US court orders World Bank’s IFC to compensate Honduran farmers | Politics

AGUÁN VALLEY, Honduras — In the years after 2018, during times when the threats subsided and the paramilitary gunmen didn’t present up, nights within the village of Panamá had been peaceable. People meandered freely by way of the filth roads of the group, wedged in opposition to an ocean of reclaimed, reoccupied African palm plantations on the distant northern coast of Honduras. They performed soccer or lounged about mom-and-pop shops to drink beers. But when the sicarios, or gunmen, appeared on the streets, sauntering round with assault weapons and bulletproof vests, all the things closed.

They had been the identical gunmen accused of killing greater than a dozen members of the land rights cooperative since 2018.

Panamá is one among a number of villages in northern Honduras which have confronted repeated waves of violence allegedly linked to the Dinant Holding Corporation, a Central American African palm oil and shopper items firm. In 2009, Dinant benefited from a $30 million greenback mortgage to develop its plantations from the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, although the corporate was linked to waves of violence in opposition to land defenders within the Bajo Aguán Valley area of Honduras.

Yet on Oct. 3, a court within the U.S. state of Delaware ruled in a class action lawsuit against the IFC that the lender was responsible for permitting its cash to finance violent actors implicated in human rights abuses and killings. The court determined the financial institution wants to pay practically $5 million in reparations to 13 nameless plaintiffs from the Bajo Aguán Valley who filed for damages after shedding misplaced family members to gunmen linked to Dinant.

It’s the primary time a U.S. court has compelled the World Bank’s influential lending arm to pay reparations to a group adversely affected by its investments. For years, the IFC has been infamous for ironclad impunity that allowed it to put money into “development” initiatives throughout the Global South — primarily mining, hydroelectric and agribusiness megaprojects. Through the Compliance Adviser Ombudsman, or CAO, the World Bank’s inner watchdog, there have been dozens of complaints over investments which have brought on environmental harm, failed to give native communities prior and knowledgeable session and human rights abuses and homicides.

“The IFC agreed to settle the […] IFC lawsuit without any admission or concession of wrongdoing.  Dinant categorically denies the baseless allegations made in the lawsuit, and no credible evidence has been presented to support claims against the company,” mentioned Roger Pineda Pinel, Dinant’s director of company duty and sustainability, in a written response to Mongabay.

The IFC’s authorized untouchability first cracked in 2019, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the IFC’s “absolute immunity” from prosecution, granted below the 1945 International Organizations Immunities Act that protected worldwide organizations from litigation in U.S. courts, after hearing a case relating to its financing of a coal megaproject in Gujarat, India. The energy plant negatively impacted a biodiverse mangrove estuary that native fishers had trusted for his or her livelihood. Until now, nevertheless, the financial institution has by no means been compelled to pay compensation on account of its actions.

“We, the families of the victims, are satisfied with the agreement,” one of many victims mentioned in an announcement from EarthRights International, which litigated the case on behalf of the plaintiffs. “From the bottom of our hearts, we hope that armed violence will cease to be a tool in the areas around the world, where the institutions financed by the IFC defendants operate, so that this story of blood, death and pain will not be repeated.”

But the reparations are nonetheless “not enough,” mentioned Karla Zelaya, a land defender from the area who has sought asylum within the U.S.

Kidnapped for a number of hours in 2012 by unknown gunmen in an act she believes was retaliation for land rights activism, Zelaya mentioned greater than a dozen of her compañeros within the land rights motion within the Aguán Valley, the place Dinant’s plantations are concentrated, have been killed or disappeared. Killings associated to land conflicts and Dinant have continued for the reason that World Bank’s 2009 preliminary funding, Zelaya mentioned. To date, more than  200 folks have been killed. “There are so many victims. No amount of money is going to bring back our compañeros. … At least we can say this is a new precedent. The bank violated the principles for which it was created: to fight poverty. But in Bajo Aguán, they did the opposite; they gave money to a company drenched in blood of innocent campesinos.”

Dispossession for palm oil sustained by many years of violence

In 2009, the World Bank Group determined to mortgage $30 million to the Dinant Corporation.

