Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
de Oca, workers' claims to the resources of Mosquitia were grounded in
ideas about both social justice and the rights and responsibilities of lib-
eralcitizenship.IfworkersloyaltotheHondurannation-statedidnotact,
Mosquitia could easily fall under the control of a foreign interest, be it
neighboring Nicaragua or a U.S. corporation.
InAugust1928,agroupofsixteenworkerssailedtheirvesseleastward
fromLaCeibatothemouthofthePatucaRiver.Theyproceededupstream
in dugout canoes with the intention of establishing a logging camp. How-
ever, by early November, more than half of the workers reportedly had
left due to inadequate provisions and swarms of mosquitoes that made
sleeping unbearable. The remaining expedition members abandoned the
camp in December and returned downstream disgruntled and with little
mahogany to show for their efforts.
74
Three months later, the Federación
de Obreros Hondureños (FOH) reached an agreement with the Ministro
de Fomento that ceded the FOH the right to colonize 40,000 hectares of
land along the Patuca River.
75
At least one Olancho newspaper expressed
its enthusiasm for the project in an editorial entitled ''The colonization of
Mosquitia by, and for Hondurans is an unfulfilled need.'' Describing the
region as ''majestic plains of great fertility and luxuriant and inaccessible
forests yet untrammeled by humans,'' the newspaper's editors declared
that ''cultivation is urgently called for whenever there are poor natives,
lackinginresourcesandlivelihoods,inacountrysideinwhichbenevolent
Nature has spilled its cornucopia of abundant gifts.''
76
But not everyonewas so optimistic. In January 1929, J. Amado Flores,
a logger and self-described supporter of worker causes, wrote a lengthy
letter to the FOH in which he praised the organization's efforts to ''liber-
ate the fatherland from voracious foreigners'' but warned against ''blindly
pursuing Utopias.''
77
Amado suggested that the colonization project was
based on a poor understanding of the region's resources. Mahogany trees,
he explained, grew in very small, widely dispersed clusters, meaning that
loggingoperationswouldbelaborintensive.Asfarascultivationwascon-
cerned, the lower portion of the Patuca River was flanked by thin, water-
logged soils. High wages and distant markets would restrict agriculture to
high-value cash crops.
78
He estimated that the local population along the
Patuca River did not exceed sixty people due to mosquitoes and a harsh
climate. This gloomy portrait notwithstanding, Amado stressed that a
''Honduran presence'' in Mosquitia was vital in light of Nicaraguan ''in-
cursions'' into the region. He urged the FOH to proceed with the project
on a drastically scaled-down basis and offered his personal assistance:
