Paper arrows: peasant resistance and territoriality in Honduras
by
Daniel Aaron Graham
B.A. (University of Washington) 1994
A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts in
Geography
in the
GRADUATE DIVISION
of the
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Committee in charge:
Professor Michael Johns, Chair Professor Michael Watts Professor Laura Enríquez
Spring 2002 Paper arrows: peasant resistance and territoriality in Honduras
© 2002
by
Daniel Aaron Graham For my nephews, Keenan and Jonas.
And for the children of Babilonia, Olancho, Honduras.
i Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ...... iii
List of Abbreviations ...... v
Preface ...... vi
Part I OTHERNESS ...... 1
Section 1 Olancho: Honduras through the looking glass ...... 1
Section 2 Counter-banditry, or Narratives of Otherness ...... 15
Maps and Figures ...... 32a-p
Part II BETRAYAL ...... 33
Section 3 Rescuing “patrimonio”: the contested creation of a national park ...... 33
Section 4 Resisting the Babilonia Hydroelectric Project ...... 46
Section 5 Conclusion ...... 98
Works Cited ...... 104
ii Acknowledgments
The case studies presented in this thesis are the culmination of two summers of research. Sections 1 and 3 derive principally from secondary sources, while sections 2 and 4 present my findings in the field in 2000 and 2001. The summer junkets were made possible by funding from The Tinker Foundation, Berkeley’s Center for Latin American
Studies, and the university’s Humanities Grant. The Berkeley Geography Department helped finance a much-needed trip to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., in early
2001. Grahame Russell of the Canadanian-based NGO Rights Action also helped to cover my expenses in the summer of 2001. In addition to that “official” money, I also received generous support from friends and family: Mernie, Ben, Misha, Patrick, and
Beverly Graham; Lance Bisaccia; Timothy Bell; Christina Snyder; Scott and Caren
Weintraub; Cherste Nilde; Shirley Spitz; Ed Otto; and Peter and Linda Dahl.
I am grateful to many others as well. In Honduras, Bertha Oliva and the other amazing women and men at COFADEH helped me immeasurably; in addition to giving interviews and supporting my research, they helped secure my physical safety during some scary moments. José Antonio Velásquez of CODEH opened his archives for my perusal, while Gualaco Mayor Rafael de Jesús Ulloa opened the doors of his cabildo. The
Izaguirre, Colindres y López, Posas y Véliz, and Valladares families all provided homes away from home, as did doña Clara Luz Rojas. Thanks are due, too, to the staff of
Honduras’s Hemeroteca Nacional for their forbearance with my persistent requests for help rummaging through their old newspapers. Most especially, I owe a debt to all the participants in my research, especially to the brave women, men, and children who
iii accepted and welcomed my conspicuous presence among them in los bajos del palacio legislativo in Tegucigalpa.
Stateside, I particularly wish to thank Mark Bonta, who helped me out in innumerable ways and whose insights on Olancho have greatly influenced my own views. I also got help from Ruth Gilmore, Brendan O’Neill, Falan Yinug, Adrienne Pine,
Jennifer Casolo, Joe Bryan, Ben Gardner, and Chris Niedt, as I struggled through the research and writing processes. Thanks, too, to Kathleen Apakupakul for her grace and poise, to Ezra Denney for his capacious charm and supple couch, and to my family for helping me see when enough was enough.
Finally, I want to thank Michael Johns, who chaired my master’s committee, and the paper’s other readers, Michael Watts and Laura Enríquez. Their feedback has been very helpful throughout. Of course, as regards any errors of fact or judgment that may persist in this paper, the usual disclaimers apply.
iv List of Abbreviations
AHPROCAFE: Honduran Coffee Producers’ Association BCIE/CABEI: Central American Bank for Economic Integration CODEH: Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras COHDEFOR: Honduran Forest Development Corporation COFADEH: Committee of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras CONACIM: National Coordinator against Impunity COPINH: Civil Counsel of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras ENEE: National Electric Company ENGO: Environmental Non-governmental Organization IDB: Inter-American Development Bank ILO: International Labor Organization IMF: International Monetary Fund PAAR: Protected Areas Administration Project PHB: Babilonia Hydroelectric Project PNSA: Sierra de Agalta National Park PPP: Plan Puebla-Panamá SERNA: Secretariat of Natural Resources and the Environment SIEPAC: System of Electrical Interconnection for the Countries of Central America UD: Democratic Unification Party USAID: United States Agency for International Development
v Preface
Among people who enjoy collecting small, weak, and apparently hapless countries, Honduras is a crowd favorite. Honduras is (they will say) the quintessential banana republic, the place where Kathie Lee Gifford had her sweatshop, that poor country laid to waste by Hurricane Mitch. While it would be absurd to deny Hondurans’ over-familiarity with failure and suffering, this paper reflects a conviction on my part that the naturalization of a connection between Honduras and hopelessness abets the forces that lend that simplification its credibility. It is not only insufficient to write off Honduras and its inhabitants as beyond redemption; such under-analytical treatment of the country’s immiseration also gives cover to the actors and processes that have carved the contours of this dismal topography — and that profit by it. At the same time, it effaces and undercuts the dynamics of contestation that are always unfolding.
To a large extent, Honduras’s physical terrain is both the primary object and — often, but not always — the principal site of contestation among peasants, elites, and agencies of the central state. About half the country’s population depends directly on subsistence or small-scale commercial agriculture for its livelihood. It bears asking why so many Honduran peasants find themselves struggling for their very existence in this sparsely populated, resource-rich country. It is also worth inquiring what these peasants are doing about it. To this end, I submit a story that strives to show some of the ways that peasants and their various antagonists square off in struggles over land and land-based resources in Honduras’s east-central department (province) of Olancho.
As this paper will illustrate, contests over land and natural resources in Honduras are also struggles over meaning — struggles to define Self and Other and what it means
vi to be properly Honduran. To some extent, in some cases, the meanings produced in fights waged over land and resources can be seen as epiphenomenal, as byproducts of these struggles. Nevertheless, they are also important in their own right. This is true in part because of their persistence over time and their instrumental efficacy in staking material claims but also because meanings are internalized by actors and can themselves become objects of fierce contestation. That is, land becomes a repository of individual and group identity, and control over land becomes central to the defense of metaphysical as well as material values. Because of the centrality of land to all parties in these material and symbolic struggles, I see the concepts of territory and territoriality as critical to an examination of the political economy of the region — and to questions of meaning and identity. My attention, then, gravitates toward instances of territoriality throughout the narrative that follows.
Geographer Robert David Sack gives us the most commonly cited definition for territoriality: “Territoriality in humans is best understood as a spatial strategy to affect, influence, or control resources and people, by controlling area; and, as a strategy, territoriality can be turned on and off” (Sack 1986: 1-2). In casting territoriality in the way he does — that is, characterizing it as a strategy — Sack performs a territorial (and yes, strategic) move of his own, rescuing human agency from the clutches of socio- biologists with their analogs to the non-human animal world (read: blind instinct).
However, human territoriality seems to arise in Honduras as a fairly predictable — though not the only — response to perceived and real attempts to strip peasants of their access to land and land-based resources; that is, to their means of production (which is, of course, also their means of survival). It is not always obvious that the peasants’
vii territorializing actions are precisely strategic; at times, territoriality arises as an effect of peasants’ self-expression — self-expression which is always political but not always cynical or planned.
As regards this question of territoriality, it seems a middle course can be charted between explanations that dwell on dirge-like structure and those invoking euphoric agency. After suffering centuries of abuse based largely on attributions of place-based inferiority, Olanchanos have in some instances been able to turn this imputed (and real) connection to their land to their own advantage. Without resorting to romantic notions of an essential, organic society with an inbred aversion to capitalism or the state, we can assert that Olanchano peasants have taken up their “weapons of the weak” in defense of a moral economy that, under the circumstances, represents the best of several quite limited options (Polanyi 2001 [1944]; Scott 1985). Chief among the weapons in their arsenal are the cultural and moral articulations the peasants have scavenged from the midden of their own marginalization and turned back upon their enemies.
This use of the word “articulation,” which I borrow from Stuart Hall by way of
Tania Murray Li, recognizes groups’ capacity to coalesce around “broad constellations of shared or compatible interests, and mobilize social forces across a broad spectrum” (Li
2000: 5). At the same time, this formulation insists that articulation is not anything-goes; rather, “articulations are…limited and pre-figured by the fields of power or ‘places of recognition’ which others provide” (Li 2000: 4, citing Hall 1995: 8, 14). In the case of
Olanchano peasants, their identity as campesinos (a category that includes peasants and rural wage laborers) and, indeed, as Olanchanos, has been largely determined — overdetermined, in Althusserian terminology — by the overall social relations of
viii production that attain in Honduras. My thesis talks about how the campesinos of Olancho have taken up the shards of their several, partial identities, and fashioned them into defensive weapons to protect their embattled existence.
The body of this thesis consists of two parts, each of which is divided into two sections. Running throughout the thesis is the theme of peasant resistance and contestation. The primary axis of contestation explored here is the one between the denizens of the municipality of Gualaco, Olancho, on the one hand and the Honduran central state on the other. A second axis, every bit as important as the first but not as heavily emphasized in this text, runs between peasants and local and regional elites.
Part I, which I have called “Otherness,” discusses the marginalization of the peasants of Olancho by the Honduran central state and the peasants’ response to this marginalization. The first section aims to introduce the reader to Olancho and trace the history of the region’s ambivalent role within Honduras’s national imaginary. As we will see, the Spanish Crown and the Honduran central state that later succeeded to power painted Olanchanos as lazy ne’er-do-wells, unworthy of their place as stewards of the land they inhabited. This trope of sloth was coupled with an unlikely second attribute — that of savage lawlessness. The degree of opprobrium that representatives of the state reserved for Olanchanos has historically co-varied, at least roughly, with the resistance demonstrated by the latter group to state-initiated attempts at surplus extraction. In this putative land of plenty, Olanchanos thus came to symbolize both lethargy and barbarity.
The second section is a vignette wherein campesinos tell stories about a local “social bandit” named Canuto whom they regard as a latter-day Robin Hood, thus reversing the
ix polarity on the valorization given to the pejorative essentialisms that the central state had long since attached to Olanchanos.
Part II, “Betrayal,” explores the consequences for subordinated groups of trying to negotiate with a weak central state. It also demonstrates the limited effectiveness of peasants’ attempts to seek post hoc redress of their grievances when the state reneges on its promises. Section three focuses on the contested creation of Sierra de Agalta National
Park in the mountains of southern Gualaco and serves as a prelude to section four, in which I offer reportage of a fierce fight over the construction of a hydroelectric facility in the Gualaco hamlet of El Ocotal.
In each section of the body of the thesis, my intent is to help the reader gain a flavor for life and politics in the region. As long and occasionally ungainly as this paper is, it is necessarily selective in the detail it provides. At every point, I have tried to highlight moments that bear on themes pertinent to territoriality and articulation, at times digressing to illuminate what I consider important contextual factors. Throughout the body of the paper, I leave it mainly to the reader to draw the appropriate inferences, which I then speak to in the conclusion.
It will not be difficult for the reader to discern where the author’s sympathies lie.
From my first days as a Peace Corps Volunteer (1996-98), I have felt a close connection with the countryside and people of Olancho, Honduras. Though I have made friends among both campesinos and cattle ranchers in the area, I feel the skewed distribution of land, wealth, and status in Honduras is deeply unjust. The legacies of patronismo and colonialism more generally militate against attempts made by peasants and policymakers alike to solve the pressing problems of the country. My positionality comes through both
x in my selection of peasants as the subjects of my research and, no doubt, in my writing.
Nevertheless, I have tried to collect and present data in a fair way. This paper shows the peasants with all their warts and inconsistencies and also takes pains to prize open the black box of “the state” to show the complexities of its structure and contradictory mandates and motivations. It also introduces characters — for example, the mayor of
Gualaco — who challenge simple binaries such as state and society, campesino and landed elite. This writing project, in short, strives to preserve some of the messiness of life on the ground, even when this may come at the cost of tidy, well-distilled theory. My hope is that the balance struck is a good one.
I have also had to strike a balance with respect to the disclosure of sensitive information. Tensions in Olancho are high, and people can die for their words. For that reason, it has been difficult to determine whether and how to cite and attribute statements and actions of the principal informants and actors in my research. In some cases, interviewees specifically requested that I do include their real name; since their enemies already know who they are, goes the reasoning, isn’t it better that the whole world should know too? In other cases, though anonymity would probably be preferable, participants’ statements — and their names — appear in print in the sources I cite. In light of these considerations, I have tried to take a cautious but realistic approach. Public officials’ and other participants’ public, printed statements and actions are reported without an attempt by me to disguise the identity of the authors of those statements. In addition, I give the real names of an engineering company (Energisa) and one of its top employees. I have also not obscured the identities of certain people who are already well known in the area
(for instance, those of a murdered man and his immediate family), though I have also
xi been careful not to provide potentially injurious or controversial details about them. In all other cases, I have changed the names and some other identifying characteristics of the participants. I do include some photographs of public demonstrators, but I feel confident that my inclusion of them will not pose any risk to the subjects of those pictures. In one photograph, I thought it prudent to obscure the faces of two subjects, and I did so. They will probably wish I had not pixelated their images, but better safe than sorry.
xii Part I: OTHERNESS
1 | Olancho: Honduras through the looking glass
In Olancho there are no political parties, and that land, because of its most beautiful appearance, could be described by the adage, “It’s a piece of heaven fallen to earth,” were it not for the lack of culture of its inhabitants. —Honduras’s government newspaper, La Gaceta, August 14, 1868 (cited in Sarmiento 1990: 321)1
The violence we see is the manifestation of all the violence that has historically been done to the inhabitants of Olancho. —Political activist from Olancho, June 21, 2000
In Honduras, mention of Olancho calls for either hushed tones or raucous bravado. In the national media and in books designed for North American tourists — what few there are (books or tourists) — Olancho comes across as Honduras’s version of
Texas, circa 1900: a vast, lawless, violent, cattle landscape on the nation's frontier (Bonta
2001: 74). This “frontier” region of east-central Honduras has long been depicted by poets, local elites, and foreigners alike, as a beautiful, productive El Dorado, but one cursed — as is so often the way with El Dorados — by the cultural failings of its inhabitants (see, for example, Wells 1857; Mejía 1995 [1932]). Among those who live in the capital city, a visit to the department of Olancho warrants admiration from one’s peers, and transplanted Olanchanos — poor, rural ones in particular (“you can tell just by
1 All translations from the original Spanish are mine unless otherwise noted.
1 looking at them”) — will often receive a wide berth from self-respecting capitalinos on the streets of Tegucigalpa.
The origin of Olancho’s rough reputation is a complicated matter, but it can be explained in part as a result of a centuries-long set of power struggles between campesinos and landed elites, and between native Olanchanos and the agents and institutions of distant sovereigns, whether the Spanish Crown or the Honduran central state government. As early as the 1520s, Spain’s conquistadors engaged in bitter, internecine struggles for control over the territory that was to become the department of
Olancho. The resources of interest to the Spaniards at the time were gold and slaves
(Bonta 2001: 95), but by the latter part of the sixteenth century, cattle ranching would begin to establish itself as the region’s key industry (Sarmiento 1990: 23). The indigenous peoples of the region noted the Spaniards’ in-fighting and, perhaps perceiving weakness in this, killed fifteen of the unwanted invaders in 1527 (López de Salcedo 1954
[1527]: 192). Honduras’s first governor, Diego López de Salcedo, avenged the fifteen
Christians’ deaths with a scorched-earth tour through Olancho that, according to a report filed by a harshly critical bishop, culminated in the murder of more than 2,000 Indians
(Pedraza 1898 [1544]: 417-8). This helped set the tone for Olancho’s reputation for centuries to come. Subsequent massacres in 1700, 1865, and 1975, each of them precipitated by local subaltern groups’ defiance of the central state’s policies as they impacted Olanchanos’ land, cattle, tax burden, or freedom, would further solidify
Olancho’s distinction as the antithesis of “cosmopolitan” Honduras as depicted by the central state in the pages of the government newspaper.
2 In fact, and as we will see, the state permeates all geographic and political strata.
The diametric opposition between “Olancho” and “the state” is more apparent than real.
However, the rhetoric carries enough legitimacy in people’s minds to produce a social fact of Olancho as anathema to the state (cf. Scott 1998). The setting-apart of Olancho has become a powerful tool employed by various actors operating in the service of sometimes widely disparate projects. All the while, affinities exist that somewhat attenuate the repulsive forces that at times seemingly threaten to culminate in the calving- off of Olancho from the Honduran state.
Though landed and state elites often overstate the case of the region’s difference from the rest of the country, Olancho’s reputation for toughness and lawlessness is based on more than myth. When I first arrived in Honduras in September of 1996, the big news in the country (apart from the drought) was the signing of a peace accord by two feuding clans in the municipio (municipality) of San Esteban, Olancho. For several years, members of the Turcios and Nájera families had been killing each other with pistols, AK-
47s, even grenade launchers inherited from the US/contra war on neighboring Sandinista
Nicaragua in the 1980s — all to the tune of 85 deaths ("Familias firman acuerdo para dejar vendetta" 1996).
Church and military authorities presided over the armistice. One child from each family was made to sign the pact as a demonstration of the permanence of the arrangement ("Familias firman acuerdo para dejar vendetta" 1996); for insurance, a monument went up. In a conversation with me in 2000, a Honduran human rights worker who hails from San Esteban expressed her disgust with the military’s presence at the event. For her, the military’s participation was a denial of local autonomy and amounted
3 to a publicity stunt meant to demonstrate the armed forces’ power and social legitimacy
— an idea that galls her, given the fact that it was the military who abducted and murdered her husband in the 1980s. But as Bonta correctly points out, for many
Olanchanos, outsiders and “their law-and-order striations are welcome if they can help resolve the seemingly never-ending vendettas that they say threaten to rip their land apart at the seams” (Bonta 2001: 332).
But such complexities do not make for good copy. The sanguinolent politics of
1990s Olancho inspired Costa Rican journalist-turned-novelist Oscar Núñez Olivas to write a fictionalized account of the San Esteban blood feud (Núñez Oliva 2000). Núñez titled his book, Los gallos de San Esteban. If the textual reference to avianthropy is too subtle, the cover of the first edition atones for that: it features two shirtless campesinos with rooster heads where human ones ought to be (see Figure 1.1).
This is far from the first instance in which Olanchanos have been represented as somehow subhuman, unworthy of the rich land they’ve inherited. In 1863-5, when patriotic Olanchanos rose up against the central state in defense of local autonomy and overtly threatened to overturn the skewed landowning regime throughout Olancho and the rest of the country, the “poor, shirtless” indios of Olancho acquired the additional appellations of “lazy,” “bloodthirsty,” “cowardly,” “stupid,” and “criminal” in the government newspaper (Sarmiento 1990: 244-50). Before that, North American William
Wells visited Olancho and commented on its sadly untapped potential: “[T]he glittering treasures of the soil must remain as they have been since the creation until a race superior in energy and activity succeed to the inheritance” (Wells 1857: 282).
4 Since before Wells’ time, the Olanchanos’ lack of merit was frequently invoked in such a way as to demonstrate their unfitness to steward the land they occupied. In particular, attention was often paid to the ostensive laziness of Olanchanos. The argument most often tendered was of a kind with the environmental determinism that has been described by Glacken, Arnold, and others: Olanchanos lacked industry because they lived in a land of milk and honey that offered up its bounty too readily. Historically, accounts of Olancho and its inhabitants have tended to suggest that Mother Nature was casting her pearls before swine ( Bonta 2001: 75; cf. Glacken 1973; Arnold 1996).