The IFC’s funding, which enabled Dinant to “develop its young palm oil plantations,” by no means lacked controversy. In 2009, farmer teams warned the IFC {that a} army coup that summer season — carried out with the backing of Dinant’s CEO, right-wing enterprise magnate Miguel Facussé, and unleashing a wave of legal violence that made Honduras extra violent than some battle zones — meant the funding was high-risk. Later revelations would hyperlink Faccusé to the regional cocaine commerce: leaked 2004 U.S. State Department cables, a declassified U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration doc from 2015 and testimony from the 2017 U.S. drug trafficking trial of the son of a former president indicated that Facussé’s properties within the Aguán Valley had been getting used to land planes loaded with cocaine.

Critics from rights teams pointed to allegations of fraud and intimidation surrounding the corporate’s preliminary acquisition of its industrial-scale palm plantations. In the Nineteen Nineties, they are saying, Dinant (then referred to as the Cressida Corporation) and different agro-industrial companies seized cooperative lands amid World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment measures, which made it simpler to promote agrarian reform lands.

“There’s something that’s never been cleared up — they’ve never proved the legality of their land titles,” George Redman, nation director for the NGO Trócaire, who has accompanied farmer teams within the area since 2012, informed Mongabay. According to Redman, Dinant has by no means made public authentic authorized titles to the land it obtained within the Nineteen Nineties. Yet the mortgage moved ahead.

Over the subsequent 5 years, as farmer teams staged huge land occupations in defiance of Dinant and different agro-industrial companies in addition to the federal government that took energy within the coup, about 150 campesinos had been killed or disappeared throughout the several-thousand-hectare industrial palm plantations.

One report indicated nearly all of the killings had been focused, harking back to “death squad activity,” carried out by non-public safety forces contracted by Dinant in collusion with army particular forces and police models, in accordance to writer Annie Bird. A 2013 report by Human Rights Watch, analyzing 29 killings as a cross-section of the broader killing spree, urged that “in 13 of the murders there are indications of involvement by private security guards.”

It was “this massive wave of targeted assassinations of those who defend the land and water,” Zelaya mentioned. “And we were in a state of total defenselessness.”

Some rights activists observe the correlation between the World Bank mortgage and subsequent killing spree. “With World Bank money, the Dinant Corporation was able to take all this land through violence,” mentioned Eslie Banegas, a land rights activist whose son was murdered in 2016 and whose title appeared on a army hit list leaked that very same yr.

“The Dinant Corporation managed to steal lots of territory,” mentioned Yoni Rivas, a land rights organizer from La Confianza, a village within the Aguán Valley. “And the World Bank was able to finance that, including when they were killing all these land and water defenders.”

In December 2013, responding to complaints by farmer teams, the World Bank’s inner auditor, the CAO, printed a report relating to Dinant’s financing that the NGO GRAIN labeled “one of the most damning investigations ever issued by the Bank’s internal watchdog.” The document famous allegations linking 40 killings to “Dinant properties, Dinant security guards or its third party security contractor,” and deemed the IFC “did not adequately supervise” Dinant in required measures to mitigate abuse by its safety operatives.

Seeking reparations

It was round that point, in accordance to Marissa Vahlsing, the chief counsel within the lawsuit in opposition to the IFC, that households in Aguán Valley started considering searching for reparations outdoors the World Bank’s accountability mechanisms. In 2017, Earthrights International, representing 13 plaintiffs who had suffered violence — one among whom was killed in 2015 — filed a category motion lawsuit in opposition to the IFC, alleging Dinant funded “paramilitary death squads and hired assassins” to quash opposition whereas consolidating its maintain over its plantations. In an especially uncommon authorized twist, the choose granted anonymity for the plaintiffs on account of the continued hazard in Aguán Valley.

The technique of growing the case dragged on for years. “All of these companies and institutions throw up so many barriers and obstacles to litigation that they put up roadblocks for a decade,” mentioned Vahlsing. She argued that firms concerned in human rights and their financiers financial institution on the hope that plaintiffs lose assets and vitality. “They can fight you on procedure as long as they can.”

In the wake of CAO’s report, Dinant’s official safety technique was overhauled. They ceased contracting Orion non-public safety — the military-linked agency that was denounced in 2012 by the U.N. working group on mercenaries as probably the most egregious human rights offenders — disarmed their remaining guards, subjected them to extremely publicized human rights coaching and invited uniformed troopers to guard their plantations. At the identical time, residents started to allege that the rising paramilitary was tied to Dinant safety operatives with the aim of terrorizing the land rights actions.

