"Miguel Facusse Barjum Honored for Lifetime Contribution to Latin America"

[Judi Lynn]

Press Release: Miguel Facusse Barjum Honored for Lifetime Contribution to Latin America
Posted by Shane Hupp on Oct 20th, 2014

MIGUEL FACUSSE BARJUM HONORED FOR LIFETIME CONTRIBUTION TO LATIN AMERICA

President of Corporación Dinant receives prestigious CEAL award in Madrid

LIGHtNING RELEASES Tegucigalpa, Honduras, October 20, 2014: Miguel Facusse Barjum, President of Corporación Dinant, attended the XXV Meeting of CEAL (the Business Council of Latin America) in Madrid on October 2nd 2014 to receive the prestigious CEAL Founders Award.

Mr. Barjum was recognized for his lifetime’s commitment to the economic development of Honduras and the Latin American region.

His Majesty King Felipe VI presided over the closing ceremony, alongside CEAL International President Samuel Cantoral Urrutia, which was held at the Casa de America (Palacio de Linares) and attended by nearly 400 business, political and community leaders from Latin America.

On receiving the award, Miguel Facusse said, “I feel very grateful and honored to have been selected from an outstanding group of entrepreneurs to receive the Founders Award that CEAL has awarded for the first time.”

Mr. Facusse later said, “Dinant is proud of its Honduran heritage and the contribution that we make to the national and Central American economies. We are an inclusive company that respects and celebrates the diversity and human rights of its employees, customers and communities. But we never stop trying to improve as a company, employer and member of the community. With such an innovative, entrepreneurial and dedicated workforce, we are confident that Dinant will continue to expand throughout Central America and the Caribbean and further into new profitable global markets that are increasingly demanding our high-quality products.”

About Corporación Dinant

Corporación Dinant is a family-owned consumer products manufacturer founded in Honduras by Miguel Facusse in 1960. Our products are sold throughout Central America and the Dominican Republic, and exported to global markets. Dinant directly employs almost 10,000 people, supporting over 22,000 livelihoods, generating many millions of US$ in exports for the Honduran economy, and contributing significantly to the economies of all countries in which we operate.

More:
http://tickerreport.com/press-releases/320213/miguel-facusse-barjum-honored-for-lifetime-contribution-to-latin-america/

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WikiLeaks Honduras: US Linked to Brutal Businessman

Miguel Facussé, a biofuels magnate entangled with the drug trade, is waging a bloody war against campesinos—with American support.

Dana Frank October 21, 2011

Since 2009, beneath the radar of the international media, the coup government ruling Honduras has been collaborating with wealthy landowners in a violent crackdown on small farmers struggling for land rights in the Aguán Valley in the northeastern region of the country. More than forty-six campesinos have been killed or disappeared. Human rights groups charge that many of the killings have been perpetrated by the private army of security guards employed by Miguel Facussé, a biofuels magnate. Facussé’s guards work closely with the Honduran military and police, which receive generous funding from the United States to fight the war on drugs in the region.

New Wikileaks cables now reveal that the US embassy in Honduras—and therefore the State Department—has known since 2004 that Miguel Facussé is a cocaine importer. US “drug war” funds and training, in other words, are being used to support a known drug trafficker’s war against campesinos.

Miguel Facussé Barjum, in the embassy’s words, is “the wealthiest, most powerful businessman in the country,” one of the country’s “political heavyweights.” The New York Times recently described him as “the octogenarian patriarch of one of the handful of families controlling much of Honduras’ economy.” Facussé’s nephew, Carlos Flores Facussé, served as president of Honduras from 1998 to 2002. Miguel Facussé’s Dinant corporation is a major producer of palm oil, snack foods, and other agricultural products. He was one of the key supporters of the military coup that deposed democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009.

Miguel Facussé’s power base lies in the lower Aguán Valley, where campesinos originally settled in the 1970s as part of an agrarian reform strategy by the Honduran government, which encouraged hundreds of successful campesino cooperatives and collectives in the region. Beginning in 1992, though, new neoliberal governments began promoting the transfer of their lands to wealthy elites, who were quick to take advantage of state support to intimidate and coerce campesinos into selling, and in some cases to acquire land through outright fraud. Facussé, the biggest beneficiary by far of these state policies, now claims at least 22,000 acres in the lower Aguán, at least one-fifth of the entire area, much of which he has planted in African palms for an expanding biofuel empire.