There were, of course, variations on this theme, but even these tend to show that
Olanchanos’ putative characteristics were better indicators of the intentions of Olancho’s outside interpreters than of Olanchanos themselves. E.G. Squier, another North American envoy to Central America in the mid-nineteenth century, had cause to tell a different story about Olanchanos than that which was generally told within Honduras. Writing at a time of heady excitement over the immanent construction of an interoceanic railroad across Honduras (though it would never actually be built ), Squier, as the Charge d’Affaires of the United States to the Republics of Central America, was interested in selling Olancho as an ideal investment opportunity for well-off Europeans and U.S. citizens. In extolling the natural riches up for grabs in Olancho, he suggested the long- running denigration of the region owed to the Spaniards’ jealous protection of its most valuable landholdings. Speaking of Olancho, Squier wrote the following:
Next to its herds of cattle, its principal sources of wealth are its gold-washings. Nearly all the streams in the department carry gold of a fine quality in their sands. These washings were distinguished for their richness at the time of the conquest, and have ever since maintained a local celebrity. But the jealous policy of Spain was effectively directed to the suppression of all knowledge of the wealth and resources of these countries, and their condition since the independence has been
5 unfavourable to their development. There can, however, be but little doubt that the gold-washings of the rivers Guayape and Mangualil, and their tributaries, are equal in value to those of California, and must soon come to attract a large share of attention both in the United States and in Europe. At present the washings are only carried on by the Indian women, who devote a few hours on Sunday mornings to the work, living for the remainder of the week upon the results. (Squier 1970 [1870]: 98)
Squier described the indigenous inhabitants of Olancho and the rest of Honduras in a positive light and did so in such a pointed manner as to make obvious his object of attracting foreign investors to the region. Notwithstanding his description of Olanchana women conducting all the family’s work for the week with a few hours of gold-washing on Sunday mornings, Squier also insisted that the Olanchanos were hardworking people:
“These Indians [of Catacamas, Olancho] are proverbial for their peaceful disposition and industrious habits” (Squier 1970 [1870]: 99). If the Indians of Catacamas in Squier’s day were celebrated for their industry and passivity, this could only have been in relation to the more “wild” Tawahkas who lurked nearby. Mining had declined in Olancho precisely for lack of labor after the freeing of slaves in the mid-1500s, and land prices were depressed in and around Catacamas for many years, due primarily to the perceived threat of Indian attacks (Bonta 2001: 152). Just two or three decades before the time of Squier’s original writing, the denizens of Catacamas, far from being recognized for their docility, captured attention with their decapitation of ten partisans of the central state during a violent tax revolt in 1829 (Sarmiento 1990: 120). Disregarding these details, Squier evidently thought of Honduras’s native population in general as potential clay in the hands of white settlers:
The existing Indian element in Honduras, left to itself, promises little or nothing for the development of the country; yet, with the introduction of an intelligent and enterprising people, their industry may be turned to good account. Frugal, patient, and docile, they have many of the best qualities of a valuable labouring
6 population, and only lack direction to become an important means in the physical regeneration of the country.” (Squier 1970 [1870]: 178).
The denigration of Olanchanos by outsiders, especially after the bitter revolts of the late 1820s and the 1860s, should come as no surprise; it is hardly a unique phenomenon in the world. Scott has described civilizing and sedentarizing projects, which were fairly common practice throughout Latin America during the colonial epoch and afterwards, as attempts by the state to impose “legibility” on regions lying at the periphery of their control; the point is to make geographically and politically remote places and their populations more amenable to centralized control and to capital accumulation (Scott 1998: 183-5). When, and to the extent that, this territorializing project fails, the state falls to constructing the region’s denizens as backwards and brutish
— everything, in other words, that the colonizers are not (Scott 1998: 187).
Apart from Scott’s too-simple view of the state, this makes some sense.
According to Bonta, the Crown’s representatives in late-colonial Honduras were anxious to rope in the scattered populations of artisanal ranchers that peppered the valleys of
Olancho; to the extent they were able, they forced Olancho’s ladinos (mestizos) and tribute Indians alike to settle in reducciones, thus making it easier for them to be taxed, to become civilized (Bonta 2001: 163).
Certainly, rural areas and people outside of Olancho also suffered at the hands of
Spanish conquistadors and their post-independence successors. The method of domination, however, seems to have taken a different turn in eastern Honduras, where
Olancho is situated, than it did in western Honduras. Martyred Chief Lempira, killed by the Spaniards in his native western Honduras in 1537, has come to be seen today as a symbol of national pride and sovereignty ; Honduras’ national currency is called the
7 Lempira, and schoolchildren throughout Honduras dress up as “Indians” each July 20, which is día de Lempira (Lempira Day). Meanwhile, no eastern Honduran indigenous or popular leaders have yet been deemed acceptable material for co-option by the central state.
The different treatment afforded to the native people and, later, of ladino peasants in Olancho, was probably partly a reflection of two apparently contradictory geographic realities. On the one hand, Olancho, with its vast, fertile valleys and its famous Guayape gold, meshed better with Spaniards’ conception of El Dorado than did the broken topography of much of the rest of the country. Conceiving of themselves as that “race superior in energy and activity” that would come to be invoked by Wells in the 1850s
(Wells 1857: 282), the Spaniards feared and demonized the native population that stood in the way of their inheritance.
On the other hand — and the importance of this should not be minimized —
Olancho was out of the way. That is to say, through western Honduras lay the trade routes to major markets in El Salvador and Guatemala; meanwhile, travel through
Olancho to the east would only bring a person into the dense rainforest and boggy swamps of the Moskitia, where the British had a foothold on the mainland. Given the great expense of overland transportation, the fact that the great market cities of San
Salvador and Guatemala City lay in the opposite direction from Olancho cooled many colonial and independence-era notables alike on settling in remote Olancho. A scheme to open up Olancho’s rivers to steamship transport in 1859 involved a promised homestead concession of 160 acres to those “Europeans, such as Germans, Belgians, and Italians” willing to establish a colony in that department (Honduras and New York Navigation and
8 Colonization Company 1860: 6). The New York Navigation and Colonization Company shared with the Honduran government a strong desire to make good on the tremendous economic potential of the region by opening it up to a less expensive mode of transportation:
The present interior trade of Honduras appears extremely small and insignificant when compared with the vast resources of the country. This has already been accounted for by the non-existence of a proper communication with either the Atlantic or the Pacific coast. At present not a single article is cultivated in Olancho which would give a profit to the producer, after paying the cost of transportation over the mountains. (Honduras and New York Navigation and Colonization Company 1860: 15)
The plan fell through, however — perhaps due to the Civil War in the United
States. Thus Olancho, though storied for its natural bounty, did not attract the great numbers of “civilized” homesteaders that the government would have liked to have settled there. Instead, a very limited number of huge estates rose up together with the small-scale ranching operations of the local indigenous people and of the mulattos descended from the gold-washing slaves who had been freed by the New Laws of 1542
(see Bonta 2001; Newson 1986). So for a time, Church and Crown, rather than develop
Olancho’s industry, satisfied themselves with levying and collecting heavy in-kind taxes on cheese and leather. “The tithes of Olancho” (“los diezmos de Olancho”) became a common phrase throughout Honduras with a meaning that pairs “an arm and a leg” with
“all the tea in China”: an unjustifiably enormous quantity of goods tendered to a more powerful authority (Ramos, et al. 1947: 35). Given all these factors, the people and the landscape in western Honduras more quickly became “legible” (Scott 1998) to colonial administrators than did Olancho. As urban Hondurans in Tegucigalpa and Comayagua
9 turned their gaze increasingly westward to the trade opportunities there, little-known
Olancho lay lurking behind them.
When the newly independent Republic of Honduras sought to increase its revenues by demanding that Olanchanos begin their taxes in cash rather than in kind, however, war broke out. The demand was an onerous one since it implied that
Olanchanos would now have to drive their cattle and cart their cheese all the way to El
Salvador or Guatemala in order to raise the necessary funds, and the Olanchanos responded violently. The insurrection of 1829, in which the residents of Catacamas cut off the heads of ten of their antagonists, was ignited when the mayor of Gualaco,
Domingo Sarmiento, refused the army’s demand that he and the rest of the Gualaqueños give up their firearms (Sarmiento 1990: 109). The reason for the army’s anxiety over the
Gualaqueños’ weapons was the latter group’s bristling hostility to the new tax law. Only when the president of the republic, Francisco Morazán, bravely met them on their turf and agreed to repeal Olanchanos’ tax obligations was a peace treaty signed (Sarmiento
1990: 140). Though the written records are fragmented and at times contradictory, it seems that Olanchanos’ reputation for sloth came to be linked more consistently with that of savagery after this run-in with the state and another that would come in the 1860s.
The central state’s presence in Olancho, then, has historically been both sporadic and, from the perspective of Olanchanos, overwhelmingly negative. This combination of neglect and violence has contributed to a tendency — highly valued among Olanchanos themselves — toward autarky and independence. “The supremely local nature of life” exemplified by the calving off of numerous small municipalities in Olancho (Bonta 2001:
166) has often put Olanchanos — both rich and poor ones — at odds with central-state
10 policymakers right up to the present day. Without eliding other important, and in some cases related, axes — class, gender, ethnicity, and kinship, for instance — we can say that in Olancho, an additional dipole sets the “local” off from the “nonlocal.” Both state and local actors have come to define Olancho by what it is not; namely, the rest of Honduras.
And, somewhat like a hologram or a fractal, this local:nonlocal dialectic reproduces itself at diminishing scales. The distinction is drawn from below as well as from above: appeals to a shared Olanchano identity tend to weaken in those instances when projects flying under the departmental banner conflict with the mores of people situated within their respective municipios and their constituent villages and hamlets. Within municipios, too, spatial conflicts sometimes attain between the cabecera (municipal seat) and its satellite aldeas (villages). Micro-political fissures at the inframunicipal scale, though, seem more frequently to burst along other lines of division such the aforementioned categories of class, occupation, party affiliation, and/or kin (as we saw with the Turcios and Nájeras in
San Esteban).
While the twenty-three municipios of Olancho share in common their marginalization vis-à-vis the rest of Honduras, as well as a collective memory of violent subjugation and occupation by the military, the department of Olancho is anything but a homogeneous sociopolitical unit. As is the case throughout Honduras, there can be no question but that the municipio is the hub of Olanchanos’ spatial affinities. Political power in Honduras, too, devolves more to the municipal level than to the departmental level, where the governor is a titular sinecure who is hand-picked by the country’s president.
11 In a country that already has a weak central state, as Honduras does, the devolution of political authority to the municipal level implies that each municipio is an important component of the state, replete with agencies often (though not always) staffed by people born and raised within the municipio. This fact, of course, makes problematic any idea of a “society against the state” (Clastres 1987), despite the obvious tension between local life and certain of the impositions people see as emanating from the state.
This paradox — that of the municipio as both exemplar of the “local” and container of the local’s opposite (“the state”) — is not easily resolved. Conflicts between and within state agencies that belie characterizations of a monolithic state further complexify the problem, as does the temporal incoherence of rapidly-evolving bureacracies that wipe out agencies’ institutional memories on a yearly basis (see Bonta
2001, especially chapters seven and eight). Local mayoralties and bureaucracies acquit themselves to varying degrees in the eyes of their constituencies, from municipio to municipio and from moment to moment. On balance, Olanchanos tend to distrust the government and other perceived intruders (who may come either from within or outside the municipio or department); and, as we will see in the cases that follow, they develop both material and rhetorical repertoires for defense of what they perceive to be theirs. At the same time, it should be recognized that perceptions of the state, territorial techniques, and meaning itself are context-specific and highly mutable.
The paired dialectics of local:nonlocal and local:state have lent themselves, in the case of Olancho, to heated contests over the labels that are applied to the department and its denizens. Olanchanos — sometimes the same person at different moments — will at turns reject and embrace the popular image of Olanchanos being a breed apart (Bonta
12 2001: 74). There are those discouraged souls who will sigh and confess, “It is true, we are too violent; it’s our lack of culture and education.” Most Olanchanos, however, are quick to defend themselves and their paisanos and paisanas (countrymen and countrywomen).
Sometimes this means denying the truth of claims that Olanchanos are any different from other Hondurans. Just as frequently, though, the approach Olanchanos take is to embrace the “macho” and “wild” labels applied to them and reverse the polarity, as it were, of the valorization given to such labels. This second, defiant approach reinforces a sense of Olancho as Honduras through the looking glass and has given rise to several slogans that Olanchanos have adopted over the years. One of these is, “Soy
Olanchano…¿y qué?” (“I’m Olanchano…wanna make something of it?”) (Bonta 2001:
68). For some time, a sign greeted highway travelers entering Olancho from Tegucigalpa:
“República libre de Olancho” (“Free Republic of Olancho”). According to tradition, another sign read, “Olancho: entre si quiere, salga si puede” (“Olancho: enter if you want, leave if you can”) or perhaps, “Olancho: ancho para entrar, angosto para salir”
(“Olancho: broad as you enter, narrow as you leave”). With respect to these last two,
Olanchanos can put up a lively debate about whether the difficulty in leaving owes more to the danger of suffering a violent end or of falling in love with the land and its warm and emotionally honest people.
Even as Olanchanos handle their mala fama (ill-fame) with some ambivalence, so too it must be asserted that Hondurans at times confess at least a grudging respect for
Olancho, treating it as something of a repository or distillery of Hondurans’ primordial qualities, their masculinity in particular. Many male (and not a few female) Hondurans are fond of a rhyming refrain that celebrates their collective machismo:
13 No hay pueblo más macho que el pueblo catracho del cual vengo yo.2
If there were no Olancho, the self-styled manly-men of Honduras would find this claim far more difficult to sustain.
2 There’s no manlier people than the Honduran people from which I come.
14 2 | Counter-banditry, or Narratives of Otherness
This dump is the center of the world now. —Capt. Michael Sheehan, U.S. Army, 1981 (Bonner 1981: 16)
“Perfect,” said Canuto. “On your way, take me to Gualaco. I've got a matter to settle.” —Los gallos de San Esteban (Núñez Oliva 2000: 216)
As one might suspect, much symbolic importance accrues to certain, outsize
Olanchano personalities. Infamous Olanchanos have at times become important fulcrums, providing discursive leverage for both the central state and local actors in their contests with each other over control of the region. Ewick and Silbey argue that stories are powerful tools because the values they express are woven throughout the narrative.
“Because narratives make implicit rather than explicit claims regarding causality and truth as they are dramatized in particular events regarding specific characters, stories elude challenges, testing, or debate” (Ewick and Silbey 1995: 214). In fact, I would argue, challenges to stories are found in great abundance —it’s just that the challenges often come in the form of other stories. In Olancho, one might be hard-pressed to identify a narrative that is not at once a counter-narrative. Parties at odds with one another join a discursive battle over the meaning of shared symbols, and some of the most important symbols are living people.
One such living symbol was “Cinchonero” (The Belt-maker), Serapio Romero, who launched a quixotic campaign against the Honduran state in Olancho’s capital city,
Juticalpa, in 1868 (see Sarmiento 1990). Cinchonero and his small band succeeded in wresting Juticalpa from military control for several days. Cinchonero’s most celebrated
15 act during his brief tenure as commander of the city was to give a Christian burial to the remains of two Olanchano heroes who had been captured and executed by the army in
1865 at the end of the two-year civil war. To do that, he had to climb the highest hill in the city and retrieve the rebels’ boiled skulls from a locked iron cage where the military had put them on display as a chilling reminder to people in the region that Olancho belonged to the Honduran state.
The occupation of Juticalpa was short lived, as was Cinchonero, and President
Medina used the government newspaper to publish the words that opened the previous chapter: “In Olancho there are no political parties, and that land, because of its most beautiful appearance, could be described by the adage, ‘It’s a piece of heaven fallen to earth,’ were it not for the lack of culture of its inhabitants” (Honduras's government newspaper, La Gaceta, August 14, 1868, cited in Sarmiento 1990: 321). In this way,
Medina claimed for the state the riches of Olancho while impugning the character of its native inhabitants, whom the central government also referred to as bandits (Sarmiento
1990: 283). Choosing to cast the region’s guerrilla fighters as bandits was a way of explaining away the political content of their uprising.
Medina’s attack on the people of Olancho was not merely rhetorical. In 1865, after boiling the ringleaders’ heads, Medina orchestrated the hanging of as many as 1,200 insurrectionary Olanchanos and ordered the relocation of 600 families into model villages at a time when the total departmental population stood at less than 30,000 (Sarmiento
1990).
Cinchonero was the enemy of the central state, and this helped make him the people’s hero in Olancho. Respected both for his anti-state zeal and for his reputed hatred
16 of the rich, Cinchonero today is considered by many Olanchanos to be their department’s greatest son; his derring-do inspired a left-wing guerrilla group in the 1980s to name themselves los cinchoneros.
A modern-day analog to Cinchonero is the “social bandit” Canuto, a young man from the municipio of Gualaco who in the 1980s quickly rose to legendary, single-name status in the department for his Olanchano audacity and his disdain for both local and state elites (cf. Hobsbawm 1985). When Núñez wrote of the family feud in San Esteban, he could not resist including a chapter on the illustrious bandit, Canuto — to my knowledge, the only character in Los gallos de San Esteban whose real name Núñez did not change for his book. Núñez researched and wrote about an actual episode in which
Canuto kidnapped and briefly held the parish priest from the municipio of Gualaco, which borders San Esteban to the southwest. In his exaggerated description of Canuto,
Núñez describes the archetypal Olanchano male:
Padre Vicente …slammed on the brakes, and the vehicle skidded several meters on the loose sand of the road, stopping a few paces from the rifle-wielding man. The man was tall, dark-skinned, and of uncommon musculature, like Stallone. His chest was bare, crisscrossed by two bandoliers full of ammunition. He wore green fatigues — completely covered with pockets and compartments — and some dissonant, leather cowboy boots that went up to his knees. The priest observed this man who’d stepped right off the movie screen, and he doubted his own sensibilities. Was it real what his eyes saw, or was it an illusion…? (Núñez Oliva, 2001: 215)
Santos Canuto Montalván Antúnez was born on January 15, 1959 (according to
"'Canuto' había sembrado el terror en Olancho" 1992: 19), in the small northern Olancho village of San Pedro, a few kilometers from the municipal seat of Gualaco. Most people who knew Canuto as a child agree that he was a solemn and respectful kid. Nearly everything to come after that is open to debate.
17 The defining tragedy in Canuto’s life came in his youth. Canuto’s father, José
Montalván, had run into trouble with the patriarch of the neighboring Sevilla family.
Somehow — improbably — a misunderstanding over the sale of a pig led José Sevilla to kill Canuto’s father. Over the course of the next few days, most of the male members of both families had killed each other off. Canuto survived the slaughter but was forced to flee in order to avoid further reprisal or police capture. This unfortunate series of events doomed Canuto to live as a phantom, ever running, haunting the length and breadth of
Olancho over a span of several years. The lure of Gualaco was strong, however, and it was to the municipality of Gualaco that he always eventually returned — until his reported death in 1992.
Across Olancho, fantastic tales abound and purport to explain many of Canuto’s exploits. Some of these stories describe Canuto as a powerful warlock, while self- described realists attribute Canuto’s long and successful career to his remarkable cunning. Whether they focus on Canuto’s supernatural powers or his canny wile, what most of these stories have in common is that they tend to draw dichotomizing lines in the sand between rich and poor, between ranchers and campesinos, between Olancho and the state, between “us” and “them.” In the popular imagination, at least, Canuto was a champion of the humble Olancho campesino and the scourge of wealthy ranchers and the central state police.
Canuto’s career spanned the decade of the 1980s, a time when many outsiders were coming into Honduras and Olancho. In the early years of that decade, the ineffectual presidency of Roberto Suazo Córdova left internal security matters to the Fort Benning- trained anticommunist crusader, General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez, whose policies he
18 modeled after those of the architects of Argentina’s dirty war (Lapper and Painter 1985:
79-80). Under Alvarez, the Honduran government worked hard to fill the United States’ need for a base of operations for its Cold War-related interventions on both the
Nicaraguan and Salvadoran borders; Honduras was so accommodating, in fact, that some political critics began to refer to the country as the U.S.S. Honduras. In a refugee camp for walking casualties of the war in El Salvador, U.S. Special Forces Captain Michael
Sheehan opined on Honduras’s suddenly central place in geopolitics: “This dump is the center of the world now” (Bonner 1981; cited in Acker 1988: 11).
Olancho, which shares part of its southern border with Nicaragua, became, as strange as it sounds, the battleground of a foreign war. The terrain was of key military and political importance to the Contra forces: it bordered the strategic Río Coco, and it was far enough away from most Hondurans’ disapproving gaze to allow foreign troops to hole up in Honduras for several years. The Contras made use of a military base called El
Aguacate near Catacamas, Olancho, that was maintained by soldiers from Honduras’ 16th
Infantry Battalion. El Aguacate was the Contras’ military prison and torture camp; bodies of missing persons — Sandinistas, Contra deserters, and suspected Honduran subversives
— are still being exhumed from the grounds of the base (e.g. Darling 1999: A1;
"Honduras: bodies found at ex-U.S. base" 2001: A6). The base served as an important communications hub for the various Contra camps that spread along the Nicaraguan border. El Aguacate was also a staging ground in 1983 and 1984 for an enormous, joint military field-training exercise, Big Pine II, that involved several thousand US,
Honduran, and Nicaraguan Contra soldiers (Lapper and Painter 1985: 124).
