The peasants are waiting for a response from the National Congress to a proposed decree submitted in order to reestablish land property titles.

Real World Radio interviewed peasant leader and member of La Via Campesina Honduras and the National Front of Popular Resistance, Rafael Alegria. The National Front of Popular Resistance was created as a response against the coup d’état staged on June 28, 2009.

The administration of Jose Manuel Zelaya had issued decree 18-2008, which provided that peasants who proved that they had occupied lands for over three years would obtain property titles over them. Besides, the decree would prevent peasants from being criminally charged with land
usurpation.

The law had been the result of a consensus reached between Zelaya’s administration and the peasants (many who had been living in their lands for tens of years) at times when the landlords were persecuting them and filing appeals against them. After the 2009 coup d’état, the decree was
repealed.

For this reason the peasant movement, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty and the Agrarian Reform and the campaign Let’s Get to the Point suggested a new decree in lieu of the repealed one.

“This proposal provides that all national, fiscal land and the land purchased by the National Agrarian Institute, that is to say the Institute of Agrarian Reform, which are not owned by the Honduran state, will be reclaimed and delivered to the peasants”, Alegria told Real World Radio.
He explained that the Honduran constitution provides that those lands should be “destined for the agrarian reform”.

The peasant proposal provides that the lands reclaimed by the government in their fight against drug trafficking are also delivered to the peasants. The initiative also demands government funding and technical assistance for the work in the countryside, to put a stop to the persecution and
repression of peasants and to ban the selling of land to transnational corporations.

This proposal is proposed to replace decree 18-2008, to resume the delivery of land and property titles to peasants. The initiative to be submitted to the government on April 14 is a more general one, which includes a proposal of an agrarian reform.

Meanwhile, according to Alegria, the peasant movement is strongly supporting the teachers’ struggle against the privatization of education in the country. “We are taking the highways, schools, secondary schools in the rural areas, to stop the government from bringing new teachers to replace
the current ones”, he said .

The Commission of Family of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras reported the murder of Ilsy Ivania Velasquez Rodriguez, the sister of detained disappeared Manfredo Velásquez Rodríguez.

This is becoming a common practice in Honduras. Alegria says that 27 peasants were killed in 2010 in Bajo Aguan, to the northeast of the country, and several more were murdered in other parts of the country.

“There are many evictions nowadays, lots of repression and violence in the countryside. I would like to ask for the solidarity of the people of Latin America and of La Via Campesina International”, he said.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cescomad/