The story below is excerpted from Don't Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart, a new title from Food First Books, edited by Medea Benjamin with photographs by Susan Meiselas.
EIvia Alvarado is a campesina organizer with the National Congress of Rural Workers in Honduras. A 48-year-old mother of six and grandmother of eleven, she travels the back roads of Honduras helping dirt poor peasants in their struggles to feed themselves. The fire of her courage and determination was first sparked by her church's mothers club. She started setting up feeding centers for malnourished children. She later helped found the Honduran Federation of Campesinas (peasant women).
Through her years of organizing women's groups, Elvia came to see that the key to the problem affecting peasants was the landlessness of some 200,000 rural families. Elvia then turned her attention to the urgent question of land reform. While there is a land reform law on the books in Honduras, it is not enforced in the practice....
Elvia has also firsthand experience with the recent militarization of her country. For one thing, she lives near the largest U.S. base in Central America, the Palmerola Air Base, which has a constant presence of at least 1000 U.S. troops. But Elvia's connection with the military goes deeper than that. As a result of her organizing work, she has been harassed, J2uled, and most recently tortured at the hands of the Honduran military. She has witnessed the parallel growth of internal repression and the U.S. military buildup....
Here is her story:
"The Real Honduras is Hidden"
If you visit Honduras and just drive along the main highway, you might think Honduras is a rich country. The people who live alongside look pretty well off, but most Hondurans are campesinos who live far removed from the highway in what we call asentamientos or settlements. Often the only way to get to these asentamientos is by horse or hiking on foot. So the real Honduras is hidden from view, but for most campesinos it's the only reality we know.
In the asentamientos, it's hard to make a living. If the campesinos have any land at all, it's usually the worst land — hilly with poor soil. Because the best land is the flat land the big landowners own.... Campesinos who don't have any land are worse off. They work as day laborers, either for a landowner or for another campesino who needs help. The daily wage in the countryside is $1.50 to $2.50 a day. But even with these low wages they can't find enough work....
We live on tortillas and beans — three times a day, everyday. When we have the money, we buy other things like rice, sugar, coffee and cooking oil. Sometimes eggs. We don't have money to buy milk or meat or anything like that. We know what a good diet is. We know that a good diet has all sorts of things in it — milk, eggs, meat, vegetables. But we poor can't afford those things. A bottle of milk costs 30 or 40 cents. With that money we would buy enough tortillas to feed the whole family.
The world of the rich in Honduras is completely different. You should see the mansions they live in! When I have to go to the rich neighborhoods, I get terrified, because there are all these armed guards around and you get the impression they don't even want you walking on their sidewalks.
"Our Struggle to Recover the Land"
In Honduras we have an Agrarian Reform Law that was passed in 1975 after lots of organizing by our peasant groups. The law is very clear. It says that land has to be fully used, that it has to fulfill a social function. Whether the land is private or state-owned, if it's not being cultivated or only has a few head of cattle on it, it's supposed to be turned over to the campesinos....
But we've never gotten land that way. Either the land-owner pays everyone off at INA (the National Agrarian Institute) or the request gets bogged down in so much red tape that a decision is never made. We do all the legal steps first. But when that doesn't get anywhere, the campesinos say "the hell with it" and simply take over the land....
The first land recovery I participated in was a piece of land owned by a widow named Nicolasa. She was a big latifundista (landowner). She inherited everything from her father, who was one of those men who got rich by just buying wire and fencing in land and calling it his.
The campesinos in the area met every month to try to figure out what to do. The bureaucrats at the INA kept saying come back next month, or that the request was being processed, that it was in the hands of the court, the regional office, the national office, the Agrarian Council—they kept us chasing our tails and getting nowhere.
But spring was coming again and the campesinos still had no land to plant, and noway to feed their families. They decided that the only way to get the lands was to take it. As their union leader, I accepted their decision and agreed to join them. We set the date for the following week, in the middle of the night.
When we entered the field, there were about 80 of us, all men except for me. We snuck in very quietly at 2:00 a.m., taking our mats so we could sleep. The next day the women and children came. The women made tortillas to eat and we all went to work— clearing the land with our machetes, turning it with our hoes, and planting com and beans. A poor campesino community nearby helped us out by sending food.
When the landowner found out we had recovered the land, she went running to the police and the army. The next day, three cars full of security police arrived to kick us out. "Don't be afraid," I said. "They're not going to kill us. Besides, there's an Agrarian Reform Law in this country that says this land should be ours."
We decided to leave so we wouldn't be arrested. But when the police had gone, we returned. Four days later, the army came. They said we were thieves for stealing land that wasn't ours, that we had to leave immediately. But we said we weren't going anywhere, because we had nowhere to go.
The landowner was with them, and we tried to have a civilized talk with her. We said we weren't asking for the land, just the part that wasn't being used so we could grow food to feed our families. But she wouldn't listen to us. Instead she opened the fences and sent in cattle to trample the com and beans we planted. We planted again, and she sent in the cattle again. Four times we planted the fields, and four times her cattle tore them up.
One day, after we'd been on the land for a few days in a row, we started to rim out of food. "Let's go out in the woods and see if we can find some animals to eat, or maybe some malanga," I suggested. Malanga is a wild root, like potato. "Good idea," said Mario, one of the campesino leaders. "And while the rest of you are away, I'll go water the com we planted yesterday."... But while Mario was digging a furrow to irrigate, a shot rang out from the woods and went straight through his head. The landowner had paid someone to follow him and kill him...
We took Mario's body to the town and held a vigil. We collected money to help the family. Then we went right back to the land. His death gave us even more courage. We waited for the army or the landowner to appear. We were as mad as hell. "Okay," we said. "They already killed Mario. Let them come and try to kill us all."
When the army arrived, we told them we weren't as well armed as they were, but that our few hunting rifles could still kill. We said we wouldn't open fire unless they did first. They realized they couldn't get us out without a big scandal, so they eventually left us alone.
That's how we won the piece of land those campesinos are farming today—with the sacrifice of one of our best leaders.
It's hard to think of change taking place in Central America without there first being changes in the United States. As we say in Honduras, "Sin el perro, no hay rabia"-without the dog, there wouldn't be any rabies.
So you Americans who really want to help the poor have to change your own government first. If you say, "Oh, the United States is so big and powerful, there's nothing we can do to change it," then why bother talking about solidarity? If you think like that, you start to feel insignificant and your spirit dies. That's very dangerous. For as long as we keep our spirits high, we continue to struggle.
We campesinos are used to planting seeds and waiting to see if the seeds bear fruit.
We campesinos are used to planting seeds and waiting to see if the seeds bear fruit. We're used to working on harsh soil. And when our crops don't grow, we're used to planting again and again until they take hold. Like us, you must learn to persist....
I'm always being criticized—that I'm a communist, that I'm a subversive, that I go around sleeping with all the campesinos, that I'm a bad mother because I leave my children home alone. Whatever. But we can't be afraid of criticism. We have to answer that we know where we're going and why we're going there, and if anyone wants to follow us, we'll be glad to show them the way....
We're not asking for food or clothing or money. We want you with us in the struggle. We want you to educate and organize your people to denounce what your government is doing in Central America.
Source: Listen Real Loud Volume 9, No 1, 1988 AFSC National Office 1501 Cherry Street Philadelphia, PA 19102