19 Not all Olanchanos were discomfited by the US and Contra presence, but most resented the occupation and were outraged by the spate of state-sponsored disappearances at that time. The Catholic Church, which had previously acquitted itself well in the defense of subaltern groups’ rights in Olancho and throughout Honduras, was no longer quite the same progressive voice it had once been. Several years before the Contra war began, in 1975, a cabal of ranchers and the Honduran military collaborated in the massacre of two priests and twelve others involved in the land reform movement in
Olancho. In the wake of that event, the Catholic Church all but retired from the political arena in Olancho (Norsworthy and Barry 1994: 117).
This abandonment by their only powerful ally left campesinos with few resources at their disposal for their self-defense against the growing power and landholdings of the largest cattle ranchers. Nationwide, but led by Olancho, Honduras’ landholdings given to pasture was rapidly increasing. In 1952, the share was 822,000 hectares — 32% of the total agricultural land in the country. By 1982, these numbers had increased to 2.2 million hectares and 70% (Ruben 1991: 7). That same year, Alvarez Martínez would issue a law
— Decree No. 33 — that set five to twenty-year sentences for crimes “against rural properties”; by 1983, he would criminalize all land invasions (Acker 1988: 94-5). In these darkest of times, in a part of the country where access to land meant everything,
Canuto might have been the only visible champion Olanchano campesinos had to choose from.
At any rate, Canuto was “chosen” first by the Honduran central state. In the late
1980s, the Honduran secret police force, the National Investigation Directorate (DNI) pronounced Canuto its public enemy #1 within the province of Olancho. It is an open
20 question whether the military-dominated police truly intended to capture Canuto or whether they merely used him as an excuse to penetrate and exercise control over
Olancho’s towns and villages. Human rights advocates have shared with me their conviction that the latter was more likely the case than the former. It seems a stretch to claim there was police complicity in the longevity of Canuto’s career, but more than one informant I spoke with suggested the police may not have been trying very hard to bring him in. It would probably be impossible to trace the provenance of some of the more fantastical Canuto stories, but we should not forget it was the police themselves who faced off against Canuto and who, therefore, may have spun the first stories about many of his most oft-recounted exploits. In the case of Padre Vicente’s kidnapping by Canuto, a police lieutenant asserted that Canuto got away by turning into a black cat. In other cases when state forces had him dead to rights, Canuto is said to have caused police officers’ guns to jam, or that he simply disappeared.
Perhaps police were simply frightened of him and the legend that grew around him with each successive coup. As with ghost stories, the narrators’ genuine fear would have contributed to the tales’ effectiveness, making them more “true” in a sense for teller and listener alike. The enmity between Canuto and the police was probably more than a myth. It was commonly perceived that Canuto enjoyed making fun of the hapless police who pursued him. He punished them, rubbing their faces in their own incompetence.
Knowing that the majority of police did not know what he looked like, Canuto reputedly derived much pleasure from buying rounds of drinks for the cops, then revealing his identity to his incapacitated adversaries. In spite of the possibility that rank-and-file policemen delivered what they felt were earnest accounts of their encounters with
21 Canuto, however, we will find circumstantial evidence to suggest that both the state and the media more consciously participated in Canuto’s demonization through narratives with territorial overtones and implications.
A peasant woman from the northern-Olancho municipio of Esquipulas del Norte tells the story of Canuto’s final escape from the police in 1991:
Canuto had some children there [in the neighboring village of Las Delicias, just across the departmental boundary with Yoro], so that’s where the military went to hunt for him, as though they were hunting for deer. But — people say — they couldn’t find him because he transformed himself into a tree full of ripe bananas. The soldiers were tired, so they stopped there to eat the bananas without realizing they were really eating part of Canuto’s clothing.3
I spoke with Captain Jorge Bueso (retired), a high-level police officer who took part in that humbling hunting trip. He told me his specific assignment when he was transferred to Olancho from another department was to track down and capture or kill
Canuto. He failed in meeting this goal, but, he confided with a smile, he succeeded in setting up local spy networks in most of the major towns and villages in Olancho. Captain
Bueso made sure I took note of the fact that he had had multiple civilian spies working for him on every block in the city of Juticalpa. No one but he knew the identity of the spies, so everyone, spy or not, lived in a constant state of paranoia (Bonta 2001: 415-17).
All of this was justified under the pretense of a manhunt for Canuto and his small band of highwaymen. Though the network of orejas, or “ears,” did not lead to Canuto’s arrest, this infiltration by the police did help the central state to keep tabs on potential political subversives and to keep the lid on land reform pressure from below.4
Even with his much-reported — though much-disputed — death in 1992, Canuto served the central state’s project of marginalizing the potentially rabble-rousing
22 Olanchanos. At least two national papers related a moment in Canuto’s storied criminal career when he purportedly fired gunshots at Padre Vicente’s feet, forcing him to dance and — what is worse — to drink coyol, a palm wine produced only in Olancho that is at once the pride of Olancho and, among non-Olanchanos, a symbol of peasant backwardness. According to an Olancho correspondent for La Tribuna, “He was a man who shot at the parish priest several times, forcing him not only to dance but also to drink coyol wine” ("'Canuto' fue víctima de una venganza" 1992: 50). When I asked Padre
Vicente about this incident, he grew agitated, telling me he had sent multiple letters to the editors of the papers to debunk that confabulation, but to no avail: the newspapers did not print his letters or retract their misstatements.5
For their part, Olanchanos have adopted and mirrored the state’s and the media’s own representations of Canuto. But they subvert those representations, too, by giving a positive light to Canuto’s mythic cunning and fearsomeness, as well as by providing locally-biased, egalitarian lessons implicit in their interpretations of Canuto’s actions, motives, and values: Yes, Canuto loved coyol. Yes, Canuto was deadly. Yes, he would exact swift revenge when provoked, but his vengeance was just. Campesino renditions of the Canuto story “correct” police and landlord representations of Canuto as a ruthless, mindless killer. Most of the self-described campesinos who shared with me their stories of Canuto were careful to portray Canuto as a paragon of probity and honor. He carried candy and coins in his pockets for the children and was courteous toward women. He only killed in self-defense; if he shot at a soldier and missed, it surely meant he was intentionally sparing the fellow’s life. “Canuto,” said one informant, “only killed his
3 Interview, July 9, 2000. 4 Interview with Jorge Bueso, July 16, 2000.
23 enemies.” When I pressed my informant on this apparent tautology, he elaborated:
Canuto only intentionally killed members of the Sevilla family — those who had slaughtered his own kin and ruined his life. By this man’s reckoning, the final death toll left in Canuto’s wake — whatever that might have been — would have been lower if the state had permitted local values to prevail.
These values do not, however, merely counterpose the local to the central state.
Campesinos have also summoned various Canuto episodes that reveal the Olancho peasants’ challenges to existing economic circumstances. By the late 1980s, these challenges were many. On one side, Gualaco and other municipalities found their forests under assault by wealthy timber magnates. On the other side, conservationists were demarcating new national parks that threatened to eliminate important usufructuary rights to land the campesinos considered theirs. In addition, land-use conflicts between various social groups — especially between cattle ranchers and smallholding subsistence farmers and caficultores — were a constant threat to erupt into open conflict. The narratives people tell today about Canuto’s exploits in the late 1980s help to reveal just how heated some of these disputes were and, I argue, represent a now-attenuated but still important campesino (counter-)narrative that challenges central state authority as well as cattle ranchers’ inordinate power and class injustice more generally.
Olanchanos, for example, claim Canuto always shared a portion of his loot among the poorest members of the villages where he circulated. More than this (or so the story goes), villagers actually felt lucky when Canuto came to call at their home, demanding food and shelter. As one informant told me, using a bit of circuitous logic, Canuto was
5 Interview with Padre Vicente, June 25, 2001.
24 known to be such a dangerous man, no one would think of harming a family that was abetting him. Families therefore felt safer when he was with them. Further, a family could be sure that Canuto would remember and eventually repay their kindness.6 In one disturbing case, Canuto is said to have cut off a man’s head “with one machete chop” for attempting to steal the corrugated roof of a house where Canuto was staying.7
Despite the mixed evidence, Canuto’s sense of honor came, say his admirers, with a sense of economic justice. According to most campesino authorities’ accounts, Canuto specialized in aggrieving the rich. He especially targeted the wealthy landowners, the big cattle ranchers of the area. Canuto was both keenly intelligent and, Núñez’s poetic license notwithstanding, rather slight of frame. According to local legend, Canuto would disguise himself as a woman at night, stand by the side of the road, and wait for a rich landlord to drive up. Upon successfully catching a lift, Canuto would remove his disguise, inform his wealthy victim whom he was dealing with, and rob him. The proceeds, of course, went almost entirely to the poor.
Again, as with the story of Canuto’s humiliation of the police, the theme of this narrative is two-fold: Canuto both rejects and mockingly defeats the imposed social order. In fact, the historical Canuto probably had a more equivocal philosophy regarding economic redistribution. Some informants who knew Canuto acknowledged, upon questioning, that he was la mano derecha (the right hand) of one or two wealthy cattle ranchers in Olancho. This piece of information, which from an outsider’s perspective weakens the campesinos’ counter-narrative considerably, is decidedly not part of the
“authorized” campesino account. This may not imply any intent on the part of the
6 Interview with Darío Aguilar, June 29, 2001. 7 Interview, July 9, 2000.
25 storytellers to deceive the listener. It is, I think, just as likely that many of the storytellers themselves are unaware of this detail of Canuto’s life, or they may bracket it, either more or less consciously, as an extraneous detail that simply does not contribute to their moral tale.
A territorial theme resonates within all these narratives. In the case of the police,
Canuto wards off unwanted outsiders who supposedly emanate from beyond Olancho’s borders. In others of his merry adventures, Canuto fences off abusive cattle ranchers from this heretical moral landscape, in effect giving notice that northern Olancho is a realm where the underdogs have a defender (for discussions of moral landscapes and heretical geographies, see Tuan 1989; Cresswell 1996). His antagonistic relationship with the landlords, at least within the orthodox Canuto canon, provides an antidote for the false consciousness of a simple-minded rallying around the “Olancho” banner when such comes at the cost of a critique of unjust differentials of power, land, and wealth at the local level.
Further evidence of Canuto’s importance as a territorializing symbol, albeit an inconsistent one, can be found in the different ways campesinos discuss Canuto’s relationship with nature. As we have seen, Canuto benefits from a connection to the earth that is so close, he is able to transform himself into a banana plant. In keeping with his vaunted sense of reciprocity, folk narratives emphasize that Canuto was a fierce protector of his people’s patrimonio, by which is meant, in this context, the community’s inherited endowment of renewable natural resources. In particular, he helped protect the surrounding forested mountains upon which virtually all non-ranching Gualaqueños
26 depended for their livelihood. Captain Bueso, in fact, commented that Canuto was an admirable “defender of the forest” from over-logging and other abuses.
The stories that attribute to Canuto a conservationist ethic reveal a concern less with nature-untrammeled as with nature-as-patrimonio — that is, as the people’s inherited resource. Some stories tell of how Canuto tracked down a family of timber poachers from Catacamas, Olancho, who were denuding the forests around Gualaco, to warn them that if they did not desist, he would kill him. At another time, he kidnapped and threatened the entire Gualaco COHDEFOR (federal forest service) staff, angered by their corruption and hypocrisy. When he learned that the police were setting a trap for him, he used the COHDEFOR truck and employees as a distraction to facilitate his escape into the woods.
One informant, a self-identified “ecologist” and one prone to exaggeration even when discussing matters unrelated to Canuto, told me that Canuto succeeded in stopping all fire-setting throughout the municipio of Gualaco for an entire year by threatening, once again, to kill anyone who set a blaze. I inquired further about this, asking, “But if
Canuto always sided with the poor, how could it be that he would stop campesinos from engaging in the slash-and-burn agriculture they depend on?”
In response to this challenge, my informant replied, “Well, the little fires were okay. He just stopped the big fires and the ones that were lit out of caprice.” When I questioned a bit further, asking why Canuto would bother to legislate and adjudicate such matters at all, the answer was that Canuto felt grateful to COHDEFOR because one of
27 their employees had recently given him a lift in the company truck. His way of saying thanks was to thusly endorse COHDEFOR’s preoccupation with fire suppression.8
The contradictory tales that first pit Canuto against COHDEFOR, then make of him their ally, would not surprise Padre Vicente, in whose curt appraisal Canuto was little more than a misguided drunk. However, what remains constant is the positive valorization given to Canuto’s behavior in each campesino’s telling. Most likely, many of these narratives contain large elements of truth. When all the many Canuto stories are synthesized and interpreted, they draw a portrait of a well-meaning but wildly impulsive man on the run. His greatest gift to campesino-class Olancho was not any particular action but rather the prodigious cache of discursive munitions he left behind for utilization by local subalterns.
The situation is very complicated, however, and of course, so is Canuto’s legacy.
The Honduran central government, as we have discussed, had its own reasons for acceding to, and in fact promoting, these stories that reinforced the idea of Olancho as a region in need of taming. More recently, a large cattle-ranching federation based in northern Olancho has used the department’s (somewhat earned) reputation for lawlessness to its political advantage. The organization’s spokesperson was able to bully the state Ministry of Security into boosting police protection of the ranchers’ property by threatening to mobilize more than 500 men, armed with AK-47 machine guns, to serve as vigilantes against local criminals if the state wouldn’t do it (Moreno 1999).
The Canuto narrative contributes to Olancho’s alienation from the central state, and while this may be seen as desirable by Olanchanos interested in autonomy and
8 Interview, June 25, 2001.
28 autarky, it has also facilitated the rise in power of a cattle-ranching elite that is in many ways homologous to the mafia families of nineteenth-century Sicily who filled the local- level vacuum of power left by the Italian state and proceeded to thoroughly subjugate the peasantry (Blok 1988 [1974]). Brave narratives notwithstanding, Canuto himself appears to have been a hired hand for some of these regional power brokers; he was, at least for a time, one of their armed retainers (see Blok 1988 [1974]: 61 for a discussion of gabelloti and campieri in Sicily).
It bears repeating that the Canuto story is at once discourse and counter-discourse; more than this, it is a narrative that belongs to many voices and which has many audiences. It does not speak truth to power; it spins yarns to and through several nodes of power. Certainly the campesinos of Olancho would have to be considered in most senses less powerful than even the weak Honduran state, but the persistence of a distinctly
Olanchano interpretation of Canuto’s career indicates a gaping hole in the central state’s ability to organize consent in the region.
Also, although the local:state dialectic just discussed is an important one, it is far from the only one we can identify. The central state speaks to Honduras: “We need to protect you from Olancho.” Olancho speaks to the state: “We will always better you; you will never truly belong here.” Ranchers speak to the state: “We must arm ourselves to protect our investments from dangerous criminals.” Campesinos speak to ranchers: “You will get your due if you mistreat us.” Olancho speaks to in-migrants from neighboring departments: “Danger! Keep out!” It is not quite right to assert that the competing strains of the Canuto legend work to cancel each other out, but it is certainly the case that the
Canuto legacy is a muddled and contradictory one.
29 Also, we must recall that the so-called central state is not monolithic, nor merely central or nonlocal. Though the state had an interest in the promulgation of the Canuto legend with the design of facilitating an oppressive anti-subversive monitoring campaign, it does not follow that the majority of rank-and-file police officers and soldiers charged with tracking him down were conscious participants in this terror tactic. They might really have marveled at Canuto’s skill and luck, and they might have found that contributing to the Canuto legend helped them save face on the occasions when he outflanked them.
In addition, ties of locality, consanguinity, and simple admiration complicate the picture of police-versus-Canuto. Captain Bueso, for instance, was related to Canuto by marriage. Bueso’s father is supposed to have received a personal note from Canuto asking him to beseech Bueso to end the manhunt. Canuto invoked the family connection, explaining he had thus far spared the policeman’s life out of respect for their kinship.9
Family connections in general, so important to Olanchano social structure, may help to explain a surprising fact: stories told about Canuto are less inclined toward magic, and are far more reserved, in Gualaco than in the department of Olancho as a whole. In part, this may owe to the fact that people in Gualaco can speak with greater authority on the details of Canuto’s life and therefore do not have to resort to supernatural explanations for Canuto’s longevity. Also, and this may be the more important factor, people’s appreciation of Canuto’s defense of local patrimonio is tempered by the pragmatism dicated by their proximity to the much-embittered Sevilla family with which
Canuto Montalván had his quarrel. One interviewee I spoke with abruptly changed the
9 Interview with Jorge Bueso, July 16, 2000.
30 direction of our conversation when I asked him the question, “Did you ever help
Canuto?”
He whispered emphatically, “[One of the Sevillas] lives in the next house over. If
I say some things, it won’t be good for me.”10 So we turned to talk of other things.
Not one of the Gualaqueños I met was of the opinion that Canuto was even a bandit. Rather, he was a man who wound up on the wrong side of the (unjust and unwelcome) law and, of course, on the wrong side of the Sevilla family. I did not have the opportunity to speak with the Sevilla family.11 Perhaps if I had, they might have defined Canuto as a bandit or something worse.
In and around Gualaco, discussions of Canuto do not revolve around his powers or even his crusades against the twin evils of the central state and the local ranchers.
Instead, the first order of business is to relate, in no uncertain terms, the status of Canuto as being alive or dead. One of the newspapers reporting Canuto’s death — a revenge killing, purportedly — asserts that Montalván’s mother, who has since died, positively identified her son by a photograph taken of his cadaver (Cruz 1992: 10). Some
Gualaqueños, though, insist she made this statement so as to guarantee her still-living son’s continued amnesty. Several of the people I spoke with felt it very important that I understand that Canuto is still alive, or that Canuto is dead. Each of them had what she or he thought was incontrovertible proof to substantiate the claim. These theories were so numerous that I soon developed a mental image of Canuto as Schröedinger’s famous cat.
10 Interview, June 29, 2001. 11 I had arranged to meet with several members of the Sevilla family. My research on Canuto was cut short, however, by the murder of Carlos Flores on June 30, 2001, and I was not able to meet with the Sevillas. Flores’s murder is the topic of Section 4.
31 Canuto’s aunt didn’t have a theory for me, however. All she evinced was a deep and abiding sadness. One of Canuto’s sisters, she explained, went insane as a result of the family’s tragic dissolution. She described Canuto as a good boy who used to visit her all the time, until the business with the Sevillas transpired. When I asked her whether Canuto was still alive, this frail old woman looked as though I had just punched her. After recovering a little, she managed, “Many of his friends think he’s still alive, but I haven’t seen him since he was 16 or 17, when he first ran into trouble.” She continued: “He had a lot of courage [valor] — too much, really — so much so that most people when they saw him would run away. But I think that fear was the reason he did what he did. And he never had enough courage to come back here.”12
12 Interview, June 28, 2001.
32 Olanchito Col ro ón Yo Las Delicias [
Esquipulas s
del Norte o i D a s
F
San Pedro a
Gualaco i c o c
. a r M N El Aguacate: Honduran/Contra G o r Salamá Military Prison a z á µ n Juticalpa Olancho A El P U araí G so A R A NIC D. Graham 2002 Source: Honduras IGN 2000
Map 1: Olancho’s location in the Republic of Honduras.
32a Key to Adelmo’s Sketch Map of El Ocotal
4 7 1 Church / kindergarten 2 Site of Carlos’ murder 3 Energisa compound 2 5 4 Community bridge 1 6 5 Community soccer field 6 Elementary school 7 Río Babilonia 3 8 8 Creek where turbined water will be released
SAN ESTEBAN
MUNICIPIO R a ío G t DE ra l nde a
a i g DULCE NOMBRE GUALACO n o R La Venta il DE CULMI b A ío a P o B a Rí e ta El Ocotal s
d te
o o
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e e
a
GUALACO a a i i
u u
h h
n San n r
c c
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l a i i e R b R i í a Río e o l Grand B S
E . . R
. í R S R l o R u a s T m i n n e to t a s y io ta c Pa a ío N R ue SAN FRANCISCO q DE LA PAZ ar P CATACAMAS a c MUNICIPAL SEAT co ua SANTA MARIA DEL REAL G Hamlet or village ío R to n R i River í T o ío R T Gualaco’s municipal el ic boundaries a
e ap Paved highway ay Gu ío e Unpaved highway R p a y a Estimated national park 10 km 20 km u G extent JUTICALPA ío R Top sketch map by A. Zelaya, 2001 Bottom map by D. Graham, 2002 Source: Honduras IGN 2000 HONDURAS JUTICALPA OLANCHO [ Map 2: El Ocotal and Parque Nacional Sierra de Agalta
32b Figure 1.1: One of the gallos of San Esteban (detail from the front cover of the book, Los gallos de San Esteban). Reproduced with the permission of Editorial Guaymuras.