Campesino living standards in the region, meanwhile, have eroded dramatically. In December 2009 thousands of organized campesinos began staging collective recuperations of lands in the lower Aguán that they argue were stolen from them, or else legally promised to them by the government through previous agreements or edicts.

More:
http://www.thenation.com/article/164120/wikileaks-honduras-us-linked-brutal-businessman#

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Please, if you have doubts about material like this, go ahead and do further research. Determine how much truth you are really getting from our corporate media on your own. The corporate media will NEVER admit how much baloney they've been slinging all our lives. They have NEVER respected the US citizens who buy their information enough to actually tell the truth when it matters so much.

[Peace Patriot]

1. OMG! This is DISGUSTING!

And I think we can surmise from this disgusting award that CEAL is a hotbed of conspiracy for fascist Murder Inc. thugs throughout the region, presided over by "His Majesty."

It is not as if they are some innocent group that was fooled. There can be no excuse for this. They are rewarding murder because they ARE murderers!

Thugs in support of this fascist shit, Miguel Facusse, and his pals, shot a teacher, who had protested the coup, in cold blood right in front of his students, and beheaded another protestor and left his body in the road as a lesson to all! Hundreds of people have been murdered in Honduras merely for PEACEFULLY protesting the anti-democratic coup d'etat in 2009, or for labor organizing or peasant land rights organizing, or expressing their opinion. The toll is appalling.

This is the sort of horror that CEAL members approve of and give 'prestigious' awards for!

Jeez. Well, and guess who else gives awards for Murder Inc. enforcement of "free trade for the rich"?

Yup. With our money and our good name on the line, 'our' government gave the fricking U.S. "Medal of Honor" to the Bushwhacks' Murder Inc. enforcer in Colombia, Alvaro Uribe. And Obama/Clinton followed up with cushy academic sinecures at Georgetown and Harvard and other perks, to the same fascist shit, Uribe. Granted, the latter were not so much payment for services rendered as bribes to shut him up about Bushwhack crimes in Colombia, which the Obama's and Clinton's of this world feel obliged (for reasons unknown) to cover up. Still.

Still.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Interesting CEAL had to hold its event in Madrid, too!

It seems to reveal they didn't think even their group of Latin American business operators could afford the security there!

With heroes like this monster, they'd better get used to making their trek to Europe to hold their meetings.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Clouds Over Honduras

Clouds Over Honduras
Posted: 01/29/2014 2:10 pm EST Updated: 03/31/2014 5:59 am EDT

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Carbon markets have driven much of the unrest, with entrenched Western economic interests pushing for investment in "green energy" in Central America. In Honduras, this takes the form of large palm oil plantations owned by the country's economic oligarchs. The palm oil plantations are located on land once farmed by poor campesinos, but which were transferred to big agribusinesses such as the Dinant Corporation.

Dinant is owned by Miguel Facusse, one of the wealthiest men in Honduras. His company, which pushes peasants off their land and has been accused of hiring hit squads to target resisters, has received investment funds from the World Bank for the production of "green energy," and is able to count the investment as "sustainable" and "green" for the purpose of selling carbon credits on international markets. The World Bank's own compliance office investigated the bank's investment in Dinant and found that the institution had been willingly ignorant of the social problems emerging from within Honduras.

In 2009, a number of campesinos who claimed to have been removed from the land started an organization called the United Peasants Movement, or MUCA. MUCA occupied stretches of Facusse's land, creating subsistence farms and cooperatives. Since then, violence has been waged between Dinant's private security forces and the Honduran state on one side, and armed campesinos on the other. Blood has been shed on both sides, with most of the casualties being poor farmers. In response to the violence, the Honduran military has reportedly reinforced the strength of the state security apparatus in the region.

Tensions are also rising in the Rio Blanco region, where the Lenca indigenous tribe has resisted a recent plan to construct hydroelectric dams on the Gulcarque River, situated in its traditional land. The project -- set to benefit DESA, a company tied to the oligarchs, and Sinohydro, a Chinese firm -- was pushed forward without the Lenca tribe's consultation or consent. In response, the Lenca began to set up roadblocks and protests. During one rally, government soldiers shot at least two protestors, resulting in one death. Indigenous leaders also claim to have received death threats from the military and police.

Legitimacy Lost

Such clashes reinforce the widely held view that the 2009 coup -- along with events since -- was orchestrated by Honduran oligarchs. (Wikileaks cables have suggested that Facusse may have been personally involved, although he denies any role.)

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/giorgio-cafiero/clouds-over-honduras_b_4681553.html