar of the international media, the coup government ruling Honduras has been collaborating with wealthy landowners in a violent crackdown on small farmers struggling for land rights in the Aguán Valley in the northeastern region of the country. More than forty-six campesinos have been killed or disappeared. Human rights groups charge that many of the killings have been perpetrated by the private army of security guards employed by Miguel Facussé, a biofuels magnate. Facussé’s guards work closely with the Honduran military and police, which receive generous funding from the United States to fight the war on drugs in the region.
New Wikileaks cables now reveal that the US embassy in Honduras—and therefore the State Department—has known since 2004 that Miguel Facussé is a cocaine importer. US “drug war” funds and training, in other words, are being used to support a known drug trafficker’s war against campesinos.
Miguel Facussé Barjum, in the embassy’s words, is “the wealthiest, most powerful businessman in the country,” one of the country’s “political heavyweights.” The New York Times recently described him as “the octogenarian patriarch of one of the handful of families controlling much of Honduras’ economy.” Facussé’s nephew, Carlos Flores Facussé, served as president of Honduras from 1998 to 2002. Miguel Facussé’s Dinant corporation is a major producer of palm oil, snack foods, and other agricultural products. He was one of the key supporters of the military coup that deposed democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009.
Miguel Facussé’s power base lies in the lower Aguán Valley, where campesinos originally settled in the 1970s as part of an agrarian reform strategy by the Honduran government, which encouraged hundreds of successful campesino cooperatives and collectives in the region. Beginning in 1992, though, new neoliberal governments began promoting the transfer of their lands to wealthy elites, who were quick to take advantage of state support to intimidate and coerce campesinos into selling, and in some cases to acquire land through outright fraud. Facussé, the biggest beneficiary by far of these state policies, now claims at least 22,000 acres in the lower Aguán, at least one-fifth of the entire area, much of which he has planted in African palms for an expanding biofuel empire.
More:
http://www.thenation.com/article/164120/wikileaks-honduras-us-linked-brutal-businessman#
http://www.democraticunderground.com/110824930