Aguán Monthly News Alert

The Aguán News Alert is a monthly-newsletter drafted, revised, and published jointly with the Agrarian Platform and the Coordinator for Popular Organizations of the Aguán (COPA) to document the ongoing violence being perpetrated against organized campesino communities in the Aguán and to highlight the transnational drivers of this violence.

Historical Context

In the 1990s, World Bank-led structural adjustment measures transformed the Bajo Aguán region of north-east Honduras from one of the nation’s primary sources of fruits, vegetables and basic grains into an African palm oil monoculture destined for export to insatiable Global North markets. Over the course of this process, thousands of campesinos were dispossessed of their farms to make way for massive palm plantations, owned by a handful of Honduran elite. 

Since then, campesino cooperatives have engaged in a multi-decade struggle to recover their land, suffering violent repression by corporate and state entities as a result. The immediate post-coup period was especially brutal, taking the lives of approximately 150 small farmers by 2014. In recent years, many more have been murdered, disappeared, and criminalized. The vast majority of these crimes remain in impunity.