Foreign Direct Investment by Development Banks in Honduras Part II

 

Foreign Direct Investment by Development Banks in Honduras -- A Local View—Part II

By Wendy Griffin February 2015

Another type of foreign investment in the Trujillo area where I lived is from international development banks. World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB in English, BID in Spanish) funds can either go to private companies, usually with government guarantees in the case of the World Bank, or to the Honduran government itself. The Honduran government in theory is using the World Bank and IDB funds to build infrastructure. An example of a small IDB project is the $35,000 to partition and furnish a room at the Fort in Trujillo to make a souvenir shop for the Pech and Garifuna artisans and buy crafts and display cases for an exhibit on Pech and Garifuna crafts there through the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History.

An example of a World Bank funded project was the Sustainable Tourist Development in Coastal Areas Project through the Honduran Institute of Tourism which “restored” historic buildings in Trujillo like the Santa Barbara Fort in downtown Trujillo, the small building in front of it where tickets for the fort are sold known as “La Comandancia” Building , and the building in front of the Trujillo Post Office, now used as technical training school for the Honduran government’s program INFOP.  That building had been the house of a prominent Trujillo merchant family, the Melhados, originally Sephardic Jews from Jamaica, who were usually the British Consuls in Trujillo.

That World Bank Tourism project, mentioned in Keri Brondo’s book “Land Grab”, did help some local businesses like Garifuna Kike Gutierrez’s Silk screening company (now closed, the variable currents in Trujillo fried all the electrical equipment), and a bread making company in Honduras Aguan which still supplied bread products to Trujillo, but many of the proposed parts of that project, like building a really nice museum for the collection at the Rufino Galan Museum or building a Garifuna Museum and a Garifuna Cultural Center and Museum in Cristales did not happen as the money was withdrawn from Trujillo and invested in Copan Ruinas—not a Coastal Area.   

Honduran businesses that have received World Bank funding over the years are quite varied. The large Bay Islander commercial fishing and exporting of frozen seafood, with its logical overfishing results, was originally funded by a $10 million grant from the World Bank. The growth of meat packing plants to export frozen deboned beef such as is used in hamburgers was mostly started by World Bank funding, with similar problems in the Honduran rainforest as Brazil faces in theirs, only more people lived in the Honduran rainforest and it is much smaller, so the problems are more acute.

The recent World Bank funding of Palestian Arab businessman Miguel Facusse in Honduras, both directly and through Banco FICOHSA, also owned by a Honduran family of Palestian Arab descent with a one third equity position of the World Bank, which generated serious criticism from the World Bank’s own Omnibudsman and New York Times articles, is only one in a series of access to multimillion dollar World Bank financing and other internationally funded sources funds for Miguel Facusse’s companies, some of which is documented in Tanya Keissen’s 2013 book “Power Grab”. 

Unlike United Fruit which used to hoard land just to keep it out of other people’s use, Miguel Facusse  has used his World Bank funding very vigorously to buy more land for African palms, for factories that make a variety of products like oil, vegetable shortening, soap, especially for washing clothes, biodiesel from African palm oil, Issima brand instant noodles, sauces, fried snacks known as “churros” in Honduras, and for making personal hygiene products. Many of the acres and acres of African palm plantations on the way to Trujillo were acquired by him after the 1992 Law for the Modernization of Agriculture permited the sale and breaking up of the Agrarian Reform cooperations in the Lower Aguan Valley.

In the past he also owned companies that made tomato sauce and owned extensive acreage in the Comayagua Valley for tomatoes, and a fruit juice company. He sold his Cressida Corporation which made these products under the “Natura” brand to British company Unilever in a multimillion deal and said then, he would invest in more African palms. He actually gets preferential loans because of “carbon credits”, because,  cutting down the rainforest to plant African palms, a tree that requires lots of agrochemical inputs in Honduras which then get in the water often killing the fish, is internationally classified as an environmentally friendly business, in theory, because biodiesel from palm oil reduces dependence on petroleum products.

Not only does Miguel Facusse get carbon credits for his loans, he has also won environmental prizes for example for having Honduras’s first “private protected area” inside the Jeanette Kawas (previously Punta Sal) National Park in the conflictive Tela Bay area, according to an article on the Honduran website angelfire.com . Based on what I know of Honduran protected area laws, the principal ones being Ley de Modernización de Agricultura (The Law for the Modernization of Agriculture) and the Law governing the Sistema Nacional de Areas Protegidas de Honduras (SINAPH--National System of Protected Areas of Honduras), both available for sale on the Internet, I know of no legal way you can have a walled private protected area inside of a national park under Honduran law. Jeanette Kawas the founder and president of the environmental organization PROLANSATE which oversees the park that now bears her name was murdered when she was fighting against people who wanted to plant African palms in the Punta Sal National Park. Her murderers and those who are thought to have ordered the murder were never prosecuted.

Having 800 Honduran peasants thrown off the island of Zacate Grande in the Gulf of Fonseca in Southern Honduras has also been hailed as a positive environmental move by Miguel Facusse, worthy of an environmental prize as there is also the possibility that that too will become a private protected area. Keri Brondo’s book “Land Grab” on Green Neo-Liberalism on the Honduran North Coast talks a lot about the concept of businessmen masquerading as environmentalists.

One would think that having income from biodiesel, from snack food, from personal hygiene products, soaps, oil and shortening, and having access to multimillion dollar World Bank loans would provide an adequate income for Miguel Facusse, now 80 years old. But there are Wikileaks reports available on the Internet at www.wikileaks.org of the private airport on Miguel Facusse’s land at Punta Farallones near the Garifuna town of Limon being used for drug airplanes like a downed Cessna full of drugs which the US Embassy knew about.

