May 08, 2014

08 Mayo 2014

As we’ve described before, there is much controversy surrounding the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation’s investment in palm oil production in the Bajo Aguan, Honduras. Wealthy landowners have been engaged in a violent conflict with campesinos, resulting in the deaths and forced evictions of many campesinos at the hands of security forces both governmental and private. The company at the heart of the investigations and recent media scrutiny is Dinant, owned by the man many consider to be Honduras’ wealthiest and most powerful, Miguel Facussé. As we have previously noted, Facussé has admitted the killings of some campesinos by his security forces. A 2011 human rights report from the Food First Information and Action Network, the International Federation for Human Rights and other groups details a number of killings, kidnappings, torture, forced evictions, assaults, death threats and other human rights violations that victims, witnesses and others attribute to Facussé’s guards. Facussé has attempted to clean up his public image before, such as a notable December 2012 interview with the Los Angeles Times in which he made the case that just because he keeps a gun on his desk, and just because he “keeps files of photos of the various Honduran activists who are most vocal against him,” and just because one of his private planes was used to fly the foreign minister out of the country (against her will) during the 2009 coup, and just because he was aware of the coup plans before the coup, he’s really not a “bad guy.” And sure, he admitted he “probably had reasons to kill" attorney Antonio Trejo Cabrera, who worked on behalf of campesino groups in the Aguan, but Facussé said, "I'm not a killer." Now Dinant has demonstrated a similar PR savviness. Writing in the Guardian after a series of articles examining the IFC/Dinant controversy, Dinant corporate relations director Roger Pineda Pinel noted among other things that “We have never engaged in forced evictions of farmers from our land; such evictions are undertaken exclusively by government security forces acting within the law and under instruction from the courts.”

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• ColombiaColombiaLatin America and the CaribbeanAmérica Latina y el CaribeWorldEl Mundo

The Colombian President, “Some Judge” and the Mayor of Bogotá

By CEPRCEPR

April 28, 2014

28 Abril 2014

Last week the Wall Street Journal interviewed Colombia’s president Juan Manual Santos and described his thoughts on the controversial ouster of Bogotá mayor Gustavo Petro:

Mr. Santos said he didn’t want to oust Mr. Petro, but he had to follow the law, even though it hurt him politically. He said he was ready to reinstate Mr. Petro if some judge ordered him to do so.

Well, lucky for Santos, he got his wish. The New York Times reported on April 23:

But a judge in Bogotá on Tuesday found that Mr. Santos had acted improperly when he ignored a request by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to suspend the ouster because it could violate the mayor’s rights.

“Some might like it and others not, but my obligation as president of the country is to obey the law and the rulings of judges,” Mr. Santos said, adding that he had no choice but to reinstate Mr. Petro.

All’s well that ends well? Perhaps not. On April 25, the Associated Press reported:

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos says he’ll appeal a court ruling that forced him to reinstate the capital’s mayor a month after the official was removed for administrative irregularities.

And why would he do such a thing, if he was indeed “ready to reinstate Mr. Petro if some judge ordered him to do so”, as “some judge” had in fact done? The AP explains:

Santos said Friday said that he will appeal the decision because it has put the government’s credibility at risk.