The presence of those casual armed teams turned much more clear to Vahlsing when she was interviewing land defender and group chief José Ángel Flores about Dinant-linked repression in February 2016 in La Confianza. They may hear bursts of computerized gunfire, which Angel Flores alleged got here from a dying squad known as the Grupo de Celio making an attempt to intimidate them.

Ángel Flores was one among many who alleged the paramilitaries had been armed by the army by way of German Alfaro, an officer contracted by Dinant and paid to intimidate and homicide land defenders. He’d written out a list of the gunmen and often made reference to how he feared he could be killed over land rights. In the identical spot the place Vahlsing interviewed him, Ángel Flores and Silmer George had been assassinated in entrance of a crowd of greater than 50 folks in October 2016.

Ángel Flores wasn’t the one land defender who predicted his personal homicide as an array of paramilitary teams with ties to army and former Dinant safety operatives sprouted all through the area.

One armed group, the Grupo de Torres or Grupo de Piturro, would emerge from the village of Panamá, whose chief, a former Dinant safety operative, was photographed with army operatives and was accused of help from native safety forces.

After Dinant disarmed its guards and ceased contracting Orion operatives, commandos from an elite army particular forces activity pressure, the Xatruch, turned a shack behind the group right into a base throughout the identical interval for which they've a safety settlement with Dinant, according to paperwork the corporate filed with the IFC. In 2016, a deserting soldier accused the Xatruch of executing and disappearing unidentified victims whereas they had been charged, on the similar time, with surveilling villages recognized for land rights organizing. When the troopers left the group in 2018, the brand new paramilitary group took its place.

Hipolito or ‘Polo’ Rivas was a beloved chief and went on document in 2021 to denounce the army for arming the paramilitary group.

“Hipolito used to say, ‘If they kill me, it’ll be the Dinant Corporation,’” mentioned Zelaya, who identified that he had delivered a number of complaints in opposition to the corporate.

In February 2023, Rivas and his son Javier had been assassinated within the close by village of Ilanga.

“It was terrible, because you tried to fight for justice,” mentioned one resident of Panamá and a relative of Rivas, who fled to the United States. “But there was a group of sicarios that the Dinant Corporation sent, trying to intimidate us. And they followed through with the threats. They murdered our compañeros: Juan, Alfredo, Javier, Hipolito. Fighting people … it’s hard to see the people you love fall, for an honest struggle they wanted to do, that we all wanted to do as a cooperative.”

Fifteen years after the World Bank funding, land defenders contesting territories with Dinant — in addition to these resisting a mining undertaking additionally linked to the Facussé household — proceed to be murdered.

In November, 2022, Dinant guards — whom the corporate had lengthy prided on being unarmed and skilled in human rights — had been rearmed. A month later, Mauricio Esquivel, a member of the Tranvío cooperative that contested land with Dinant, was discovered executed within the city of Quebrada de Arena, within the Aguán Valley. In January, 2023, Omar Cruz was murdered at his house in Tocoa days after he submitted a grievance to Honduras’ Public Ministry alleging that Dinant financed an armed group referred to as Los Cachos, and that he was subjected to unlawful surveillance by Dinant safety operatives. By the tip of 2023, at least 11 land defenders within the area could be killed.

“Dinant categorically denies the unfounded claim that the Company or its leadership has financed any armed groups, including ‘Los Cachos.’ This accusation is entirely fabricated, with no supporting evidence,” Pineda Pinel informed Mongabay. He added that quite a few impartial investigations, together with by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Honduras’ Public Ministry and the International Criminal Court, “have consistently found no evidence to substantiate claims of human rights violations by Dinant.”

For some, the reparations are admirable however nonetheless not sufficient. “There’s going to be some reparations,” Banegas informed Mongabay. “But it’s not enough. All the displacements, the assassinations. It doesn’t fix the damage that’s already been done.”

Banner picture: Campesino farmers perform the exhausting work of loading harvested African palm fruit on the Remolinos palm plantation within the distant Aguán Valley area of northern Honduras, February, 2023. Image by Jared Olson.

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