Activist, wife, slain in Honduras

[Judi Lynn]

Activist, wife, slain in Honduras

Tegucigalpa, Aug 23 : The vice president of a group representing landless peasants in the Caribbean province of Colon was murdered along with his wife, a senior Honduran police officer said.

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The double-murder came a day after unknown assailants murdered in Tocoa the president of another Aguan peasants group, Marca, and wounded the organization's treasurer.

Secundino Ruiz and Eliseo Pavon came out of a bank in Tocoa after withdrawing a sizable sum of money to pay employees of their cooperative when they were attacked by unknown masked gunmen riding on a motorcycle, police said.

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Two weeks ago, six employees of a farm owned by agribusiness tycoon Miguel Facusse were riddled with bullets in an ambush, while another five people - three men who worked for a soft drink bottling company and two women who were with them - were murdered near Tocoa.

More:
http://www.newkerala.com/news/2011/worldnews-52606.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. Honduras: what's behind the latest Aguán Valley violence?

Honduras: what's behind the latest Aguán Valley violence?

Submitted by Weekly News Update on Tue, 08/23/2011 - 08:34. Campesino leader Secundino Ruiz was shot dead as he was leaving a bank in Tocoa in the northern Honduran department of Colón on Aug. 20. Ruiz was president of the San Isidro Cooperative, part of the Authentic Claimant Movement of Aguán Campesinos (MARCA), and he had just withdrawn 195,000 lempiras (about $10,260) to pay MARCA workers; because of the money, police attributed the killing to common criminals. Eliseo Pavón, the treasurer of the cooperative, was wounded, according to Julio Espinal, the commander of a police contingent sent to the area earlier in the week. (FoodFirst Information and Action Network, FIAN, Aug. 20, via Vos el Soberano, Honduras; Prensa Latina, Aug. 21)

MARCA is one of several campesino groups claiming land in the Lower Aguán Valley, the scene of numerous and sometimes violent conflicts over land ownership. Three members of the organization were killed on June 5.

Ruiz's murder followed an exceptionally bloody week in which 11 other people were killed in the valley. Six died on Aug. 14 at the Paso del Aguán estate (also described as the Panama estate) of Grupo Dinant, a major Honduran food product and cooking oil corporation headed by one of the country's largest landowners, Miguel Facussé Barjum. Four of the victims were Dinant security personnel, and the other two have been described as campesinos, according to most accounts; one report said five guards were killed and one campesino.

Five more people were killed on Aug. 15, shot with automatic weapons as they rode in a Pepsi distribution company's pickup truck on the highway between Sinaloa and the city of Sabá. The victims were four of the distributor's contract employees--Bonifacio Dubón, Elvin Ortiz and Eleuterio Lara, and their supervisor, Karla Vanesa Cacho—and Migdalia Sarmiento, who had gotten a ride with them. Sarmiento ran a refreshment stand near the regional office of the government's National Agrarian Institute (INA), where she worked as a cleaning person years before. The authorities found no evidence that the victims had been robbed.

More:
http://ww4report.com/node/10247