Honduras: rights abuses may catch up with Aguán landowner (Facussé, of course!)

[Judi Lynn]

Honduras: rights abuses may catch up with Aguán landowner
Submitted by Weekly News Update on Tue, 04/26/2011 - 08:35.

On April 8 a German development bank, DEG Deutsche Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft mbH, cancelled a previously approved loan to Grupo Dinant, a large Honduran company that produces snacks, other food products and cooking oil; the loan was reportedly worth $20 million. Shortly afterwards, EDF Trading, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the French energy firm Electricité de France SA, cancelled a contract to buy carbon credits from a Dinant subsidiary, Exportadora del Atlántico, under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) for carbon trading.

Although the two European companies didn't explain why they were backing out of their Honduran deals, the moves appeared to result from an international campaign around allegations of human rights abuses in northern Honduras' Lower Aguán Valley by Dinant's founder, wealthy landowner Miguel Facussé Barjum.

Along with other big landowners, Facussé has been engaged in a longstanding, often bloody dispute over land in the Lower Aguán region claimed by campesino families living in the area. In a recent incident, five private guards killed five members of the Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MCA) on Nov. 15 at Facussé's El Tumbador African palm plantation, in Trujillo, Colón. In addition to raising African palms on Lower Aguán land for cooking oil, Facussé and Dinant have been trying to use African palms to get a foothold in the international biofuel market. Dinant has secured a $7 million loan from the Inter-American Investment Corporation (IIC) and a $30 million loan from the World Bank's International Finance Corporation (IFC) in part to expand the company's African palm cultivation .

A number of environmental and human rights organizations--including two German-based groups, the environmental watchdog CDM Watch and the human rights group FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN)--have been working to publicize Honduran activists' charges of human rights violations by Facussé and Dinant. On March 25, a FIAN-led fact-finding mission submitted a report to the rapporteur for Honduras of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) saying that 23 peasants were killed in the Lower Aguán between January 2010 and February 2011 and stressing the five deaths in the Nov. 15 incident. DEG and EDF decided to withdraw their support for Dinant a little more than two weeks after release of the report.

More:
http://ww4report.com/node/9813

http://www.defensoresenlinea.com.nyud.net:8090/cms/images/stories/0_miguel_facusse.jpg

Facussé

[Judi Lynn]

1. German Bank Won’t Lend to CO2 Project, CDM Watch Says

German Bank Won’t Lend to CO2 Project, CDM Watch Says
By Mathew Carr - Apr 18, 2011 12:24 PM CT

DEG Deutsche Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft mbH, a German development bank, won’t pay out on a loan to the owner of an emissions-cutting project in Honduras, said CDM Watch, the Bonn-based environmental lobby.

~snip~
Last week, the Aguan biogas project in Central America said it was evaluating Electricite de France SA’s termination of a contract to buy carbon credits. EDF terminated its involvement after CDM Watch alleged the facility’s owner committed human rights abuses. The project is owned by Exportadora del Atlantico, a unit of Grupo Dinant.

~snip~
CDM Watch said in a February report that Grupo Dinant may not hold legal claims to the land and may be linked to killings of members of the Unified Peasant Movement and the Peasant Movement of the Lower Aguan Valley. Twenty-three peasants were killed in the Bajo Aguan region from January last year to February 2011, CDM Watch said today, citing a report by international human rights groups led by FIAN, the FoodFirst Information and Action Network, a Heidelberg, Germany-based group that identifies abuse.

~snip~
“The allegations are deplorable,” said David Abbass, a CDM spokesman in Bonn. “If human life has been taken, or human rights violated in any other way, it is a flagrant violation of the most fundamental principles of the United Nations,” he said today in an e-mailed response to questions.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-18/german-bank-won-t-lend-to-honduran-co2-project-cdm-watch-says.html