agriculture

The Honduran trade union leader and member of the IUF’s International Executive Committee, Carlos H. Reyes, represented the international organization’s Latin American Regional Office during the Public Hearing and International Seminar on the state of human rights among Bajo Aguán’s peasant communities, held May 28-30 in the city of Tocoa. SIREL spoke with him about this important event.

-What’s your assessment of the intense work during this event in Bajo Aguán?

-It has been a very significant experience, in which we had a chance to listen to and learn in detail about the basic human rights abuses that Bajo Aguán’s organized peasants suffer every day. We also reflected on and analyzed the situation of the country as a whole.

In this sense, we also examined the state of human rights nearly three years after the coup d’état, and we shared local, national, regional and international experiences and processes that are underway to defend the human rights of these peasant communities.

-In your presentation at the Seminar you stressed how important it is for the international community to continue monitoring the situation in Honduras

-It’s vital. I visited the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva with IUF Regional Secretary Gerardo Iglesias, and more recently we met with Swiss legislators and officers from the foreign affairs ministry to convey our concern for the human rights situation in Honduras.

Human rights are deteriorating constantly due to actions by state security forces who have been infiltrated by organized crime. All of Honduras, and in particular Bajo Aguán, is living under a failed state, and the country’s de facto powers are taking advantage of this situation to demand greater foreign intervention, with the ensuing loss of sovereignty.

The international community is still not turning its eyes to Honduras, and that’s very alarming. We have to demand that it focus its attention on what’s happening in the country, and, at the same time, as Resistance Front we need to assume our role in effectively denouncing these issues.

-What impressions of the rural conflict sparked in Bajo Aguán do you take away with you?

-It’s obvious that this is a problem that requires political solutions to address the root of the conflict, which is the form of land ownership and the vast majority of the population’s lack of access to land. We’ve seen and heard the effects of this situation through the voices of the victims and their accounts of violence and terror.

-The state is completely absent from Bajo Aguán and there’s widespread impunity…

-The chair of the Public Hearing, former member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) María Silvia Guillén, put it very eloquently when she said that if the state were present in Bajo Aguán there would be no need to hold an event like this.

-IUF Latin American participated in this major event…

-As member of the IUF’s International Executive Committee I was asked to represent the Regional Office at this Seminar, and it was a great experience and an honor for me to do so. IUF Latin America has been an active part throughout this whole process of monitoring, accompanying, and denouncing the situation in Bajo Aguán, standing beside its peasant communities. I think it’s very important and necessary to continue our commitment to this cause, together with other international networks and organizations.