32c Figure 1.2: A t-shirt shop in Juticalpa offers commoditized Olanchano identity. The shop owner says most shirts are sold to members of the Olanchano diaspora.
32d Figure 3.1: “Without the forest there is no life.”
32e Figure 3.2: “El Tribunito,” the shoeless paperboy mascot of Tegucigalpa’s leading daily, exhorts Hondurans to plant trees.
32f Figure 4.1: Martín presents his son’s cadaver.
Figure 4.2: Carlos’s body yields evidence of an ambush.
32g Figure 4.3: Anti-dam protesters gathered at the capitol plaza in Tegucigalpa.
32h Figure 4.4: “Let’s care for the forests.” An example of the construction of national identity around the forest industry and conservation. This image has been digitally altered to avoid using someone’s actual license plate number.
32i Figure 4.5: This tryptych became the “official version” of events for many reporters and passersby.
32j Figure 4.6: The capitol plaza layout, looking to the southwest.
32k Figure 4.7: On July 18, 2001, riot police prevented escape for Gualaqueños and COPINH activists.
32l Figure 4.8: Alternative nationalism: Lempira is bedecked with the Honduran flag and eulogized as “the first defender of the national sovereigny.”
32m Figure 4.9: Pro-dam demonstrators at El Ocotal were unable to tell me where they had had their banner made. Note the demographics of the group; nearly all of these demonstrators are young men. Contrast with Figure 4.3
32n Figure 4.10: Domingo preaches ILO Convention 169. This image has been digitally altered to obscure Domingo’s face and that of one other participant.
32o Figure 4.11: One of the numerous chorritos de Babilonia.
32p Part II: BETRAYAL
3 | Rescuing “patrimonio”: the contested construction of a national park
The coffee, we sell one part. The other part I consume. So we don’t buy coffee; rather, life is inexpensive for us because we already have it, see? We sell one part: we buy the dress, the shoes. That, in reality, is patrimonio: to have something that one is taking to survive and which is always there. It endures. It’s not like a thing that someone has—a pound of sugar and you drink it up—that’s not patrimonio because that goes away. But coffee, yes. We take out production and the plantation remains, see? It continues for years to come. —Beto Linares, sexagenarian from Catacamas, Olancho13
This section illustrates an important, recent moment in which the Honduran state succeeded in organizing consent around the twin projects of forestry and park preservation among the denizens of Gualaco and the other towns in the vicinity of the heavily-forested Sierra de Agalta mountain range. The name given to the Honduran forest service at the time of its inception in 1974 —the Honduran Forest Development
Corporation — was appropriately ambiguous because it allowed for two equally valid interpretations of COHDEFOR’s mission: development of forests, and development through forests. The agency’s creation represented a new national plan for economic development based on foreign exchange derived from the export of raw and value-added timber products (Utting 1993: 137).
By the late 1980s, COHDEFOR’s utilitarian forestry mandate would evolve to include preservationist goals for areas designated as cloud forests. The agency’s success in convincing Gualaco peasants to abide by new land use restrictions would depend on
13 Interview with Beto Linares, July 9, 2001.
33 COHDEFOR’s ability to assure local residents that adherence to the new conservation rules would be compatible with a continued, secure livelihood for themselves and their families. COHDEFOR achieved its goal of creating a population of (imperfectly) self- regulating conservationists in part by drawing its extensionists from local ranks. A few particularly dedicated extensionists from the area tirelessly worked to show their neighbors how an intact forest could provide material as well as environmental services.
In the end, as we will see in the next section, the Honduran central state would ultimately fail to honor the contract painstakingly brokered by its local representatives in Gualaco
— thus demonstrating to the embittered Olanchanos the logical impossibility of being a good citizen where there is no good state.
When the Honduran National Congress decreed the creation of Sierra de Agalta
National Park (PNSA) in 1987 (Cruz 1993), Gualaqueños were angry. Already, things had been bad. Throughout the 1980s, people living in the villages and small towns ringing the Sierra de Agalta mountain range in Olancho found themselves besieged on several fronts. Largeholders — cattle ranchers, mainly — extended and consolidated their holdings in the valleys, thus reducing the land base for small-scale producers and relegating the latter largely to the sloping serranía (pine-clad foothills) and the montaña.14 Pressure and resentment increased in the serranía in turn as numerous logging outfits began cutting large swathes of timber, both legally and illegally. Now, as encroachment by ranchers and loggers pushed campesinos up the flanks of the Sierra de
Agalta, the central state was telling peasants they could no longer even count on
34 continuing access to resources in these mountains that they had long considered their own.
But though Decree 1987-87 at a stroke changed the legal status of the heart of the
Sierra from that of largely unconsolidated state land to that of a national protected area, the park’s creation in a de facto sense would require a steady deployment of discursive and material resources. With support from such international sources as the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID), the Peace Corps, and various environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs), the Honduran state forestry agency, COHDEFOR, became the primary institution charged with demarcating and administering the park. Such a task would be far from easy, given the threat the park represented to the poor majority of affected people who considered the continuing possibility of swidden agriculture and other forms of usufruct within the park’s boundaries as essential to their livelihood.
The mere idea of national parks was novel and strange in 1980s Honduras, and the terms in which such parks were described made clear to peasants in Gualaco and other affected communities that the PNSA was an appropriation of properly local resources for the benefit of people who had never stepped foot inside the demarcated area and who probably never would. The first national park in Honduras, La Tigra, had been created as recently as 1952, and conservation enforcement mechanisms were not to be contemplated for decades to come (National Park Service 2001). Before the 1980s, peasants had enjoyed largely uncontested rights of usufruct to much national land, particularly if it was land that no other powerful actor (cattle ranchers in particular) had
14 In local parlance, the term montaña more closely describes a condition of vegetative cover than it does topography. Though montaña is generally found in the mountains, mountainous terrain does not warrant designation as montaña
35 designs upon. Large tracts of national land in some of the country’s lowlands and
foothills became the property of landless and land-poor Hondurans in the land-
colonization schemes of the 1960s and early 1970s; mountainous terrain such as that
found in the Sierra, meanwhile, served as an important subsistence safety-valve for the
people living in and around the villages in the mountains’ immediate vicinity.
Much of the impetus for the creation of new parks like the PNSA originated
outside of Honduras. National parks were en vogue internationally; national-park systems came to be seen as a preferred tool for seeing to the conservation of globally valorized aesthetic, recreational, climatic, and genetic resources (see, for example, Neumann 1998), and poor countries like Honduras found it was relatively easy to find financing for projects that hewed to this model. Thus, it became very easy in the late 1980s and early
1990s for Peace Corps Volunteers and other conservationists to submit and gain approval for new protected areas throughout the country (Bonta 2001: 475-80). Sierra de Agalta
National Park became one of thirty-seven Honduran “paper parks” created in one fell swoop in 1987 (Bonta 2001: 427).
With guidance and funding from AID, it would become the job of COHDEFOR to adapt its forestry mission to include protection of these new parks. COHDEFOR, together with local schoolteachers and a series of dedicated Peace Corps Volunteers, took up the daunting task of convincing villagers that the PNSA was in everyone’s interests.
Surprisingly, this campaign met with a fair degree of success, albeit after a slow start.
COHDEFOR had for years already been working, along with other agencies of the Honduran central state, to link the concepts of forest and nation. Billboards along the
unless it possesses at least some of its “original” broadleaf cover (Bonta 2001: 298-300).
36 highways served — and still serve — to remind the traveler to protect the forest for the sake of the country (see Figure 3.1). License plates all read, “Cuidemos los bosques”
(“Let’s care for the forests”; see Figure 4.4 in the next section). Every year, students in rural schoolhouses can earn scholarships for composing poems and songs to the pine tree, and on Arbor Day, the schoolchildren team up with the country’s armed forces to plant hundreds of thousands of trees (Lanza 2000). These forest-building, nation-building activities originally revolved around the single goal of maximizing the production of wood products for export. By the late 1980s, however, these campaigns expanded their mandate to encompass, too, the production of citizen-peasants who would work to protect and preserve tracts of forested land that had heretofore been seen as an available common-pool resource.
But all would not be simple. Since forest service employees, teachers, and Peace
Corps Volunteers alike began employing a standardized lexicon of conservation that originated in the North, questions over the meaning of conservation arose and reverberated in local villages in some unexpected ways. One term in particular became a site of ambivalent meanings and a source of conflict. Borrowing from northern conservationists’ terminology, the heart of the Sierra de Agalta mountain range came to comprise an important part of the so-called national heritage. The United Nations launched its World Heritage Sites program in 1978, and two parks in Honduras received this designation by 1982, thus reinforcing the idea that “heritage” was something that could—and should—be shared by all (UNESCO 2002). The trope of national or world heritage did not sit easily at first with those most directly affected by the creation of the new national park in the Sierra de Agalta. The term used in Spanish to translate the
37 English word “heritage” is patrimonio — a word that has a special meaning for Honduran peasants that is closely associated with subsistence (see the epigraph that opens this section). For an Olanchano, patrimonio refers specifically to natural resources and has historically been conceived as reproducing itself through local-spatial and kinship networks or, at any rate, at scales far smaller than the “national” or the “global” (for more on patrimonio, see Bonta 2001: 459). Gualaqueños and other denizens of the region have long prized the montaña, coffee, and bananas as their own enduring patrimonios — that is, as their families’ source of continuing wellbeing. These resources, the interconnected patrimonios of local people, were all to be found at least partly within the boundaries of the new park. Therefore, the more inclusive definition of patrimonio worried local people that a zero-sum game was afoot. Their mountains might cease to serve them as a source of refuge and livelihood; these values would likely be lost as the PNSA restricted local people’s access to the area’s resources so as to open them up for the ostensible benefit all of Honduras and, indeed, the whole world.
The job of environmental educators, then, was to convince members of local communities that real, material benefits would accrue to them in exchange for their conscientious stewardship of the park. Evidence suggests this indoctrination happened unevenly. Bonta points out, “While in rural [areas] it was at first unthinkable to lock up perfectly good space, in the towns the idea of parks and conservation/preservation was becoming popular” (Bonta 2001: 431). There are several reasons this may have been so.
COHDEFOR offices were located in towns, and many professional COHDEFOR staffers focused their energies here, resisting “hardship assignments” in more out-of-the-way places. Much the same pattern held for the school system: even if a remote village
38 succeeded in having a school built, it nevertheless frequently failed to attract and retain professionally certified teachers who themselves often hailed from larger towns or cities.
Peace Corps Volunteers were supposed to service even the most difficult-to-access villages, but in practice, this did not always happen. Also, since towns were home not only to people directly and wholly dependent on agricultural production for their livelihood, conditions in these places were more conducive to the development of a concept of nature that could be abstracted from its ability to put food on the table and shoes on children’s feet. Thus it was possible to see in the urban green patches of
Tegucigalpa signs featuring the cartoon depiction of a shoeless paperboy proclaiming the virtues of forest protection (Figure 3.2).
Promulgation of the park and the notion of conservation also seems to have progressed unevenly in terms of economic class, finding purchase more readily among better-off campesinos and local professionals than among families whose survival depended on at least occasional access to untitled lands in the mountains. Preservation of the parklands from future peasant incursions would require peasant sedentarization, which necessarily meant a shift away from peasants’ traditional, extensive, slash-and- burn technique. Anti-burning campaigns and land-titling projects became the order of the day, and it gradually became “common sense” throughout Honduras that seasonal burning was a source of national shame. But though nearly all Hondurans learned to intone invectives against the scourge of slash-and-burn agriculture, smoke did not cease to fill the country’s valleys at the start of each dry season. Very simply, the entry costs to alternative agricultural methods remained prohibitive to the poorest farmers: a single,
100-pound sack of urea alone costs as much as an unskilled laborer could earn in a week
39 in the field, and the experimental application of green manures such as velvet bean carried with it production risks that some farmers simply could not afford to take. Also, as Jansen and Roquas have discussed in the western Honduran context, the country’s land-titling initiatives have only modernized land insecurity rather than eliminate or reduce it (Jansen and Roquas 1998).
Finally, the communities’ incremental acceptance of the idea of conservation-for- all progressed in largely unpredictable, contingent ways. For example, one of the leading conservationists in the Gualaco village of El Ocotal today, Adelmo Zelaya, began his path toward an environmentalist mindset with a lie he told in order to qualify for an expenses-paid workshop on gardening techniques. At that time, in the early 1990s,
Adelmo had only a tiny parcel planted in garden vegetables, less than the minimum cultivated area necessary to receive consideration for the workshop scholarship. He got into the seminar by misrepresenting his gardening experience and the size of his garden.
Adelmo’s participation in the gardening workshop helped pad his résumé enough that he was able to vie successfully a few years later for a special training seminar in the United
States that was offered to a handful of promising Honduran agricultural-innovators-cum- community-leaders. Adelmo credited his 1997 trip to the United States, as well as his collaboration with a U.S.-based ENGO and support from AID, with awakening in him an ecologist’s sensibility. By mid-2001, he was able to speak with pride about the 80- manzana (140-acre) nature reserve that he was building, bit by bit, with money from his own savings. In an interview, Adelmo spoke excitedly about the money he had spent buying mahogany and guanacaste seeds, about his cultivation on the reserve of several species of trees that others regarded as worthless trash species because he knew they
40 performed a function as vital bird habitats, and about his purchase of a mating pair of iguanas (which were hunted and eaten by local people who Adelmo magnanimously explains were unaware of the animals’ protected status on his private reserve).15
COHDEFOR and the Peace Corps actively sought out entrepreneurial spirits like
Adelmo to proselytize on their behalf, but in the first few years following the enactment of Decree 1987-87, the going was rough. For one thing, many COHDEFOR officials themselves questioned the new “save the forest” ethic; after all, they were trained as foresters, not as preservationists (Bonta 2001: 431). Open skepticism abounded in communities that depended on the forests; a few true believers were voices crying out in the proverbial wilderness. COHDEFOR employees also suffered from a well-earned credibility deficit; the organization was widely and accurately rumored to be thoroughly riddled with corrupt practitioners and hypocritical policies.
One COHDEFOR employee who won the respect and the ear of Gualaqueños was
Darío Aguilar. Aguilar, himself a Gualaqueño from one of the area villages, strongly believed that local people’s protection of the new national park was their best option. A united front between peasants and the conservationist element within the state might stand a fighting chance against the powerful ranching and timber interests that were continuously shaving away at the region’s common-pool resources. Aguilar, an avid deer hunter, was not a starry-eyed preservationist, but he did believe in the importance of the ecological functions performed by trees and forests, and he was optimistic about the prospects for developing ecotourism in the area. Together with Peace Corps Volunteers whom Aguilar befriended and solicited for technical and other assistance, he spread the
15 Interview with Adelmo Zelaya, July 8, 2001.
41 good news to gatherings in mountain villages and hamlets along the park’s northwest margin: farmers could become hoteliers, day-laborers would find work as tour guides, and the area would gain renown as a glittering showcase of Honduras’s impressive natural bounty. For the hamlet of El Ocotal, the nearby chorros de Babilonia (Babilonia
Falls), an impressive series of falls totaling more than 1,500 vertical feet, symbolized, among other things, the promise of future prosperity for the town.
For those who would believe in Aguilar’s prophesied tourist throngs only when they saw them with their own eyes, there was one other major point to bolster the forester’s claim that the park’s designation would not be anathema to local people’s future livelihood. The park would be divided into two zones: a nuclear zone “off-limits for all uses except ecotourism and scientific research” (Bonta 2001: 437) and a buffer zone to which local peasants would have a continuing, if provisional, right of usufruct.
Slash-and-burn agriculture was out, but local people’s production of coffee and bananas by organic means could continue uninterrupted; in fact, these uses were protected against any future development projects that were not expressly contemplated within the pages of the park’s management plan. No management plan for the park, in fact, existed (or exists as of this writing); theoretically, then, peasants’ theretofore informal use of this state land was afforded legitimacy and some semblance (or facsimile) of permanence.
Of particular importance to people living in many villages were the extant and growing coffee plantations. Just upriver of the first plunge of the chorros de Babilonia, more than 60 families from the vicinity of El Ocotal, Gualaco, held small parcels planted in coffee (Ulloa, et al. 2000). In other communities, too, coffee represented a real and relatively egalitarian prospect for making a living (Bonta 2001: 185). Testimony by Beto
42 Linares, a Catacamas resident and owner of a three-manzana coffee finca, shows how coffee was important to big landholders, small peasants, and wage laborers alike:
I was raised since I was little beneath the coffee trees. Before, since we didn’t have our own, we worked the land of other patrones. Since we were little, we would go “up-mountain” [montaña arriba] at four in the morning with lights, through the mountains, to help those who had land; that’s how we lived. Today I have a little parcel there, in El Murmullo, on which I labor because I love the montaña. I love going for those few days that we go to harvest the coffee…. I was sixteen when I began to work my own parcel; I didn’t have much strength yet, but I did it. And that little parcel I sold to a nephew of mine because I wanted him also to enter into the patrimonio. And I moved further in, and I bought another parcel of scrub [monte], and I went back to planting. That’s how all of us live, having a little bit.16
Gradually, then, this conservation campaign which emphasized the protection of coffee production began to show results. Some people likely viewed statements about the ecological and aesthetic properties of “the forest” as nothing more than platitudes to be recited on cue. On the other hand, a significant contingent of people living in the towns, villages, and hamlets surrounding the Sierra evidently internalized the ethic in a thoroughgoing way. One such person was Adelmo, who by 2001 would blanch at the thought of throwing a candy wrapper on the ground and who eulogized the forest for its ability to keep the soil spongy and oxygenated.
Adelmo became a guardarecursos (resource guardian) under the joint aegis of
COHDEFOR and the Protected Areas Administration Project (PAAR). This job, which he still keeps, is to inventory the state of his patch of the forest and to report observed offenses of the PNSA’s restrictions. Adelmo does not indicate that any of his neighbors resents his diligent performance of these duties. In fact, Adelmo is one of the most widely respected leaders within his community. His fellow villagers’ forbearance with Adelmo’s
16 Interview with Beto Linares, July 9, 2001.
43 punctiliousness likely owes in no small part to the fact that COHDEFOR and PAAR never follow up on any of Adelmo’s suggestions for citations.
Adelmo exemplifies, though in an exaggerated way, the many Gualaqueños who came to accept the notion that patrimonio could be for everyone including themselves; after all, Adelmo reasoned with me, it is impossible to separate one place’s air from another’s “with a curtain.” But Adelmo and the other villagers of the area were holding the central state accountable for much more than air; implicit in their acceptance of the new park was a social contract that would obligate the state to protect local people’s customary right to cultivate and harvest bananas and coffee in the montaña and generate lucrative jobs in the ecotourism sector.
Certainly with the benefit of hindsight, however, there were good reasons to harbor doubts about the state’s will and capacity to make good on its end of the deal. As we have mentioned earlier, the Honduran central state is far from monolithic; on the contrary, it often strains for coherence and cohesion. Intra- and inter-agency contradictions as well as the inconsistency and unpredictability of institutions’ policies over time render nearly any branch of the Honduran state a shifty and undependable business partner. Recent Honduran history is rife with examples of one state “hand” apparently not knowing what the other is doing. It was with a sense of outrage that Beto related to me that the National Agrarian Institute (INA) was engaged in assigning land titles to needy applicants within the boundaries of Sierra de Agalta National Park!
