French EDF cancels its financial support for Honduran plantation owner Miguel Facussé

By Honduras Accompaniment Project
April 15, 2011. French energy giant EDF announced this week that it has canceled its agreement to purchase carbon credits from Miguel Facussé’s Dinant Corporation, based in Honduras.
EDF has opted not to specify their reasons for the decision or the details of the agreement they had under the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism “We have taken the situation in Honduras very seriously and have spent the past few months looking at our options in respect to our withdrawal”, said John Rittenhouse, Chief Executive of EDF Trading, a subsidiary branch in London. The cancellation takes place just days after the German government’s Development and Investment Bank (known as DEG by it’s German initials) announced the cancellation of 20 million US dollars in loans to the Honduran plantation owner.

In recent years, Miguel Facussé and his associates have been accused of assassinating more than twenty peasant farmers who have been occupying land in Honduras’ Lower Aguán, land they say was illegally stolen by Facussé. Facussé even admitted on public television that his guards had killed five peasants, yet there has been no judicial process against him.

The UN have yet to comment on the situation, nonetheless, the denunciations of local and international organizations like FIAN have obligated the German public institution to cancel it’s involvement in the projects. A major part of the documentation and denunciation has been carried out by journalists, documentary filmmakers, human rights organizations and the Honduran resistance movement itself through it’s written and radio information projects. The resistance has also implemented an economic boycott on all products produced by the plantation owner.