On the Wikileaks website 26,000 of the documents mention Honduras, and include official US reaction to the 2009 coup against Zelaya and a Memorandum of Understanding about a public-private partnership to develop the Honduran Mosquitia, where the US military’s Joint Task Force Bravo is active at the Caratesca Naval Base and the Department of Defense funded mapping exercise Centroamerica Indigena is taking place.  

Denouncements of the Garifunas of Limon that Facusse’s land at Punta Farrollones (he originally said it was going to be a resort) is being used by drug traffickers is part of the Ethnics Review at the University of Kansas for the CentroAmerica Indigena Project. In Tanya Keissen of Food First, in her  book “Power Grab” about the land conflict between Honduran peasants and Miguel Facusse and two other prominent Honduran businessmen  in the Lower Aguan Valley,  she also says the peasants speak in whispers about drug airplane landing strips among the extensive African palm plantations.

The issue of cattle ranchers and African palm growers cutting down rainforest in the Honduran Mosquitia, and thus having an excuse to be there, and putting clandestine drug airports on their lands has also been reported by US geographer Kendra McSweeney in articles in Science and NACLA on “narcoganadería” (drug related cattle ranching) and “narcodeforestation” (deforestation related to drugtraffickers) including in the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, where the Department of Defense funded mapping project under the direction of University of Kansas geographers “Centroamerica Indigena” (Indigenous Central America) is taking place.  

If you look at the maps of the Honduran government’s official website for Model Cities or officially now called ZEDE’s—Zonas Economicas de Desarrollo y Empleo (Economic Zones of Development and Employment) which is www.zede.gob.hn there are some interesting patterns about where there are Model Cities and where there are not Model Cities. For example the areas where powerful people in Honduran politics and the economy like Miguel Facusse, Jaime Rosenthal, Pepe Lobo’s brother Ramon (Moncho) Lobo, the drug kingpins of Los Cachiros whose leaders’ last names are Maradiaga,  are no longer included in the proposed ZEDE areas. This represents a change from the proposed Model City locations maps in La Tribuna in 2012.  There are proposed Model Cities ZEDE in Lenca, Garifuna, Bay Islander, Miskito (ZEDE Sico Paulaya which overlaps with the UNESCO World Heritage site Rio Platano Biosphere), and Ladino areas, including the referendum for a ZEDE in Suyapa in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa passed in the troubled 2013 election.

Particularly interesting is that the maps on the Honduran government’s ZEDE website for Sico-Paulaya show airports associated with drug trafficking like Miguel Facusse’s Punta Farallones airport, the airport at Sangrelaya, thought to belong to the Los Cachiros family who also invested in African palms and had a palm oil processing plant confiscated by the Honduran government in Bonito Oriental, and at least 3 clandestine airports in the Sico-Paulaya valley which were connected to the Trujillo to San Pedro highway by the “illegal highway” between the Garifuna town of Ciriboya, Iriona and Sico denounced in the 2004 video Lucha Garifuna made by Witness.org and CEGAH (Committee de Emergencia Garifuna de Honduras).  

An illegal airport at Las Marias on the Rio Platano in the nuclear zone of the Rio Platano Biosphere is also shown on the ZEDE Sico-Paulaya map. The Pech are sure that the employees who put it in said they worked for an African palm company, and they thought it was Miguel Facusse’s company, but were not sure.   The SINAPH law states it is illegal to put in works for infrastructure like airports and highways in protected areas.    The new digital maps being produced by the Centroamerica Indigena mapping project, acessable on the Internet through the link about the project on the American Geography Society’s  website also show in detail the area of the Mosquitia such as the location of clandestine airport at Rayaka reported Canadian Geographer Derek Parent.

To think of this another way, how will the drug planes that go through Honduras get maps to find the clandestine airports they are trying to use? Now they can look it up on the Internet, and the detailed digital maps that they can use are being done with US government DoD funding, which says it is combating the War on Drugs in Central America. The idea of having these detailed maps are almost surely not coming from the Hondurans. During Contra War the Honduran government prohibited the distribution of maps of Honduras as “state secrets” and good maps of Honduras were not made available to Honduran schools until a USAID program after the Contra War.

Honduras made the laws for the Model Cities or ZEDE during Pepe Lobo’s administration. His motto was that he would like Honduras to be the best place in the world for foreign investment.  A movie was made showing that  a lot of people are interested in investing in a country with a lot of airports. What kind of industries they are really interested in investing still remains a very interesting question. For example, the benefits of investing in the ZEDE was presented at an international conference on “Bitcoins”,  the Internet currency favored by drug dealers as it is not tied to a specific country.

Since I spent time in the public Honduran hospitals of San Isidro and Hospital Escuela in Tegucigalpa and Hospital Atlantida in La Ceiba last year, and I have heard of reports of everything from rats to operating when there is no water in the building and even when there was no roof of the Trujillo hospital, I find the proposals at conferences of Honduras as a destination for medical tourism (where people go and have surgery for cheaper than in the US) as bizarre. I personally would not wish on a dog having to go to a Honduran hospital for treatment. The medical personal of Tegucigalpa hospitals marched in the streets last year, not for higher or unpaid salaries, but because they said, “We can not be expected to treat people without the most basic equipment, like no sutures for stitches. Estamos trabajando con las meras uñas (We are working with nothing but our fingernails)”.