While Bonta certainly recognizes the Honduran state’s interdepartmental and temporal incoherence (indeed, he witnessed this first-hand as a Peace Corps Volunteer working in the region in the early 1990s, as did I in the late 1990s), he credits the central
44 state’s very weaknesses and limitations with providing the conditions that allowed Sierra de Agalta National Park to become more acceptable to people in the area (Bonta 2001:
432-5). He points out, in fact, that “some local people who work for the PNSA find that they are successful in their jobs in direct relation to their disobedience of the absolutist conservation laws” (Bonta 2001: 448). These important observations notwithstanding, recent events shed much light on the dangers attendant with casting one’s lot with a state that cannot or will not keep its promises. It is to these events that we will now turn.
45 4 | Resisting the Babilonia Hydroelectric Project
He who trusts in his riches will fall like a dry leaf. But the just will renew themselves like the branches. —Handwritten sign inside the church/kindergarten in El Ocotal, Gualaco
4.1 | The meeting: June 30, 2001, morning
I arrived in Gualaco on Wednesday, June 27, 2001, and immediately began making contacts for interviews about Canuto, which were to form the grist of my master’s thesis. One of the first people I met was the municipal alcalde (mayor), Rafael de Jesús Ulloa. A tall man with a sad smile, Rafael was a former schoolteacher as well as a rancher. Though he had accumulated extensive landholdings, Rafael projected an air of earnest humility that was incongruous with his social and economic station and which might have helped account for his popularity among the poor peasants of the Gualaco countryside.
The mayor acceded to my request for guidance in my project, but his offer came with a catch: he requested I attend a special meeting being held in the town hall that
Saturday, June 30. He assured me I would learn a lot about the politics and circumstances of life in Gualaco if I made it to the meeting, and I would meet plenty of people who had known Canuto. For the rest of the week, I conducted interviews here and there with various informants I met while looking forward to the Saturday meeting.
Saturday rolled around quickly enough, and I sauntered into the meeting room at about ten a.m. The meeting had been scheduled to start at nine that morning. Previous experience with local politics elsewhere in Olancho had conditioned me to arrive plenty
46 late or risk numbing my backside on a hard wooden chair for an hour or more while waiting for participants to arrive from their corn fields or from far-flung villages. Today I had misjudged: the small, unlit room was full of serious-faced people (thirteen men and one woman), and they were intently discussing the logistics of a protest march in the capital that was planned for the following Wednesday, July 4. They very briefly paused to acknowledge my arrival as I walked in, then resumed their discussion.
As I listened in, I gathered that the protest was related to the construction of a small hydroelectric facility at the top of the chorros de Babilonia. The 4.4-megawatt dam, dubbed the Proyecto Hidroeléctrico Babilonia (PHB), was under construction within the buffer zone of Sierra de Agalta National Park — despite laws protecting the buffer zone and local coffee production from other development and despite an August 2000 poll conducted jointly by the municipality and the Catholic Church indicating that 83% of affected families were opposed to the project (Mejía Guerra 2001: 12).17 All the while, the engineering company in charge of the private venture, Energisa, was enjoying success
— at least within Honduran political circles — in its efforts to portray itself as a local, green answer to Honduras’s development needs.
The group’s goals for the march and protest were twofold: to increase public awareness of the social and environmental abuses committed by Energisa and its government allies, and to pressure Congress to order Energisa to halt construction.
Tension was high in the meeting room; the demonstration planners spoke as though everything hinged on the success of the demonstration. The increasingly violent tenor of
17 The poll recorded head-of-household responses for 375 families, which represents the total number of families that were deemed directly affected by the dam’s installation. I do not know the selection criteria for “affected” status. 11% of those polled indicated agreement with the project, while 6% were either undecided or preferred not to express their opinion.
47 the conflict preoccupied the people in the room. The mayor had received several death threats in recent months, and Father Fredy Benítez, who had overseen the PHB opinion poll the previous year, was stabbed in the arm one night in early March by a drunken mendicant who may have exchanged his services for a bottle of guaro. One meeting attendee, a self-professed radical peasant activist from Honduras’s north coast province of Colón, framed the conflict in especially dire terms: “The matter is urgent. If something isn’t done soon, there will be deaths here.” Others nodded in agreement.
By the time the meeting adjourned at a little after noon, Church representatives were mobilized to plan the staging of the march itself while the village representatives at the meeting had each been charged with specific organizing tasks in order to ready their neighbors for the bus ride into the capital. This would be no mean accomplishment. They had a little over two days to meet their goal of rounding up 100 to 200 protesters who would commit to occupying the capitol plaza indefinitely. For many of them, this would be their first trip outside of Olancho. Almost none of the demonstrators had a lot of money to support themselves away from home, and this year drought loomed as a worrisome likelihood that could devastate families who spent what small reserves they had on this risky political gamble. Still, the group seemed confident of its ability to fill the three buses they had rented for the Tuesday afternoon drive to Tegus.
As they filed out of the building, some of them stopped to talk to me, several of them suggesting I should make the trip with them. “Canuto might be interesting,” offered the dramatic agitator from Colón, “but this, this is far more interesting. You should come with us and change your topic.” As I politely demurred, he chirped, “I’ll even help you write it!” and his stony demeanor gave way to a wild gale of manic laughter.
48 49 4.2 | The shooting: June 30, afternoon
After running a couple of errands, I ate a quick lunch, anxious to get out to my afternoon appointment. It was sometime between two o’clock and two-thirty as I climbed in my truck for the drive out to the village of La Venta. As I was about to pull onto the highway, two national police trucks sped by, pulling a trail of dust in their wake. The bed of each truck was carrying several uniformed men, and it struck me as odd to see so many policemen in an area noted for its dearth of law enforcement presence. I saw that the young men in the back of one of the trucks were laughing about something, and I inferred from their apparent levity that they must be headed toward an easy assignment or perhaps were making a weekend getaway to the coast.
La Venta lies at the eastern end of the municipality, and it took me a while to get there from the main town of Gualaco. It was getting on toward late afternoon when I arrived in the village. A friend of mine had told me that Eduardo Antúnez would talk my ear off, so I looked forward to meeting him. He greeted me in a friendly manner as I approached his house, and we sat together on wooden chairs on his front porch. I looked out across the flat expanse of the small town, noted the gathering of dark clouds overhead, and wondered whether the long-delayed monsoon rains would come that day.
Eduardo’s granddaughter played nearby while I sipped Kool-Aid and prepared to soften Eduardo up with small talk. I had not yet retrieved my tape recorder from my pickup, so I merely told him I was interested in talking with him that afternoon about the famous bandit, Canuto. Eduardo agreed to the interview right away and without pause he began to speak:
You see, Canuto was not really a bandit. He was forced to do things the way he did because the laws here are not for everyone. They were created
50 for the rich and by the rich; when it comes to helping the poor, the laws suddenly do not exist. So Canuto found himself in a situation not unlike that in which we find ourselves today. There is a dam company near here, and today they have murdered one of our community leaders in the hamlet of El Ocotal.18
It was three-fifteen p.m.when I got this news. The murder, Eduardo let me know, had taken place at 1 p.m. Somewhat in shock, I ran back to the truck to get my tape recorder; I wanted Eduardo to repeat what he had just told me. My mind was slow in coming to terms with this new revelation, and for a few moments I was still thinking of conducting a formal interview. But by the time I had read Eduardo the obligatory interview consent form, I thought to put a question to him: “Will there be a police investigation?”
The sorrow in his eyes sufficed for an answer. Recalling the laughing police officers that passed me on the highway — they must have been headed toward El Ocotal
— I felt sick. I knew Ocotal had no means of telephone communication. That information, together with my knowledge that the police were arriving from somewhere far away scarcely more than an hour after the killing took place, gave me the sinking feeling that the police might have known about everything ahead of time and were merely on their way to Ocotal to keep an appointment. I decided to try to document the murder and gather what evidence might be still left at the scene, since I had tools at my disposal
— camera, tape recorder, and private vehicle — that the villagers themselves probably did not.
I had not yet been to the hamlet of El Ocotal, so I had Eduardo get in my truck with me and show me the way. On the drive there, we stopped to give a ride to Gustavo
18 Interview with Eduardo Antúnez, June 30, 2001.
51 Montoya, a Catholic lay minister for the tiny church in Ocotal. Gustavo, who lived in La
Venta and preached in Ocotal, was like others from the area whose sense of spatial affinity covered a whole cluster of villages and hamlets in the Río Babilonia watershed.
Ocotal was the epicenter of the Babilonia dam controversy because that hamlet lay nearest the base of the waterfall, was most at risk in case of a dam failure, and had been selected by Energisa as the site of its turbines. Nevertheless, the Ocotaleños who opposed the dam were not alone in this; other villages, I would learn, had strong contingents of dam opponents as well. Some of these people merely sympathized with the Ocotaleños; others bridled at the company’s ability to ride roughshod over municipal objections to the project. Still others were worried about their compromised ability to have gravity-feed water systems installed in their villages after the river’s flow was diverted. And nearly everyone expressed alarm at the company’s tactics of intimidation, which reportedly included the stationing of private, armed guards outside at least one area elementary school.
It turned out that Gustavo had a very personal stake in the unfolding events: he was a cousin to the victim, Carlos Flores, who had turned twenty-nine just days before he was shot. As we drove up the gravel highway toward Ocotal, Eduardo operated my tape recorder, soliciting commentary from Gustavo pertaining to the history of antagonism between Energisa and villagers in Ocotal and other affected hamlets, which had led to
Carlos’s killing by six armed guards under the employ of the engineering concern.
Energisa, Gustavo told us,
presented an environmental impact statement that was totally false. To tell you the truth, we had every desire to dialogue, to put the cards on the table, to see to it that the studies, mainly those dealing with environmental impacts, could honestly say that the project would not harm the
52 community in any way. But that’s been impossible. They have hidden the facts. Actually, this problem is the government’s fault, because the Secretary of Natural Resources and the Environment, Xiomara Gómez de Caballerodisregarding the fact that the project is located within a national park, a reserve zonegave Energisa the license to proceed. And that’s why we in these communities have been fighting so hard…. And it has been impossible, absolutely impossible, to get the authorities to listen to us. So when things starting getting really bad here, we decided to forcefully take a bridge. And here came the police to take us away. Many compañeros wound up in jail. But the bridge that we took over is the access bridge to our community, and it was built with private, community funds. It has been totally impossible to get Energisa to rethink things, to the extent that they have now unleashed on us a terrible persecution that has affected a lot of us. Some of us have been sent to jail, others arrested and released with no charges against them. We understand this to be a struggle against powerful economic interests that are looming over us. And then suddenly we could see that even the parish priest here in Gualaco was attacked — they stabbed him. And this is all part of the same problem. And today they have killed one of our compañeros, someone who has worked very hard to see that this project not be carried out. But he’s not the only victim. Maybe if they kill a few more, the project will be able to move ahead without any problem. So I don’t know how you see it, if this is just.19
We turned off the dirt highway onto the village road that had been built and improved by the Ocotaleños with monies apportioned by the national coffee growers’ association, AHPROCAFE. We drove slowly over the bridge that had been the scene of the standoff in January of that year. Gustavo explained that they had successfully held the bridge for several days, refusing passage to the Energisa vehicles, until the national police arrived. The police made several arrests and took the protesters to the jail in
Juticalpa; the rest of the involved townspeople scattered, and Energisa’s trucks rolled in.
Those who had been taken in and charged now had this arrest on their records; some others who got away were merely “processed” (procesados) in absentia.
19 Interview with Gustavo Montoya, June 30, 2001.
53 For Gustavo, the day of the arrests and the criminal processing was a symbolic moment that galvanized his sense that the powers of the provincial and central levels of government were arrayed against the communities of Gualaco. The term, procesado, in a technical sense, merely indicates that a person has had a charge filed against him or her.
But Gustavo and other Ocotaleños, I learned, understood the term quite differently: it meant they were marked for death. The practice of building up political troublemakers’ criminal records before killing them, people told me, was the usual modus operandi in the region. On April 7, a Honduran human rights umbrella organization, the National
Coordinator against Impunity (CONACIM), filed a paid announcement in the
Tegucigalpa newspaper, El Heraldo, on behalf of those who were fighting to stop
Energisa’s project from going ahead. The advertisement denounced what CONACIM saw as improper processing by the assistant regional prosecutor of several Ocotaleños for unsubstantiated accusations of destroying Energisa property (Gualaco and CONACIM
2001); Carlos Flores was listed by name as one of the falsely accused. CONACIM’s reason for publishing the names of the accused was to reduce the possibility that these processed individuals’ manufactured criminal record might be used to justify any subsequent deployment of violence against them by Energisa or the police.
Gustavo was not one of those who were criminally processed, but this did not seem to lessen his anxiety. As a leader within the local Catholic Church, he had advocated a nonviolent strategy of opposition to Energisa’s project. He worried, he told me, that the slightest violent provocation by community members would bring a hail of bullets upon all of them and could provide a pretext for the forced displacement of the entire village. Now that Carlos had been killed, Gustavo felt his conscience could no
54 longer permit him to restrain the village’s more incendiary defenders from brandishing their weapons — and using them. The outcome of a shooting war would not be favorable, and Gustavo knew it. Over the course of the afternoon, Gustavo ran through this projected doomsday scenario twice, wincing each time as though physically impacted by the dismal vision he summoned.
Ocotal was tiny — just a few scattered houses and a tiny Catholic chapel lay within sight of the road. We stopped at the little church and got out of the truck. “He lived there, across the road,” someone told me as we neared the entrance to the chapel.
“They shot him while he was getting ready to take a bath; he was half-undressed.”
I entered the church. Colorful hand-drawn posters depicting Minnie Mouse and
Winnie the Pooh graced the walls, reflecting the building’s function as a kindergarten as well as a church. These happy drawings only accentuated the horror of the scene for me: there, in the center of the room, the stiffening body of Carlos Flores seemed to fill my field of vision. His cadaver rested on a bed that someone had brought in. Carlos’s loved ones had not yet finished clothing him. He wore black pants and a black t-shirt, but his feet lay bare. Two of Carlos’s neighbors struggled to pull socks over his feet, which had grown tumid in the three hours since his death. Once they had Carlos’s socks on, the two men tied his legs together at the ankles with a long strip of cloth and pulled his arms down by his sides. At each corner of his bed, a small, white candle burned, affixed with melted wax to the bedposts. Blood from his head wounds soaked the pillow and mattress beneath him, and wads of toilet paper were only partly successful in keeping purple rivulets from streaming from his ears and nostrils.
55 Carlos’s grandmother, Margarita, held her hands to her face as she sat by his side.
Her ululating wails, at once spine chilling and heart wrenching, were interspersed with invectives directed at the men who had taken Carlos’s life. “Ay, son of my soul,” she cried, “The ingrates did not respect the church! They shot you from right outside the church. Ay, the cowards! They had to kill you while you were unarmed. They could not face you like men. Ay, ay, ay, ay!” Margarita paused long enough to wipe away a trickle of blood running from the corner of her grandson’s mouth and to replace a bloody wad with fresh toilet paper in his left ear. Then she sat and resumed wailing.
After some time spent looking at Carlos and sensing that people might want an explanation for my obtrusive presence, I sought out Carlos’s father, Martín Solís, and expressed my concern that the murder be properly documented. Speaking briefly with him, I learned the police had already come and gone. No one had inspected Carlos’s body; the police had merely scooped up all the machine-gun shells they could find
(leaving a good deal of shotgun shells behind), briefly took people’s testimony, and left.
As far as Martín knew, no one was coming back.
Martín agreed to help me collect evidence. He pulled up Carlos’s shirt and, with assistance, rolled Carlos onto his side so I could photograph two bullet entry wounds in his back. After rearranging Carlos’s shirt and laying him on his back, Martín indicated a third entry wound at Carlos’s left temple and an exit wound at the base of his skull. He and others speculated that all three wounds were inflicted by bullets fired from AK-47s or
Uzis, with which the suspects had been seen.
Outside the church, I tape-recorded the testimony of eye-witnesses who claimed to see at least six Energisa guards, their faces covered with ski masks, stroll down the
56 500-meter path from the Energisa compound and situate themselves under the eaves of the church and around the perimeter of Carlos’s front yard. Some had machine guns; others carried shotguns. The witnesses, frightened, then withdrew to their own homes. As
Carlos stepped out of his house to draw water for a bucket bath, the gunmen triangulated upon him. One of Carlos’s neighbors said Carlos yelled for her to stay in the house and protect her children because the gunmen were going to fire. Many of the shots missed
Carlos; several of these perforated his bathing bucket while others scarred the nearby guapinol tree or skidded harmlessly in the dirt. Three hit their mark, however, and one witness recalled Carlos crying out, “Ay, they have killed me!” Everyone in Ocotal, of course, heard the shots ring out; people estimated hearing about thirty-five or forty shots fired. Then the guards turned around and returned to their compound.
The police had removed nearly all the machine-gun shells from the scene before I arrived, but we were able to gather one nine-millimeter shell and a large number of shotgun shells from the scene. We collected these shells in a plastic bag for presentation to the human rights organization, COFADEH (Comite de Familiares de los Detenidos-
Desaparecidos en Honduras), in Tegucigalpa. I believed the police had merely been
(perhaps intentionally) careless in their collection of the evidence, but a human rights worker later interpreted the selective collection of shells as a deliberate attempt to hide evidence that machine guns, which are prohibited by law, had been used in the attack. Of course, murder is a crime regardless of the weapon used, but it would be easier to maintain that the guards were acting within their rights to defend themselves legally from gunfire if they restricted themselves to the use of legal firearms in their counter-fire.
Indeed, despite circumstantial and material evidence to the contrary, some newspaper and
57 radio accounts of the murder cited the police as indicating that they could not discard the possibility that there had been an exchange of fire. Upset Ocotaleños, meanwhile, complained to me that though they had told the police that the known culprits were holed up in the Energisa compound a scant half-kilometer up the road, the police neglected to investigate further or make arrests. (Another informant — someone close to the village but not from it — later gave a different accounting of events. According to the alternative version, the villagers purposely misled the police into believing the attackers had fled, so they could later exact justice in their own manner.)
I do not have a sense of which rendition is the more faithful interpretation of what happened. No one in Ocotal owned a camera or a tape recorder or any other device that could render their suffering real to those who had to weigh the words of police officers, government ministers, civil engineers, and respected businessmen against this collection of mostly poor, maize-, banana-, and coffee-farming peasants. I owned two cameras and had them both with me that day, so I lent one to the president of the village council. At his request, I took a photograph of those present who felt their own lives were now in immanent danger; the reasoning was that if we managed to publicize their peril it might make it more difficult for Energisa to shoot others of them with impunity.
I drove Gustavo back to La Venta, then made a second trip to Ocotal in the evening. That night, I helped lift Carlos into his coffin, and in so doing, I implicated myself as a positioned participant in the fight over Babilonia. Carlos was surprisingly heavy and very large by village standards; his broad shoulders pressed against the box’s narrow confines as we tried to set him to rest. We had to lay his arms awkwardly over his torso and tamp him down to get him fully inside his undersized coffin; then we slid the
58 top of the simple pinewood box into place. Outside, in the dark, gunshots pierced the sky, but no rain fell.
4.3 | The protest: July 4 to 17
On July 3, as the dam opponents made the four-hour bus trip into the capital,
Honduras’s Liberal Party candidate for president, Rafael Pineda Ponce, unveiled before the National Congress his plan for resolving the country’s high-profile problem of gang violence. Pineda Ponce, who was serving as President of the Congress, timed his bill —
“The law for the prevention, rehabilitation, and social reinsertion of people integrated in gangs” — to coincide with the re-convening of the unicameral legislature after a one- month recess ("Presentan anteproyecto para rehabilitar a pandilleros" 2001). If he were to win the tough presidential race against National Party candidate Ricardo Maduro, Pineda
Ponce would have to pull out all the stops. The Gang Rehabilitation Bill was to help
Pineda Ponce launch the final stretch of his campaign for the November election, casting him as tough on crime while understanding of Honduras’s disadvantaged youth.
The next day, 200 angry Gualaqueños and hundreds of sympathizers from the capital city — many of them left-leaning students from the national university — were marching on the capitol building, roaring angry epithets at the politician for his hypocrisy. At the urging of neckerchief-clad Marxist-Leninist student leaders, the marchers cried out together, “It’s not the gangs that are the problem; the President of
Congress is the one who needs to be rehabilitated!” At other times, the group chanted,
“¡Pin Pon, Pin Pon, tu yerno es un matón!”20 in reference to Pineda Ponce’s timber magnate son-in-law, Jorge Chávez, who remains free despite widespread allegations he
20 “Ping Pong, Ping Pong, your son-in-law is a killer!” Pin Pon is a play on Pineda Ponce’s surnames.
59 contracted the assassination of a prominent Olanchano environmentalist in 1998 (Fiallos
1998; "Italo Iván Lemus, es otro de los hombres que mató a Luna" 2001). By pointing to
Pineda Ponce’s alleged connection to the murder of a well-known environmental martyr from the same region — Carlos Escaleras of Catacamas — the Gualaco protesters lay claim to a similar, environmental hero’s status for their own fallen comrade while drawing attention to the National Congress’s legacy of environmental double-dealing in
Olancho.
In keeping with Honduras’s recent tradition of popular protest, the Gualaco contingent made its way up the street toward the capitol plaza and settled there for the night. After some cheering and singing, the capitalinos who had joined the Gualaqueños in their march went home, leaving the Olanchanos to make their camp.
Entire families had come, including infants. An important proof of the central government’s liberal disposition is its forbearance of rowdy protests at the steps of the capitol — a tack probably meant to give the lie to the very foundation of demonstrators’ discontent with the state. Thus it was with the explicit understanding of, and cooperation with, the capitol police, that the protesters set up camp under the auspices of the capitol.
A one-toilet restroom and a large sink, accessible from outside, were placed at the disposal of the demonstrators, and police helped protect the protesters by limiting access to the capitol after dark to any visitors they detected who were not affiliated with the
Gualaco group.
Announcing it would be unsafe to return to El Ocotal until Energisa were made to leave, the protesters turned the area beneath the capitol building into their interim village.
With donations from various popular organizations in and around Tegucigalpa, the
60 demonstrators had enough food to eat, at least for a while. Trained organizers from the
Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras (CODEH) worked with some of the protest leaders — including Adelmo Zelaya and Gustavo Montoya — to set up an organizational structure for this makeshift community of protesters. The group set up a cooking subcommittee; a team of women, using giant cauldrons over open fires and working in shifts, spent twenty hours a day cooking beans, cassava, and tortillas. The first two nights, many adults and several children slept on the ground with no bedding and suffered from the cold nighttime temperature. Extra mattresses and blankets were purchased to correct for the shortfall. The health subcommittee saw to the treatment of drinking water and the general sanitary conditions around the plaza. Some of the adults also began teaching classes to the children for a part of the day, while the members of another subcommittee were charged with patrolling the camp for suspicious strangers.
With the participation, but not direction, of several male and one or sometimes two female Gualaqueño protest leaders, the CODEH consultant drew up a formal organizational chart for the group — an organigrama, in the lexicon of Latin American development. He printed the diagram and gave copies to the heads of the various subcommittees. On this document, the Gualaquenos’ organizing committee was dubbed the Central Council for the Defense of the Environment of Gualaco, Olancho (Consejo
Central para la Protección del Ambiente de Gualaco 2001).
The Council’s most influential and charismatic leaders made sure they ended up with the important and prestigious job of communicating with the media. The details of the subcommittees’ selection was a sore point for protesters who felt their voices were being marginalized and their viewpoints left out of consideration by the group’s
61 essentially self-appointed spokesmen. Some of the hard feelings amounted to little more than sibling rivalry, but one woman made the observation that mothers’ and wives’ perspectives were being sidelined. The leaders under scrutiny were apparently unused to such criticism; their feelings seemed genuinely hurt by these accusations. Adelmo Zelaya was one of these leaders. He and the other ringleaders made middling attempts to accommodate and incorporate others’ views, but the open debate was rather quickly stifled with whispered warnings against revealing internal schisms to lurking Energisa operatives. As a result, I never learned how “community” opposition to the dam project might carry gendered shadings.
Anyway, all agreed the public relations task was particularly important because prominent Energisa allies — most notably Liberal Party Congressman and head of
Congress’s Energy Committee, Jack Arévalo — were attacking the dam protests in the news on a near-daily basis. Arévalo maintained that the protesters represented but a small and dissonant fraction of the larger, pro-dam community in Gualaco. On one occasion,
Arévalo cited records of the Secretariat of Natural Resources and the Environment
(SERNA) that he claimed indicated a 90% approval rating for the dam in Gualaco another time, he informed the press that it had been confirmed that more than 50% of the population in Gualaco favored the dam and that the only opponents were the alcalde, the priest, and a few others ("UD manipula a turbas para ganar votos: Jack Arévalo" 2001;
"Banco Centroamericano congela préstamo para proyectos hidroeléctricos" 2001).
Arévalo impugned the protesters’ legitimacy on other grounds as well. On July 5,
Tegucigalpa newspaper La Tribuna reported Arévalo’s assertion that the anti-dam mobilization was being financed by the left-leaning Unificación Democrática (UD) Party
62 in order to gain votes in the November election ("Pobladores de Gualaco protestan por la construcción de represa Babilonia" 2001). A July 13 article in El Heraldo featured
Arévalo warning that the anti-dam campaign was “provoking investors to be frightened away from the country” ("Denuncian que las organizaciones ambientalistas corren la inversión" 2001). The newspaper article’s paraphrasing of Arévalo’s accusation (“esta campaña está provocando que los inversionistas se ahuyenten del país”) bore a strong resemblance to the caption featured at the bottom of an Energisa paid announcement that had come out in the papers the week before: “Honduras needs to attract investment; let’s not frighten it away” (“Honduras necesita la inversión no la ahuyentemos”) (Energisa
2001). The next day, on July 14, the San Pedro Sula-based paper Tiempo quoted Energisa legal counsel José Torres Torres as saying that the government should not allow itself to be manipulated “by a small group of bored people who take an interest in hindering the development of this country” (Padilla 2001).
As exemplified in the cases above, characterizations of the protesters made by the dam’s defenders tended to fall into one or more of three broad categories. Either the protesters did not really represent Gualaco; or they were the puppets of dark, outside forces; or they were too backwards to deserve a say, or a place, in local development. The protesters not only did not represent the real Gualaco; they did not belong to the new
Honduras.
But what exactly was the new Honduras, what was Energisa’s relationship to it, and why did key state actors view the dam protest as an impediment to national progress?
To answer these questions fully would fall outside the scope of the present paper.
63 Nevertheless, even a brief examination of the Honduran central state’s struggles to develop its energy sub-sector in accordance with the dictates and guidelines of powerful international institutions can shed some light on the dynamics at work in the Babilonia case.
It is important, for starters, to understand Honduras’s deeply ambivalent and contradictory place within the history of Central American regional integration. For nearly two centuries, Central Americans have debated the merits and liabilities implied by the unification of the isthmus. Small steps in recent decades, such as the establishment of PARLACEN and other regional economic and political deliberative bodies, have kept alive the prospect of a substantive unification sometime in the future. This dream of pan- isthmian reunification, which holds some purchase in the popular sector, coincides rather neatly with the goal of multilateral investment banks and state governments to lower transaction costs for investment and trade in the region. A neo-liberal blueprint for expanded foreign direct investment and increasingly unfettered communication and transportation throughout the isthmus gains some of its legitimacy by piggy-backing on the nostalgic desire of many Central Americans to come together again, to form one people.
There is no question that many Hondurans have internalized the longstanding,
Liberal project of bringing fractured Central America back together. Honduras’s most widely celebrated hero, Francisco Morazán, was the first president of the short-lived
Central American Federation in the early nineteenth century. His vision of a single
Central American state endures symbolically on the stars of the Honduran flag and the volcano of its state shield. To borrow from Anderson’s lexicon (Anderson 1983), the
64 Honduran “imaginary community” inculcated through state-run schooling is one imbued with both Honduran and Central American nationalisms. Of course, this dual identity must contend with other forms of individual and community identity — for instance, spatial, kin, gender, and class identification (Bonta 2001) — and falls short of capturing everyone’s imagination. Still, even some harsh critics of the central state within Honduras tend to appeal to this sort of binomial nationalism that sees Honduras both as a sovereign state and as the mantle-bearer for a unified Central America. This cultivated affinity for
Central American integration militates in favor of Honduras’s taking part in regional integration schemes.
On the other hand, Honduras’s neighbors see that country as the weak link in the
Central American chain, at the opposite end of the integration-readiness continuum from
Guatemala and El Salvador (Amaya 2000). “Francisco Morazán is our hero, too,” say the
Salvadorans. “Too bad he was from Honduras” (Jailer 2001). Since as early as the 1950s,
Honduras has lagged behind its neighbors; this was exacerbated by Honduras’s war with
El Salvador in 1969 (Amaya 2000). Honduran presidents since President Rafael Callejas
(elected in 1989) have adopted neo-liberal prescriptions and have tried in earnest to edge
Honduras closer to economic integration, but challenges have persisted.
The fear of being left behind, whether by investors or by the rest of the Central
American isthmus, has repeatedly found its way into the text and subtext of the Honduran development debate, in some cases effectively legitimating repressive measures taken against opponents of progress. President Flores Facussé, in a speech delivered in August of 2000, made it clear his priorities lay in establishing the foundations for increasing integration: “No party flag, no electoral platform, no political proposition can be cleaner
65 and more realistic than those that take up the project of Central American integration”
("Presidente Carlos Flores: No habrá integración sin voluntad sincera" 2000). Honduran elites evince a conviction that Honduras’s economic success must be bought at the price of a stricter disciplining of the popular sector — a price they seem willing to pay. As recently as August 31, 2001, no less a moral authority than Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez carried this theme in a speech delivered before the National Police, in which he lamented
Hondurans’ increasing propensity to strike and protest. “If we’re going to continue to develop a culture of striking,” he said, “the problem is that we are not going to have either investment or development, because logically no one wants to invest in a country where work doesn’t get done” ("Cardenal Oscar Rodríguez: Si siguen las huelgas no vamos a tener inversión: El purpurado recibe homenaje de la Policía Nacional" 2001).
The “don’t scare off progress” message has become the stock refrain of both the
Honduran state and the country’s investor class whenever civil society raises its voice against controversial development projects.
The energy subsector, for Honduras as well as for other countries in the region, has been a major object of contention between advocates of privatization and whose who do not believe the provision of electricity should be dictated only by market mechanisms.
The creation of a single, regional energy grid is a top priority for the architects of the
Puebla-Panamá Plan (PPP) for regional integration.21 The energy-sector component of the
PPP has been spearheaded by the Inter-American Development Bank, the principal financier for the $330 million Electrical Interconnection System of Central American
Countries (SIEPAC) (Inter-American Development Bank 2001). The Central American
66 Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have also taken to the PPP with great enthusiasm, both banks making strategic use of conditionally loosened purse strings to encourage Honduras to generate, privatize, and interconnect its electricity for the benefit of the whole region. In January of 1998,
National Electric Company spokesman Rigoberto Borjas was a cheerleader for the project, predicting a bright future for Hondurans with the advent of the free-market
SIEPAC regional energy grid ("Centroamérica iniciará interconexión eléctrica en 1998"
1998). Meanwhile, grafitti sprayed on one building wall in Tegucigalpa’s sister city of
Comayaguela angrily conveyed the point that some things, like electricity, should not be so thoroughly commoditized: “Let them privatize your mother.”
For international financiers such infrastructural improvements are indispensable to attracting more direct foreign investment of all kinds in the region. With this goal in mind, the IDB, CABEI, and the IMF have demanded certain changes in PPP member countries’ legal frameworks to allow private-sector vendors to provision cheaper and more consistent electrical energy to the region through the new, unified SIEPAC power grid. The banks’ basic technique is to forgive some old debt in exchange for government commitments to refashion themselves in the neo-liberal mold. Meanwhile, these development banks route new loans into public and, especially, private projects aimed at linking the countries of the region.
The Honduran government, perennially in financial arrears, has earned high marks from such organizations as the IMF, the IDB, the Central American Bank, and the
World Bank, for the alacrity with which, in return for some debt relief and other
21 The PPP, seen by most as a stepping-stone to an eventual Free Trade Area of the Americas, is the recognized coordinating body for a broad array of regional integration projects in southeastern Mexico and the seven countries of
67 assistance, it has adopted these multilateral lending institutions’ tough prescriptions for greater economic health. A July 10, 2000, press release issued by the International
Monetary Fund announced a $900 million debt service relief package for Honduras from all the above-mentioned banks as part of their Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC)
Initiative and in “recognition by the international community of the country’s progress in implementing reforms in macroeconomic, structural and social policies” (International
Monetary Fund 2000).
The $900 million, of course, is anything but free money. In order to secure this reduced interest-rate plan, Honduras has had to meet specific sets of preconditions and promise to implement a full complement of further structural adjustments with each of the lending institutions. One precondition for IMF support was to boost revenues in the short-term by raising the price of electricity to consumers; a further and related condition was the passage in the Honduran Congress of modifications to the Electricity Sector
Framework Law to facilitate the privatization of the sale of electrical energy, which have historically been the sole province of state-owned ENEE. Due to popular resistance to privatization of this government utility, this condition has proven particularly difficult for the Honduran government to meet, requiring the country’s finance minister and the president of the Central Bank of Honduras to draft several letters to the IMF to request adjustments to the timeline for the completion of this phase of economic rationalizing. A passage from one such letter, written in May of 2000, illustrates the point well:
Dear Mr. Köhler
I have the pleasure to inform you that the Government of the Republic of Honduras has satisfactorily met four of the five prior actions required for the IMF
Central America.
68 Executive Board review of our Second Year Economic Program under the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF). The actions met include the approval of an action plan to reform the Honduran Social Security Institute, which required a great deal of efforts on our part. However it was not possible to achieve the approval of the Framework Law on the Electricity Sector, although it was at the third and final debate in the National Congress, which will recess during June 2000.
Due to the deep-seated nature of the reforms formulated in this legislation, the Framework Law on the Electricity Sector has itself generated a heated debate among all sectors of Honduran society, which has taken time; but we believe that it has the advantage of leading to legislation reached through consensus which will ensure the success of its implementation. We consider the delay in the approval of this law to be the appropriate part and parcel of the democratic process in the country, and we have been informed that the debate between the National Congress and the different sectors involved will reopen next July 1, following the recess of the legislative chamber. It is important to point out that the Government of Honduras will continue to commit all its efforts to achieve the approval of this law no later than September 30 of this year, and that we agree that approval would be a condition for the completion of the third review under Honduras' program. (Castillo and Asfura de Díaz 2000)
By early July of 2001 — a year after this letter was drafted — the National
Congress had still not succeeded in passing the promised legislation. While the IMF has moved forward with the debt-reduction plan, the Honduran Ministry of Finance and the
National Congress have have not been relieved of their outstanding obligation to clear the way for the privatized generation and transmission of electrical energy. This helps to explain why, as protests have threatened the viability of showcase electrical-sector projects, the government has recently and repeatedly shown its willingness to tolerate and at times employ violence in order to keep these projects on-track.
The same banks that are helping to finance the SIEPAC interconnection project are financing projects designed to plug into that system and provide electricity to the region’s growing industrial sector. In recent years, state and transnational authorities have
69 increasingly encouraged the exploitation of so-called clean, renewable sources of energy, which in practice has meant hydropower.
There are several good reasons for this. For one thing, Honduras, with all its rivers, has a high level of hydroelectric potential. One large dam alone, El Cajón, is able to supply Honduras with close to forty percent of its current energy demand; overall, 60% of Honduras’s energy comes from hydroelectric sources (United States Department of
State 2001). Also, the principal alternative to hydroelectric power in Honduras — the coal-fired plant — has made for some angry, asthmatic neighbors, who have gone so far as to sue the former ENEE manager for his decision to approve the location of twelve thermal plants near a population center in northern Honduras ("Sobreseen juicio a favor de ex gerente de la ENEE: estaba procesado por el delito de contaminación ambiental en perjuicio de los vecinos de varias colonias aledañas a la subestación de Bermejo" 2001).
But more than this, hydropower has become a major priority for wealthy nations that worry about the negative repercussions that could redound upon their own populations due to “dirty” energy-production methods in underdeveloped countries like
Honduras. The Global Environmental Facility (GEF), born of the 1992 Earth Summit in
Rio de Janeiro, provides financial incentives to poor countries not to generate certain
kinds of pollution — in this case, not to produce greenhouse gases such as CO2. In light of Honduras’s high degree of dependence upon the goodwill of multilateral institutions and foreign governments, the UN-administered GEF likely influences the Honduran government’s energy-production trajectory out of proportion to the modest $375,000 it has allocated to its clean energy program there (Naciones Unidas 2001). In August 2001,
Honduras’s Secretary of Natural Resources and the Environment (SERNA) co-sponsored
70 a pan-Central American seminar with the UNDP and CABEI. The seminar was entitled,
“Financial options and development potential of the renewable energy market.” During the meeting, the UNDP representative is reported to have made a recommendation that each country of the isthmus seek financing for its projects each and every time these projects “contaminate the environment less and can be maintained over the long run”
("Menú de proyectos de energía eléctrica presentará Honduras a países europeos" 2001).
In keeping with the high premium the state was placing on both privatization and the production of clean energy, it was with a great deal of fanfare that on June 21, 2000,
President Flores Facussé granted the country’s first-ever concession to a private company
— Energisa — to both build and operate a hydroelectric plant ("Presidente Flores firma contratos de suministro de energía eléctrica" 2000). The Babilonia Hydroelectric Project would be Energisa’s first hydroelectric project, and it looked to many in the development community as the start of a bright new future for investment and progress in Honduras.
CABEI became the project’s chief" financier, putting up approximately $2.7 million of the project’s estimated $5 million total cost (Oliva de Guifarro 2001). Two years after
Rigoberto Borjas had used his bully pulpit at ENEE to sell Honduras on the virtues of a privatized, regional energy grid, he was cashing in, serving as secretary of Energisa.
Energisa’s PHB was in many ways the model development project. It was local: its engineering and public relations personnel hailed from San Francisco de la Paz,
Olancho, which abuts Gualaco to the southwest. It was small. And it was green, at least by that tautological form of reasoning that claims that all hydroelectric projects are environmentally benign. The company, well aware of the international trends that valued small dam projects as clean and sustainable alternatives to coal-burning plants or
71 gigawatt megadams, adroitly exploited its project’s attractiveness with smart flyers
whose slogan read, “Let’s care for the forests for a better Honduras” (“Cuidemos los
bosques para una Honduras mejor”) (Energisa 2000), thus recapitulating the catchword
found on every license plate in the country (see Figure 4.4).
The Energisa brochure recalls the devastation occasioned by Hurricane Mitch in
1998 and suggests that projects like Babilonia would help advance (“sacar adelante”; literally, to pull forward) the country and speed its recovery. It makes the point that the investors are Olanchanos and attests to their commitment
to provide technical assistance to those denizens who may maintain crops close to the watershed so they might develop an agricultural activity that doesn’t greatly alter the flora and fauna; [the company would make a] contribution as well in the creation of a culture for the preservation of the natural resources, under the scheme of direct relations with [these resources’] concession of life. (Energisa 2000)
For the Gualaqueño families who were growing organic coffee and bananas in the
Babilonia watershed, Energisa’s condescending tone was hard to bear. Energisa had positioned itself as a beneficent environmental steward who would bring the Río
Babilonia watershed under a more enlightened hand. Energisa’s reference to peasants’
“crops” implied the cultivation of high-impact annuals such as maize and beans. In fact, the majority of the disputed land was given over to the lucrative and stable coffee fincas that local farmers had planted years earlier in keeping with the terms of the National
Park’s buffer zone that they had haltingly grown to embrace. Rather than imparting a
“culture for the preservation of the natural resources” of the area, Energisa’s security guards effectively barred the Ocotaleños from tending to their coffee plants. Under the watch of armed guards, hundreds of hectares of coffee rotted on the branches in 2001.
72 While continued access to coffee production opportunities formed the primary material basis for villagers’ opposition to the PHB, there were other reasons as well. As many as eleven down-river communities would be left without the possibility of developing gravity-feed water systems because Energisa had successfully contracted with the central state for first rights to the river’s flow. Honduran business magnate Jaime
Rosenthal countered this complaint in a newspaper column by pointing out that “the same quantity [of water] that goes into the turbines also comes out of them” ("Jaime Rosenthal:
El gobierno debe promover la energía hidráulica" 2001). What Rosenthal did not mention was that by capturing the river’s flow and piping it 1,500 vertical feet down the northern flank of the Sierra, Energisa was appropriating the same kinetic energy that might have made these rural villages’ water systems a viable possibility.
