Power Struggles in Capitalist Democracies and the - amazonia.fiocruz.br

Tanya Kerssen does a good job of describing the several hhe unions in the Aguan and the divisions caused by their different histories and experiences based on varying levels of land titles and the levels of violence and repression on them. However, they do unite in opposition to the coup and against the coordinated violence of the police, military, and the paramilitary thugs of the big landowners, while also forming a pillar of strength within the FNRP. In June when Tanya Kerssen and I led a delegation of human rights accompaniers to the Aguan Valley of Honduras, we did not know that we would, ourselves, play a cameo role in the life and death struggle for land in the Aguan.

On July 1,our delegation click US and Canadian residents stood between 40 heavily armed police and the Power Struggles in Capitalist Democracies and the of Rigores who they intended to Strkggles evict.

The week before, the police had burned and bulldozed the homes, school, and two churches of this seven year Powef peasant cooperative. The police had returned to drive the people off their land so that their absence would weaken their legal claim.

For 3. When I returned to the community a year later, all but three families had rebuilt their homes, replanted their corn and beans, and replaced some of their animals. We, after all, returned to our privileged lives in the North.

They are home; the only home most of them have ever known. We have nowhere else to go. Honduras is a country that few in the US knew anything about prior to the June 28, coup that ousted democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya. Hundreds of thousands of US solidarity activists have visited or know a lot about Nicaragua, El Capitalis, and Guatemala, all of which border Honduras, but for many Honduras has been a blank slate. I remember in the s we on the staff of the Nicaragua Network used to call it the USS Honduras for its US domination and its use as a safe haven and training center for the US-funded Contra terrorists. But even then Honduras peasant cooperatives in the fertile Aguan Valley were organized and struggling for their rights to own the land that they had cleared and cultivated.

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Kerssen takes us through their compelling story beginning when the military dictatorship of the s and s opened up the virgin rainforest of the Aguan Valley to be cleared and put into agricultural production, specifically African oil palm, by cooperatives. If Honduras is now a failed state, it was hardly even a functioning state in the first place in terms of its citizens seeing themselves as actors in a national project. That makes all the more remarkable the convergence of diverse social movements, labor, teachers, LGBT activists, indigenous, artists, and perhaps most importantly, the peasant cooperative unions, in the wake of the coup.

Kerssen does a good job of describing the https://amazonia.fiocruz.br/scdp/blog/work-experience-programme/seeing-education-from-a-perspective.php peasant unions in the Aguan and the divisions caused by their Power Struggles in Capitalist Democracies and the histories and experiences based on varying levels of land titles and the levels of violence and repression on them. These cooperatives have also been an important source of money and food for the struggling land occupations.

Kerssen is an expert on food sovereignty and peasant agriculture. She detests the monoculture industrial plantation export-driven model demanded of countries like Honduras by neoliberal economic orthodoxy. Ye,t she does so without being judgmental about the decisions peasants must make. She writes:.

Aguan movements may not have rejected oil palm production or fully embraced agroecology, but they are engaged in an ongoing discussion about food sovereignty among themselves and with transnational movements like Via Campesina. But in the Aguan and indeed everywherefood sovereignty has to be pragmatic.

It has to work now if imperfectly, in the embattled context in which peasants find themselves. Grabbing Power is very readable and accessible book that does not require https://amazonia.fiocruz.br/scdp/blog/work-experience-programme/presidential-speech.php high level of knowledge about Honduras, peasant agriculture, or the food sovereignty movement in order to be a valuable source of knowledge and understanding of this troubled country where acts of incredible courage and determination are taking place daily outside the notice of even most of us who would describe ourselves as Latin America solidarity activists. Grabbing Power helps fill in the formerly blank slate for us. Copyright Upside Down World.]