The Coup and the Palm Trees

If they are going to kill us anyway, we might as well die in our lands. With these words and a shrug of shoulders, a leader of the Unified Peasant Movement of the Agun (MUCA) explains their decision to occupy more than 20,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in the Bajo Agun region in Northern Honduras after the military coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009. The Coup under the Palm Trees interrogates the Honduran present, through an exploration of the countrys spatiotemporal trajectory of agrarian change since the mid-twentieth century. It tells the double history of how the Agun region went from a set of empty lands to the centerpiece of the countrys agrarian reform in the 1980s and a central site for the palm oil industry and drug trade, while a militarized process of state formation took place between the coups of 1963 and 2009. Rather than a case of failed democratic transition, the book shows how the current Honduran crisisexemplified by massive outmigration towards the United States, blatant narco-state links, and the 2009 coupis better understood within longer historical processes in which violence, exclusion, and dispossession became the central organizational principles of the state.