For the people living in Ocotal, the discharged water not only would avail them nothing; it posed a safety hazard. Energisa would not be returning the water directly to the original riverbed; instead, it would simply discharge the river’s output into a tiny tributary creek that ran directly through the village. The potential impacts on the creek and on the village were not contemplated in the company’s environmental impact statement. This oversight did not prevent SERNA secretary Xiomara Gómez from awarding Energisa an environmental operator’s license, although the Honduran environmental prosecutor would later take her to court for this, alleging she had not consulted Energisa’s report before conferring the license (Padilla 2001).22
Not least of all, Gualaqueños resented the breach of municipal self-determination represented by Energisa’s ability to move forward with its project over the municipal
22 I was not able to ascertain the outcome of this legal proceeding.
73 government’s strenuous objections. The Ley de Municipalidades (Honduras 1998) was supposed to have devolved more power to the local level of government. Title III, Article
14, specifically charges municipalities with preserving the “historical patrimony,” with protecting the local ecosystem and environment, and with “rationalizing the use and exploitation of the municipal resources, in accordance with the established priorities and programs of national development” (Title III, Art. 14, nos. 4, 6, and 8). Gualaqueños interpreted these passages as declaring the municipal government’s competence to decide which projects met criteria of rational use and consonance with the municipality’s historical patrimony. The Ley del Ambiente (Mejía Guerra 2001) also gave the municipality primary responsibility over National Park lands falling within their borders.
In the end, none of these de jure guarantees of local control over and access to the park’s buffer zone — or erstwhile promises to prioritize ecotourism — were adequate to protect
Gualaco campesinos from this unwanted incursion of capital interests from the territorially ambitious rival municipality of San Francisco de la Paz. In allowing Energisa to run roughshod over Gualaco’s patrimonio, the Honduran central state had not only undermined the Ley de Municipalidades, it had broken its COHDEFOR-brokered moral contract with the peasants of Babilonia.
The Gualaqueños felt deeply betrayed, and they expressed their dissatisfaction in some creative ways during their stay in the capital city. Problematically, even paradoxically — in light of the government’s severe credibility deficit among the
Gualaqueños — the villagers continued to publicly direct their appeals to the central state. The villagers knew the odds were against them, but of course they had no other state to appeal to. Their supplications were loud and public, however, aimed as they were
74 to rouse Tegucigalpa’s complacent civil society from its slumber and exert enough pressure upon Congress or the president to force them to act on the protesters’ behalf.
In the days leading up to the villagers’ arrival in the capital, the human rights organization COFADEH had put together a large, 4-foot by 8-foot poster depicting
Energisa’s alleged misconduct. On Wednesday, July 4, this poster was brought to the capitol plaza to coincide with the arrival of the Gualaco contingent. Its contents consisted of three panels of photos and text (see Figure 4.5). In the center panel of the triptych, photographs of Carlos’s weeping parents’ presentation of their son’s bullet-riddled body seemed to most effectively capture passersby’s attention. Hundreds of capitalinos stopped by the poster, which was always attended by one or more interpreters from Ocotal or a neighboring village. By the morning of July 6, the poster had become imbued with an enormous amount of symbolic importance for the protesters. An unlikely rumor circulated that desperate Energisa operatives were offering up to $10,000 to strangers on the street if they could steal or destroy this conspicuous and damning bit of evidence.
Villagers jealously guarded it around the clock, even sleeping on top of it at night to prevent its loss.
The poster’s rhetorical and symbolic importance seemed to owe to two main factors. First, it was highly unusual for poor villagers to have at their disposal evidence that could directly contest official versions of the truth. The purchase of journalists’ services is a matter of course in Honduras. To illustrate the pervasiveness of the problem it is sufficient to note that the current president of the National Congress, Porfirio Lobo, recently donated a sizable parcel of land to the journalists of his hometown of Juticalpa,
Olancho, for them to develop or sell as they wished; the parcel is known locally as the
75 Colony of the Journalists. Especially when newsworthy events transpire in isolated locations, journalists will typically cover the story only if they can find a sponsor. In the case of Carlos’s killing, the first newspaper story to cover the event was written by a journalist who never visited the scene (Saíd Mejía 2001) — the same reporter who ten years earlier had spread the false story about Canuto firing on the priest and forcing him to imbibe palm wine. A second reporter with an Olancho beat literally hid in his bedroom when I visited his home on the day after the murder to request he cover the story. The photographic evidence presented on the poster damaged the credibility of Saíd Mejía’s description of a mutual “shoot-out” between Carlos and the security guards.
Second, the poster bore the stark image of a bleeding martyr, which implied the presence of presumably foreign oppressors. If Gualaco was in favor of the dam, who was this perforated man surrounded by weeping loved ones in the village chapel? The mere presence of so many armed guards at the generation plant and at the dam site itself would seem to give the lie to assertions by Congressman Arévalo and others that Gualaqueños supported the project. The graphic images of Carlos’s defunct body complemented the weeping testimony of his mother, delivered over national radio, as she categorically denied local status to the dam’s perfidious supporters:
I ask that something be done, that my23 death of my son not remain like this. That something be done against those people. Because we are not troublemakers. Nor are we treading on other people’s land; it’s our own! And they have gone to offend. And they have gone to meddle in the montaña and get us out of there. But that they will never see. Dead first, just as they have killed me my son. That’s why my son died…[sobs] …for what is ours! (COFADEH 2001)
Carlos’s mother, Rosa, represented her son’s killers as foreign invaders, and the evidence presented by the dam’s opponents supported that interpretation. The
76 demonstrators — the Gualaqueños together with sympathetic political, Catholic, and human rights organizations from the capital — very quickly raised Carlos to the status of an environmental martyr. They styled him after two outspoken environmentalists — by serendipity, both also named Carlos — who had been murdered in eastern Honduras in recent years. Carlos’s martyrdom gave the protesters the legitimacy they needed to cast themselves as a movement “for the defense of the environment.”
In life, Carlos had been an organic coffee farmer, proud of his successful experiments in inter-cropping and integrated pest management. He fought and died to preserve village access to their means of livelihood; through the successful public relations efforts of the protesters, this livelihood struggle became explicitly environmentalist. As early as July 5, the Argentine version of Yahoo!News depicted
Flores as an “environmentalist leader” (dirigente ambientalista) (Yahoo!Noticias
Argentina 2001); other wire services and many ENGOs followed suit. Suddenly, within a few short days of his death, Carlos became the literal poster-boy of an environmentalist discourse that pitted Gualaqueño defenders of Sierra de Agalta National Park against the depredations of greedy thugs from another municipality. As for the “Gualaco vs. the outsiders” element of the story, there was just one problem — spoken softly and scarcely repeated — with this picture: Ocotaleños were quietly sure that Carlos had been betrayed by his own brother. He was the only one who could have told the gunmen when Carlos would be bathing.
Environmentalism and exclusivist claims of localness were not the only tools seized upon by the resourceful villagers in their protest. One of their number was a
23 The use of the first-person possessive denotes the speaker’s sense that her son’s death was a crime committed against herself as well as against her son.
77 twenty-one-year-old midget named Oscar Manuel Cardona. Apart from his deep-set eyes,
Oscar looked just like a seven-year-old boy, and indeed, whenever reporters came looking for a story, Oscar played the part. For a brief period, Oscar became a media star, dazzling interviewers with his “preternatural” eloquence and poise. One by one, these reporters grew wise to Oscar’s secret, but the villagers played this card as long as they were able to. In fact, the villagers themselves tended to look upon Oscar as a child; the poor man was the constant object of delighted mothering by the group’s sizable clutch of eleven-year-old girls. At one point, I took Adelmo aside and pointed out that people’s treatment of Oscar was unfair to him. Adelmo, surprised at first, came to agree with me, but this revelation did not prevent the media-relations committee from sending a letter requesting an audience with Honduras’s first lady, signed by Oscar Manuel “in representation of the children who find ourselves here in Tegucigalpa” (Cardona Solís
2001).
Some of the male protestors also participated in a publicity stunt that cleverly poked fun at their own alterity. Several members of Energisa’s top brass were completely bald. One day the protesters invited the media and passersby to join them for free haircuts. Only one hairstyle was on offer: bald. Though no one from the general public accepted the Gualaqueños’ winking offers of a free head-shave, several of the protesters
(including me) went under the clipper. Many of the women from the group lined up, too, but their husbands quickly put a stop to that. The protesters’ reasoning, obviously tongue- in-cheek, was that the government seemed only to listen to bald people; perhaps the
Gualaqueños would have more luck getting through to their Congressmen if they had
78 shaved heads too. One jovial demonstrator laughingly alluded to racial undercurrents24 that might be clouding the politicians’ decision-making: “Si los políticos no quieren escuchar a los ‘peludos’, pues, nos convirtiremos en ‘pelones’!” (“If the politicians don’t want to listen to the ‘hairies,’ well, we’ll convert ourselves into ‘baldies’!”)
By Sunday, July 8, I was staying with the protesters mostly around the clock, even sleeping with them on the cement plaza floor at night. This gesture ingratiated me with the protesters, who became almost embarrassingly protective of me while I was there. Still, they did not hesitate to make frequent use of me and my camera. Several times daily someone from the camp would ask me to photograph some suspicious- looking person they’d seen perambulating in the vicinity and listening in on planning meetings. I became aware that, in fact, numerous people were spying on the group.
Several of these people also began following me whenever I would leave the camp to run errands; they usually went away when I conspicuously photographed them. Two of these people, however, approached and harassed me, speaking English as they did so. In each case, the harasser angrily yelled at me that I was a meddling foreigner who was sabotaging Honduran efforts to develop its industry and economy. Each of these men, both of them young and about the same age as each other, used very similar phrasing —
“You fucking American!” and “this is none of your business.” These details convinced me they had been hired to intimidate me.
As the protest entered its second week, the protesters realized they would have to communicate and coordinate with members of the Civil Council of Indigenous and
24 Gualaco’s population was historically constituted by Indians and later by mulattos descended from slaves who had mined gold in what is now northern Gualaco (Bonta 2001: 115) until their emancipation under the New Laws of 1542 (Bonta 2001: 95-6n). Many Gualaqueños bear some phenotypic characteristics, such as thick course hair, that set them apart from supposedly “whiter” ladino Hondurans.
79 Popular Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), a predominately Lenca Indian organization from western Honduras that was planning its own yearly march on the capitol. July 20 is día de Lempira, when martyred Chief Lempira is honored. Several years ago, COPINH activists tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus on the capitol plaza and replaced it with one of Chief Lempira. Removing the statue would have been politically untenable for Congress, so the politicians made the best of things by embracing the image and attempting to co-opt it. Every July 20, Congress lays a wreath next to the statue and proclaims its pride in Honduras’s shared Indian heritage, and every
July 20, COPINH activists arrive to denounce the Honduran government’s hypocrisy and to demand Congress keep its promises to the primarily Lenca communities of western
Honduras.
On Sunday, July 15, I volunteered to drive a small group of Gualaqueños to the western city of La Esperanza to meet with COPINH leaders. When we arrived, we found the COPINH leadership delivering a fairly sophisticated lecture on dependency theory to a huge roomful of campesinos. On hearing the Gualaqueños’ case, these leaders pledged
COPINH’s solidarity with the protest and promised to adopt the dismantling of Energisa as one of its own primary demands before the government. COPINH, as it happened, was fighting a dam project, too — the El Tigre project that stands to affect the provinces of
Intibucá and Lempira, near the western border with El Salvador. The organization’s leadership felt it important to stand beside the Gualaqueños in solidarity, deciding, therefore, that COPINH would send an advance dispatch of eighty members to join the
Gualaco group on Monday. Another 1,000 or more would arrive on Wednesday, July 18.
80 The first group arrived on Monday, as promised. One of their coordinators,
Cándido Martínez, gave me a short stump speech in response to a question about the relevance of Gualaco to COPINH’s mission:
Lempira fought for the country; he didn’t fight for a [single] community. I believe our brothers in Gualaco are providing an example for the country, at the international level, for the unions and the popular organizations — bueno, for the whole world — that where there’s a will there’s a way, when one chooses to defend a right although they walk over your dead body.25
The key concept implicit in Cándido’s statement was the universality of the right to self- determination. One village’s struggle for autonomy is every village’s struggle. What is more, it is the whole country’s struggle, the whole world’s struggle. Gualaco’s fight was thus both very local and thoroughly global. The theme of unity in diversity was one that the members of COPINH believed in, which they demonstrated by their impressive support of their new allies from Gualaco.
On Tuesday, members of the COPINH leadership, together with Gualaco mayor
Rafael Ulloa and other community representatives, called a press conference to denounce
Congress’s indifference to Carlos Flores’s murder and to the community’s demands.
After reading their statements, the spokespeople led the protesters into the street in front of the capitol and blocked traffic for one hour. This action took place with the understanding of the police, who facilitated the re-routing of traffic to minimize the chance of automobile accidents. The press coverage of the event was heavy and for the most part favorable. The show of solidarity between COPINH and the Gualaqueños led many reporters as well as the public at large, to begin identifying the latter group as indigenous. Suddenly the Gualaqueños were really en vogue, constructed as they now
25 Interview with Cándido Martínez, July 16, 2001.
81 were as both environmentalists and an autochtonous people. That afternoon and evening, spirits ran high.
82 4.4 | The crackdown: July 18 to 20
That night about twelve-thirty, one of the women protesters shook me awake,
whispering urgently, “Daniel, the police have come!” I looked in the direction she was
pointing, toward the street, and saw about fifteen police standing at the plaza entrance. I
asked the woman if she knew what the police were doing there, and she answered, “I
think they’re here to kick us out.”
Police troops arrived by the truckload and even by bus, forming a line, shoulder-
to-shoulder, on the street side of the plaza. Moncha, a feisty Gualaqueña of fervent
Evangelical belief, began to pray loudly, asking Jesus to deliver the group from evil.
Other demonstrators, both women and men, began to loudly supplicate the police to
remember their rural roots, not to act against the poor campesinos of Olancho.
As the police’s numbers quickly swelled to something approximating fifty; I
filmed and photographed them from close range and photo-documented the events as
they unfolded. To my surprise, no attempt was made to confiscate my cameras or to stop
me from taking pictures.
The police moved from the west (street) end of the plaza to the south end. In an
architectural metaphor reflecting status and power differentials between legislators and
commoners, the capitol plaza is located physically beneath the Congress building, which is raised above street level on pillars (see Figure 4.6). The Congressional chamber thus provides a roof that protects protesters from sun and rain. The police plan was to push the demonstrators out from under the Congress building and onto an adjacent, uncovered plaza to the north. They began to move slowly forward while the higher-ranking officers stood behind them and barked to the protesters to leave the plaza.
83 The demonstrators would not willingly cede the plaza to the police, and they were furious that such an action should happen at one in the morning. They yelled at the police, reminding them that some of the people they were pushing around were small children and pregnant women. Gustavo Montoya, the Catholic lay minister I had met on my first trip to El Ocotal, took the group’s megaphone and began speaking, trying at once to calm his comrades and reason with the police. “Imagine how you will feel,” he said to the police, “if a child is harmed by your actions.” He urged them to exercise reason and compassion.
It was clear that some of the gathered policemen and policewomen did not want to be there; others appeared eager to engage the demonstrators physically. Whatever their feelings about it may have been, they all pushed forward as a unit.
Despite the climate of fear and confusion among the protesters, one of the demonstrators had the presence of mind to convince the women with young children to stay where they were, on the ground. He reasoned that the police would not dare to harm any of the infants. Most of the women agreed, and they remained where they were.
This tactic worked with partial success. Most of the women with small children were lying rather closely together, and they formed an island that proved difficult for the police to remove. Police closed in around these women and children but did not act immediately to remove them; the rest of the police continued forward, pushing the other demonstrators out from under the Congress building. Only hours later would the police manage to move the last remaining women and children.
The male demonstrators, wanting to protect their families, picked up lengths of firewood and brandished these against the advancing police. Suddenly, police and
84 protesters clashed physically, trading blows with clubs and firewood. The violence seemed to begin when Carlos Flores’s seven-months-pregnant widow swooned and fell.
The protesters responded to this upsetting pass by attacking the police line. Carlos’s father, Martín, cut a tragicomic figure as he flourished his stick as though it were a rapier, waving and thrusting it at the shield of one of the oncoming policemen.
The chaos worked to the police’s favor and soon they had successfully pushed the group onto Plaza La Merced, an unprotected square just north of the Congressional plaza, by about two a.m. Several of the Gualaco group’s leaders had fled early on and were hiding elsewhere in the city, concerned that the police might act on the outstanding warrants for their arrest. Most remained, however, and several were in shock. Others, angry and indignant, demanded answers from the higher-ranking police officers. One of these officers asked the group to be reasonable. “We did everything we could,” he said,
“to avoid any violence.” He assured the group that their access to the bathroom would remain in effect and that those who needed attention for any medical problems would receive it. Shortly after he said this, the police blocked access to the bathroom.
While all this was transpiring, a convoy of four busses and nine large trucks was making the long trip from Honduras’s western provinces into the capital city, full with perhaps seven hundred COPINH activists. Police held up the convoy various times on technicalities and pretexts, twice along the highway and once more as the protesters marched on foot toward the capitol building. When the marchers reached the plaza, they peacefully retook it with the original Gualaco protesters and the COPINH advance guard of eighty that had arrived earlier in the week. The augmented group celebrated its victory, but the celebration was short-lived: hundreds of anti-riot police poured onto the plaza and
85 surrounding streets and routed the protesters from the plaza and adjacent blocks under a heavy assault of rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannon, and clubs.
The scene was reminiscent of Seattle, Quebec, and Genoa: there were bloody people everywhere, with shopkeepers and their employees peering timidly from their shuttered businesses. In the end, fifteen to twenty protesters were hospitalized with injuries sustained at the hands of police (Figure 4.7). Seven police were also reported injured, one with a jaw shattered by a hurled rock. Several protesters were jailed, and some of these people claim they were beaten while in police custody ("Por violento desalojo: El CODEH demanda a Gautama Fonseca y a Pineda Ponce" 2001).
Circumstances suggest that various state agencies may have colluded to bring about the violent confrontations of July 18. On July 14, Security Minister Gautama
Fonseca called on National Police troops to prove themselves in the field, announcing that he would fire “seat-warming” police officers and promote those officers who exerted themselves ("Por violento desalojo: El CODEH demanda a Gautama Fonseca y a Pineda
Ponce" 2001). The commanding officer present at the forcible removal of Gualaqueños in the early morning hours of July 18 indicated her orders came from “the highest authorities” in Congress. “The highest authorities” would presumably be a reference to
President of Congress Rafael Pineda Ponce, whose presidential campaign managers had cut their teeth working as advisers for General Pinochet in Chile ("Ceremonia en el
Congreso Nacional: Embajador de Taiwan y periodista hondureña homenajeados" 2001).
Pineda Ponce denied he personally ordered the police action, but he asserted it was “time to put the house in order” ("Desalojo de olanchanos: Hay que poner orden en casa:
Pineda Ponce" 2001) and said the police were right to strike (back at) the protesters:
86 “Some people think that when they strike an agent on one cheek, the police officer should turn the other. In fact, it’s his right to protect himself and if possible strike both his adversary’s cheeks” ("Pineda Ponce contra las marchas pacíficas: Los problemas se resuelven dentro de la Constitución y no en las calles" 2001).
The day after the clash, Pineda Ponce used the heavily-guarded capitol plaza as his platform for awarding the Gran Cruz con Placa de Oro award to the Taiwanese ambassador in recognition of Taiwan’s significant financial contributions to Honduras’ development efforts. According to a Tiempo newspaper article, Ambassador Ching Yen
Chang took the opportunity to note that “democracy is an irreversible world tendency and the will of the people is its absolute priority” ("Ceremonia en el Congreso Nacional:
Embajador de Taiwan y periodista hondureña homenajeados" 2001).
In the aftermath of the July 18 action, Honduras’s National Police filed criminal charges against 21 people, including members of the leadership of COPINH, COFADEH, and CODEH for “going too far in the exercise of their Constitutionally guaranteed rights”
("La Policía ataca en los juzgados a 21 dirigentes populares: Bertha Oliva, Andrés Pavón y Carlos H. Reyes, en el banquillo" 2001). Bertha Oliva, President of COFADEH, was accused of inciting the riot though she only arrived toward the end of the fracas.
