May 08, 2014
As we’ve described before, there is much controversy surrounding the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation’s investment in palm oil production in the Bajo Aguan, Honduras. Wealthy landowners have been engaged in a violent conflict with campesinos, resulting in the deaths and forced evictions of many campesinos at the hands of security forces both governmental and private. The company at the heart of the investigations and recent media scrutiny is Dinant, owned by the man many consider to be Honduras’ wealthiest and most powerful, Miguel Facussé.
As we have previously noted, Facussé has admitted the killings of some campesinos by his security forces. A 2011 human rights report from the Food First Information and Action Network, the International Federation for Human Rights and other groups details a number of killings, kidnappings, torture, forced evictions, assaults, death threats and other human rights violations that victims, witnesses and others attribute to Facussé’s guards.
Facussé has attempted to clean up his public image before, such as a notable December 2012 interview with the Los Angeles Times in which he made the case that just because he keeps a gun on his desk, and just because he “keeps files of photos of the various Honduran activists who are most vocal against him,” and just because one of his private planes was used to fly the foreign minister out of the country (against her will) during the 2009 coup, and just because he was aware of the coup plans before the coup, he’s really not a “bad guy.” And sure, he admitted he “probably had reasons to kill” attorney Antonio Trejo Cabrera, who worked on behalf of campesino groups in the Aguan, but Facussé said, “I’m not a killer.”
Now Dinant has demonstrated a similar PR savviness. Writing in the Guardian after a series of articles examining the IFC/Dinant controversy, Dinant corporate relations director Roger Pineda Pinel noted among other things that “We have never engaged in forced evictions of farmers from our land; such evictions are undertaken exclusively by government security forces acting within the law and under instruction from the courts.”
Considering what we know about Honduras’ security forces’ respect for human rights and the law –the frequent subject of U.S. congressional concern and human rights organizations’ statements — that should make everyone involved feel better, right?
Update, May 28, 2014: Yassid Kababie, Social Affairs Corporate Manager for Corporación Dinant, sent a response to this post, which we have posted here. [PDF]
