José Ángel Flores

The family know that paramilitaries don’t kill for sport, that they serve a master. And although no court has proven who that master is, the residents of Bajo Aguán have long denounced the state security forces – who are provided with sophisticated spying technology by foreign companies and governments, nominally for the fight against drugs – for working with narcos, and prominent politicians and businessmen.

In Bajo Aguán, those farmworkers who remain continue trying to build a community amid the exodus. But there is the sense of a looming threat. At the entrance gate to one reclaimed palm cooperative, called Lempira, residents take turns standing guard. Inside, there is a school, a health clinic and a local-governance system. It is an impressively self-sufficient place built with the cooperative’s own manpower and resources – the type of community that could help deflate corruption and undergird a better future for Honduras. But, as threats intensify and families flee, the social fabric woven by cooperatives unravels a little more. Forced emigration is yet another way for security forces to dissolve the farmworkers’ political struggle.

The Aguán Valley is known for being a hotspot in the drugs trade, and the trafficking of drugs through the region increases the threat of violence faced by the community. One of the three main landowners in Bajo Aguán, the late Miguel Facusse, was suspected by the US government of using his vast plantations for this purpose, although he was never prosecuted for it. Farmworker leaders, such as those present at the tragic MUCA meeting, have also condemned the military’s involvement in moving drugs.

But the battle over plantations of African palm is just the latest version of an old story: development schemes that empower corruption and organized crime, concentrate wealth and plough over resistance. The Flores family has lived it through the generations. Lenin’s grandmother came to the region to work in the bananeras, transnational corporations that enjoyed tight ties to political strongmen and state security forces. The family acquired land in the Aguán Valley that they later had to abandon during neoliberal land reforms in the 1990s.

Flores’s murder while trying to gain back that land reveals the newest dynamics of long-standing corruption and violence, most significantly around infrastructure and natural-resource-extraction projects in Honduras. The use of hitmen and paramilitary structures to destroy social movements is common, particularly because it enables powerful actors to continue operating above ground while delegating the work of violence to structures underground, thus safeguarding corporate and political reputations. Furthermore, the use of police and the military to enforce the wishes of powerful businessmen and politicians – for example, in the evicting of cooperatives – gives a veneer of legitimacy to essentially corrupt practices.

These are the same dynamics behind the murder of environmentalist Berta Cáceres and the continuing struggles of such groups as the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras against megaprojects. Flores’s death – and the particular struggles faced by the MUCA – sheds light on widespread issues plaguing cooperatives in Honduras. ‘There is strong tension, colleagues who can’t sleep any more, threats, evictions,’ reveals Jamie Cabrera, a farmworker with the Gregorio Chávez cooperative. ‘There’s no cooperative that doesn’t have many families living in exile out of the country.’

A woman standing beside Cabrera, who asked to remain anonymous, added: ‘The ambition for power, for money … I’ve seen so many things in my time that I don’t understand. So many children who just want to live on their land with dignity, yet those people gun us down without thinking twice. That’s what people are fleeing. We are marked,’ she said. ‘It’s something you internalize. But I prefer to die speaking the truth.’