Paper Arrows: Peasant Resistance and Territoriality in Honduras
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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).