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Since the 2009 coup that overthrew the government of President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, the countryside of the lower Aguan Valley, a long embattled region and one of Central America’s richest agricultural areas, has undergone a brutal rash of kidnappings, murders, detentions and intimidation.

The region has been long marked by conflicts over land and land reform; but today in the Aguan Valley — prime real estate for plantations of African palm — the stakes have increased dramatically. With the global biofuel rush, and with the expansion of carbon markets, which can provide massive underwriting for projects that appear “green,” but in many cases may be anything but, the promise of carbon credits and free money from climate-financing schemes like the U.N.-backed Clean Development Mechanism, appear to be among the causes of renewed violence.

A signal occurrence was the recent kidnapping of a local campesino (peasant farmer) named Juan Chinchilla. Chinchilla is a leader of the Unified Peasant Movement of the Aguan (MUCA in its Spanish acronym) and a member of the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP), a movement that rose up after the 2009 coup that ousted President Zelaya. On January 8, Chinchilla was on the road when his motorcycle was fired on. He was quickly taken captive by men identified as wearing police and military uniforms and uniforms of the private security guards of Miguel Facussé, a Honduran businessman who owns vast plantations of African palm in the Aguan Valley.