“The National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP) expresses its energetic condemnation of the massacre against the campesino community in El Tumbador, Trujillo, in which our companeros Ignacio Reyes, Teodoro Acosta, Siriaco Munozm Raul Castillo and Jose Luis Sauceda were assassinated”, the FNRP said in a November 16 statement.
All of those killed were members of the Campesino Movement of Aguan (MCA). The campesino activists were killed by assassins hired by pro-US oligarch Miguel Facusse, who helped fund the coup that overthrew president Manuel Zelaya last year.
Zelaya, who is now in exile in the Dominican Republic, had begun a process of land reform to the benefit of landless farmers.
The FNRP said Facusse “has contracted hundreds of assassins, including Colombian paramilitary advisors, to expel and massacre the peasants who are the legitimate owners of the land”.
The FNRP said President Porfirio Lobo, who “won” fraudulent elections organised by the coup regime, was “complicit in this crime; this is a fact confirmed by the delay by the authorities in stopping the aggression against the campesinos and the tolerance shown by the armed forces, the police and the justice officials of the region in the face of [Facusse’s] recurrent crimes”.
Zelaya, who is also FNRP general coordinator, wrote a letter on November 17 in solidarity with the MCA and “all of the Honduran people who are afflicted by the poverty and death imposed by this system based on profit and sustained from the spheres of power in Washington”.
Zelaya said: “The United States issued a statement yesterday celebrating the massive increase of a military presence in the zone, and even having the nerve to insinuate that the fallen were not peasants …
“How long must we bear the assassination of Hondurans in the name of private property? These are cowardly acts that apart from serving an unlimited and uncontrollable militarization of the state, [and] repression, persecution; assassinations, and massacres, are part of a strategy to eliminate the real opposition in the country …
“The people have a right to self defence … The murderous actions against the people cannot be left unpunished.”