At the same time that the police were filing charges against leading Honduran activists, Security Minister Gautama Fonseca dismissed the possibility that Hondurans were capable of protesting of their own accord. A newspaper article that appeared on July
20 cited Fonseca as saying the protesters were “being used by intellectuals, in quotes, who live in Tegucigalpa looking for foreign money to organize this type of disorder”
("Agitadores que reciben dólares del exterior causaron disturbios: Gautama" 2001). The
87 title of the newspaper article was, “Agitators who receive dollars from abroad caused disturbances.” During a radio interview on July 19, I was asked if I was affiliated with a suspected “IRA terrorist,” but the Honduran government itself never issued a direct accusation of any wrongdoing on my part.26
One result of the police violence on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 18, was that the protesters were forced to retire to various yards and shelters around the city which were provided them by COFADEH, CODEH, the Catholic Church, and a sympathetic labor union. Many of the mattresses and other possessions were ruined, trampled or stolen by police or inundated by the water cannon. A large number of protesters were forced to sleep in the dirt or on bare cement. Many protesters wore a glazed-over, shell-shocked look for days afterwards.
The following morning, July 19, several participants and observers of the events of the previous day conducted television and radio interviews. Demonstrations were tense but peaceful as protest leaders decided not to try to break through the heavy police cordon that had been placed around at least five square blocks surrounding the capitol.
On Friday morning, as members of COPINH, COFADEH, CODEH, and the
Gualaco leadership met with high-level government ministers to discuss grievances and try to find solutions, representatives of Congress’s Casa Cultural arrived on the plaza to bestow a wreath upon the statue of Chief Lempira. Schoolchildren played marimba while congressional staffers taped cartoonish cardboard-and-construction-paper arrows onto
Lempira’s quiver and placed a large flower wreath on an easel next to the statue.
26 The “suspected IRA agent” was Sally O’Neill, head of a charitable organization in Honduras that is affiliated with the Catholic Church.
88 The spokeswoman at the event addressed the assembled cameramen as though she were speaking to a vast throng, though in fact the plaza was all but empty. “Today is el día de Lempira, a day to celebrate what it means to be Honduran,” she said. Evidently aware of my affiliation with the Gualaqueños, she turned to face me and intoned, “And to be Honduran means to be born in Honduras and to respect the law!” For this she received applause from her small retinue of colleagues. She then spoke of Pineda Ponce’s blood relation to Lempira, deduced by dint of the Congressman’s birth in the region where
Lempira had lived and died. In fact, she informed her television audience, Lempira’s
“indigenous blood runs through all our veins.”
Waiting until she finished, the COPINH Indians arrived at the plaza en masse.
They ascended the steps to the Lempira statue and loudly decried the government’s duplicitous treatment of indigenous and other disadvantaged peoples in Honduras. Bertha
Cáceres, one of the COPINH organizers, said, “They want to give Lempira a wreath because they think he’s dead. But they’re wrong! He is still alive!” A great cheer went up as several of the COPINH members picked up the wreath and threw it to the ground where it was trampled under dozens of stomping feet. Lempira’s paper arrows were similarly dispatched. Somewhat incongruously with this show of defiance of the central state, the COPINH demonstrators finished with a nationalistic flourish, wrapping
Lempira’s statue in the Honduran flag and perching a cowboy hat atop his head. For several hours and in sweltering heat, COPINH demonstrators remained gathered around
Lempira’s image, railing at the government while dozens of police troops stood on guard to prevent anyone from returning to the covered part of the plaza.
89 As this was going on, coordinators from CONACIM and from COPINH conducted negotiations with a government panel at the Ministry of Governance. At the end of the day, negotiators came out to announce that several government ministers would fly out to Gualaco by helicopter the following day to see things for themselves.
That night, I drove out with Adelmo and some of the others who wanted to get the village ready for the visit. Accompanying us were two COPINH members sent by their group as goodwill representatives.
90 4.5 | The two Gualacos: July 21
Somehow, Energisa also knew about the visit. On the morning of Saturday, July
21, both the anti-dam group and Energisa-affiliated people made numerous trips into the hamlet of El Ocotal, hauling their respective constituents in to prove that “the community” supported their side of the conflict. The contrast in demographic breakdown was marked between the two groups. The anti-dam group was comprised of women, children, and men of all ages, while the pro-dam group consisted primarily of young men from their late teens through their thirties (Figure 4.9). According to some of my anti- dam companions, the vast majority of the ostensibly local, pro-dam group, were actually from the neighboring municipalities of San Esteban and San Francisco de la Paz.
Congressman Jack Arévalo, not present that day, was later to cite the significant pro-
Energisa turnout as confirmation “that more than 50% of the population is in favor of the project and that those who are opposed are the mayor, the priest, and a few other people”
("Banco Centroamericano congela préstamo para proyectos hidroeléctricos" 2001).
The commission, which had promised to arrive around noon, was late in getting to
Ocotal. All the members of the pro-dam contingent spent the afternoon behind locked gates within the Energisa compound, while the dam’s opponents milled about on the main dirt road. As trucks filled with PHB supporters drove past the protesters on their way in and out of the compound, they spun their wheels to cover their adversaries with dust. The protesters responded with sneers and insults despite appeals for calm from
Father Fredy and other organizers who were present.
As the dam opponents waited for the commission helicopter to appear, one of the
COPINH activists, Domingo Segura, took the opportunity to proselytize. Stepping up
91 onto a small stage next to the road, the Lenca man drew a small black book from his pants pocket, raised it over his head, and waved it at the crowd. This book, Domingo told them, could be their salvation. The book he held in his hand was a Spanish-language copy of the International Labor Organization’s Convention on Indigenous and Tribal
Peoples, better known simply as Convention 169.
In 1994, Honduras became one of the first countries in Latin America to ratify the convention, which commits its signatories to ensuring that indigenous people(s) living within the national territory receive fair treatment in the arenas of land tenure, employment, education, health, and politics (International Labor Organization 1989). The law stipulates that state governments must recognize indigenous communities’ right to self-determination. Part I, article 7, section 1, says that
[t]he peoples concerned shall have the right to decide their own priorities for the process of development as it affects their lives, beliefs, institutions and spiritual well-being and the lands they occupy or otherwise use, and to exercise control, to the extent possible, over their own economic, social and cultural development. In addition, they shall participate in the formulation, implementation and evaluation of plans and programmes for national and regional development which may affect them directly. (International Labor Organization 1989: Pt. I, Art. 7, sec. 1)
Section 4 of Part I, Article 7, adds that “[g]overnments shall take measures, in co- operation with the peoples concerned, to protect and preserve the environment of the territories they inhabit” (International Labor Organization 1989: Pt. I, Art. 7, sec. 4).
This was all very well, but what good would this do for the people of Gualaco?
The best part of ILO 169, exclaimed the animated speaker, was that, whether they knew it or not, the Gualaqueños themselves had indigenous characteristics and that they could qualify to receive the protections and guarantees offered by Convention 169. Section 2 of
Part I, Article 1, lays out a surprisingly simple basis for identifying indigenous or tribal
92 groups: “Self-identification as indigenous or tribal shall be regarded as a fundamental criterion for determining the groups to which the provisions of this Convention apply”
(International Labor Organization 1989: Pt. I, Art. 1, sec. 2).
By Domingo’s reasoning, the Gualaqueño campesinos had much more in common with the Lencas of COPINH than they did with the dominant sectors of
Honduran society. Domingo had looked around the village that morning, and, he said, he recognized many parallels between this village and his own Lenca village in western
Honduras. Economically disadvantaged peasants in places like Gualaco were constant targets of pejorative, racializing attributions like “indio” or “negro” by better-off, lighter- skinned ranchers and city dwellers. If the Gualaqueños were going to be indios anyway,
Domingo seemed to be suggesting, why not go all the way and become indígenas? ILO
169 gave them that option; all it would take was for the Gualaqueños themselves to recognize and express their latent indigeneity on more empowering terms.
Domingo read extensively from the little book, stopping frequently to engage the crowd. “What has the government sector done with your resources here? Exploit?”
“Exploit!”
“The river is your resource!” answered Domingo.
“That’s right,” said one woman in the crowd.
“The land is your resource.”
“Of course it is,” replied someone else.
“And the timber — I believe other people are taking it from you.”
The crowd erupted in angry epithets.
93 Pointing then to his book, Domingo said, “Here’s where we’re going to pin Carlos
Flores’s cross on señor [Minister of Security] Gautama Fonseca, here in Article 15 — this is your property!”27
This rally broke up in excitement at the sight of the commission’s helicopter. The commission, scheduled to arrive at midday, swooped in sometime shortly after four p.m.
— more than three hours behind schedule. As the helicopter made its approach, more than one hundred pro-dam supporters flooded onto the main road through El Ocotal and faced off against the dam’s opponents. When the government officials arrived, escorted by armed guards, they announced that, regrettably, they only had time for a thirty-minute visit. One of the ministers then expressed surprise at the sizable number of pro-dam constituents. Members of the significantly discomfited opposition group stumbled angrily and ineffectively through the fifteen minutes the commission gave them to say their piece. One group leader accused the minister of governance of having close connections with Energisa; the minister angrily denied the charge. The dam’s opponents did manage to express to the gathered commission members that the dam supporters were not members of the community, that they had been paid off to lobby for the dam.
The ministers, then, went to hear out the other side. One of the dam supporters spoke credibly about his bewilderment at the opponents’ fury. He said he could not understand why there could not be more room for tolerance by both sides. He related how he had become ostracized by the project’s opponents simply because he had chosen to embrace the PHB for the income and other opportunities it provided.
27 The foregoing was transcribed and translated from a video recorded on July 21, 2001.
94 Shortly after hearing that testimony, one of the ministers asked the crowd, “How many of you are from this region?”
They all yelled, “All of us!”
And, “And how many of you are from Gualaco?”
“Everybody!”
“Okay, then!” said the minister.
I was recording this exchange with my tape recorder. Someone in the pro-dam group yelled out, “¡Fuera, gringo!” (“Get out, Gringo!”) Pretty soon there were dozens chanting “Fuera, gringo!” Governance Minister Vera Rubí asked me to leave the immediate area, since I wasn’t Honduran. I did so.
Following their brief visit, the ministers left. Soon after, a lot of trucks pulled out of the Energisa compound and headed out of El Ocotal with their beds full of passengers.
I took photos of the vehicles as they left and made sure to get their license plate numbers, thinking this might be important if these trucks were used in future Energisa scare campaigns. I received many angry glares and threatening gestures from the trucks’ drivers and passengers as they passed.
We would be returning to the capital that night, but first Adelmo wanted to show me his nature reserve. We walked through the reserve to the Río Babilonia; along the way, Adelmo pointed out the signs he had painted and posted. One of the signs read,
“The biotic resources are living; the abiotic are not, but they give us existence.”
As we walked, I asked Adelmo whether it was possible that the people who supported the dam were good people with whom Adelmo and the others just happened to have a difference of opinion. No, he said; those who supported the dam were “sell-outs.”
95 He listed the names of several sell-outs; in each case, he said they had sold their convictions at a price of precisely “a million Lempiras.”28 I asked him what he had thought of Domingo’s theory of indigenous Gualaqueños. He told me, “You know, it’s not that strange. He said we have a lot in common with people over there.” He said he would think some more about it.
We arrived at the river. It was dusk, and parakeets chattered overhead. Effusive vegetation crowded the banks, and we had to push our way through to get to the quietly babbling water. What struck me, on seeing it up close, was how small the river was. I turned to Adelmo and asked him one more question: was this fight, when it came right down to it, all about the coffee?
Adelmo glared at me momentarily before replying:
Is that what you think? That I’m only doing this because of the coffee? I don’t even have any coffee up there. I used to have some coffee in another zone, over there, but it was destroyed by Mitch. That day at the bridge, when the police came and started arresting, I ran straight here. I sat down on that rock and just stayed there for hours, thinking about all those communities that won’t get water.29
Then, his eyes moist, he turned away.
We loaded the truck with passengers and left with the last of the failing light.
Along the way, we were tailed by a series of different pickup trucks that seemed to be coordinating the pursuit in a relay, each vehicle following for a distance of some miles before passing us, then pulling off to the side of the road. This continued for most of the length of the 150-mile trip. As our truck made the final descent into the capital at about midnight, a large 4x4 truck with tinted windows followed us through the winding city
28 In 2001, “a million Lempiras” would be about $65,000, but Adelmo’s claim should be interpreted more symbolically than literally.
96 streets to the COFADEH headquarters where we were staying. When we got inside the building, the truck continued circling around the block, honking and revving its engine at times, for the next two hours.
At that point, I decided it was time for me to leave the country. On Monday, July
23, I flew back to my home in the Bay Area.
29 Interview with Adelmo Zelaya, July 21, 2001.
97 4.6 | Epilogue
The Gualaqueños’ battle, of course, did not cease with my departure. When it was discovered that the Central American Bank for Economic Integration was the primary lender for the project (Oliva de Guifarro 2001), the protesters laid plans to appeal to the bank to freeze its loans to Energisa. After the protesters lobbied in front of the
Tegucigalpa-based international headquarters for CABEI, news reports announced that the Bank was suspending all its funding not only for the Babilonia Hydroelectric Project but for all hydroelectric projects in the country, pending some assurance about the state of Honduras’s juridical health. The announcement was made by Jack Arévalo, who explained to reporters that 160 megawatts’ electrical production would be lost because foreigners have grown leery of investing in a country where what’s approved today can be destroyed tomorrow by capricious protesters ("Banco Centroamericano congela préstamo para proyectos hidroeléctricos" 2001).
In fact, however, the Bank never did suspend its financing of the dam. In a newspaper advertisement entitled, “Banco Centroamericano no suspendió financiamiento a Energisa,” CABEI corrected Arévalo’s latest misstatements, explaining that project funding remained online for the Babilonia Hydroelectric Project but that the Bank would require mitigation measures be taken if technical deficiencies in the project were discovered (Oliva de Guifarro 2001).
On the morning of Monday, July 23, the same day I left Honduras, Mayor Rafael
Ulloa, Father Fredy Benítez, and Sister Carmelita Luis David Pérez were shot at from a passing truck as they drove from Tegucigalpa to Gualaco.
98 In spite of everything, the hardiest protesters held out for several weeks longer in
Tegucigalpa. On August 20, thirty of them again marched on the capitol. This time they performed a kind of environmental passion play, with three crucified demonstrators representing the park, the municipality, and the waterfall. Another three of the demonstrators were dressed as Death, while still others carried signs depicting the area’s endangered fauna (Padilla 2001). But Congress made no move to halt Energisa’s project.
None of the top officials at Energisa were seriously investigated. The Central American
Bank did not suspend its funding. The papers quit running the Gualaco story, and the protest ran out of steam.
Family by family, they returned to their homes in the hamlets and villages of
Gualaco. The rains had come too late to save the main maize crop, and the coming months would be difficult. Some of them say they will continue to resist, but they confess they aren’t sure how.
Rafael Pineda Ponce failed in his bid for the presidency. Hondurans voted in rival candidate Ricardo Maduro on a campaign of “zero tolerance” for crime. While Pineda
Ponce had also projected a strong anti-crime message, his heavy-handed treatment of the
Gualaqueños reinforced Hondurans’ perception of Pineda Ponce — also the older of the two candidate by more than two decades — as an anachronistic, caudillo-style ruler.
At the time of this writing (May, 2002), Energisa is nearing completion of its project, bravely pulling Honduras forward into the realm of modernity and progress.
99 5 | Conclusion
One evening, as dusk crept over the plaza, Beto Linares and I were sitting at the base of Chief Lempira’s statue talking about politics and patrimonio. Prompted by a question I had asked him, Beto leaned forward to tell me, almost conspiratorially, what was wrong with Honduras’s shift toward increasing political decentralization: “The law is great, but the follow-up is terrible.” After granting greater autonomy to local communities one day, the state could easily pull it back the next. “The state comes in overnight and implements projects without any restrictions from anyone. Well, no one’s going to stop the government! And then after doing something, they just wind up undoing it. Prohibitions are only for the poor. That is what we see.”30
This paper set out to look at some of the ways peasants and their antagonists square off in battles over land and land-based resources in Olancho. In an introductory section and three vignettes centered on the municipio of Gualaco, I have tried to illustrate something of the range of spatial as well as discursive practices — forced resettlement, taking bridges, posting security guards outside of elementary schools, but also telling stories and yelling loudly and acting out — that constitute territoriality between
Olanchano peasants and the various interests that have tried, over the course of centuries, to wrest away control of the land.
While noting peasants’ great disadvantage vis-à-vis landed elites, monied investors, and agencies of the central state, this study has taken seriously these subordinated actors’ attempts to defend their means of subsistence from a panoply of more powerful forces. When the peasants’ subsistence needs interfered with the
100 international project of capital accumulation, however, the Gualaqueños’ arsenal of defensive weapons showed little more efficacy than Chief Lempira’s paper arrows. At the same time, all the government’s laudable legislation — from Decreto 1987-87 to the Ley de Municipalidades to ILO Convention 169 — were suddenly just so much paper when the higher calling of economic progress demanded Congressional stonewalling, ministerial legerdemain, judicial inaction, and police brutality. There was more at stake than 4.4 megawatts of electrical energy production, after all: the IMF-brokered, $900- million debt reduction package could still be rescinded if progress were not made toward the privatization of the energy sector.
Energisa’s ability to continue with the installation of its hydroelectric facility in spite of its well-documented criminal behavior, and over the loud protests of Gualaco’s mayor, makes a mockery of Honduras’s Ley de Municipalidades. It reveals the perspicacity of Slater’s observation about the futility of administrative reform without a corresponding modicum of national autonomy from outside interests: “[N]o regional development, ipso facto, can bring about self-reliant regional development, the enunciated aim of national policy. For such a development to be feasible there needs to be some kind of concerted strategy for national self-reliance vis-à-vis the influence and interests of international capital” (Slater 1989: 515). However, this is not enough: the circumstances in Honduras also clearly show that the state is also beholden to local elites.
Ironically enough, the case of Honduras demonstrates that the weakest states are also among the most abusive.
30 Interview with Beto Linares, July 9, 2001.
101 In the preface, I put forward a hypothesis that peasants’ territorial actions and
words are more than mere strategy — that territorial consequences are sometimes better
described as effects of peasants’ politicized but nevertheless very real self-expression.
Related to Hall’s and Li’s conceptions of articulation (Hall 1995; Li 2000), Tsing’s
discussion of “cultural mobilization” expresses well the liminal, dynamic, and often
ambivalent positioning that informs the sort of high-stakes territorial politics we have
seen play out in Gualaqueños’ lives (Tsing 1999: 6). Tsing recognizes the performative
aspect of groups’ cultural mobilizations while maintaining that such performance does
not imply a lack or loss of authenticity: “Performance does not make the performers
frauds. Instead, it mobilizes identity, making it work in the world” (Tsing 1999: 7-8).
It seems to me, though, that the question of authenticity is an important one, for a
shifting repertoire of group expression can easily give rise to plausible charges of crass,
ad hoc opportunism, if not charlatanry. But if we recall that peasants’ actions — whether
we wish to call them articulations or cultural mobilizations or something else — are
conditioned always by the class and political structures within which they are located,
and if we recall the schizophrenic character of government policies and actions to which
the Gualaqueños have been forced to respond, we can see that the degree of peasants’
agency in their actions is actually quite circumscribed. Under such unstable conditions as
Olanchano peasants have had to face in their fight to maintain access to their means of
subsistence (the land), it seems inappropriate to scrutinize their “performances” for
inconsistencies. At any rate, to recognize any cultural or political expression as other than a single frame in a constantly moving picture is to deny all life and agency to its subjects.
102 Finally, to assert that the peasants’ room for maneuver was limited in the fight over Babilonia is not to imply that their struggle was unimportant or without value. The
Gualaqueños’ very public struggle mobilized elements of Honduran civil society that had lain dormant since the dirty war of the 1980s. To some degree that cannot be quantified with any certainty, the public’s disgust with its government’s treatment of the
Gualaqueños and the COPINH activists, contributed to the sound electoral defeat of
Congressman Rafael Pineda Ponce in his bid for the presidency. Whether more wholesale changes can be expected within the Honduran polity in the near future, or even whether the Ocotaleños will be able to persist under the imperious gaze of Energisa and its armed detachment, are matters I don’t have the heart to discuss. I have come to the conclusion, however, that whatever solutions the Gualaqueños come up with, they will not be able to rest their hopes on the state — nor on their fugitive hero, Canuto.
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