Yes, thanks so much for asking because there has been an enormous amount of international attention in the human rights community to the situation in the lower Aguán Valley. The land there has a history of land reform. It's where land reform historically took place in Honduras in the 1970s and 1980s. Gradually in the 1990s and 2000s, with the encouragement of previous governments, that land was re-taken over, mostly illegally—sometimes at the point of a gun, sometimes through corrupt legal practices, and sometimes with the encouragement of the government—by a series of large landowners who converted the land into African palm plantations, often forcing campesinos and campesino collectives off the land. The leader of those large landowners is Miguel Facussé, the richest and most powerful man in the country and one of the leading backers of the coup.
In the last three and a half years, since December 2009, there have been both legal cases pursued very actively to restore those lands and government lands that were supposed to be given as part of agrarian reform to the campesinos, and so-called land recuperations in which people re-take lands that have been seized from them illegally. In turn, Mr. Facussé and other landowners have allegedly killed at least 96 campesinos, one by one usually. It's what some people could call a slow-moving massacre. They have continued these assassinations, including at least 12 people since the first of this year. None of those cases have been prosecuted. There are other cases of security guards being killed—a few. We don't really know about the situation there.
It's very alarming and it's incredibly terrifying to watch the complete impunity of the situation in the Aguán Valley, which involves both U.S.-funded state security forces and these private armies of these individuals. There are, in fact, now more private security guards in Honduras than police.
One of the most terrifying situations concerning their power is that in the Aguán Valley a woman journalist who works with the campesinos was kidnapped in the early fall but not killed. Her kidnappers said they let her go so that she could go back and tell them that they were going to kill all of them, one by one—and that's what's been taking place.