Two and a half years ago, President Xiomara Castro was elected on a promise to dismantle the corrupt and authoritarian structures that made Honduras one of the world’s deadliest countries for environmental and land rights defenders. But the targeting of local community leaders who oppose extractive projects continues to claim victims. In September, Juan López of the Municipal Committee in Defence of the Commons and Public Goods of Tocoa was shot dead. Castro must put community rights before business interests and seek strong international support to fight corruption and extractivist greed.

Juan López was gunned down on 14 September as he left church. An environmental activist, community leader and member of the Municipal Committee in Defence of the Commons and Public Goods of Tocoa, he was the latest victim of extractive greed in Honduras – but far from the first. Communities protecting the rivers that flow through the Bajo Aguán region have seen several of their leaders assassinated. Three defenders of the Guapinol River, Aly Domínguez, Jairo Bonilla and Oscar Oquelí, were killed last year.

In 2023, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granted precautionary measures to López and 29 other members of the Municipal Committee and the Justice for the People Law Firm in the face of death threats, harassment, surveillance and other acts of violence against them. In response, the state of Honduras was supposed to consult with those affected and adopt all necessary measures to protect their rights to life and personal integrity and ensure they could continue their human rights work without fear of retaliation. It was supposed to investigate the threats that gave rise to precautionary measures and take steps to prevent their recurrence. It clearly didn’t do any of that.

Environmental conflict

López was one of the leaders of resistance against mining in the Carlos Escaleras National Park, whose name pays tribute to another murdered environmentalist, a farmer from Tocoa who was killed in 1997 for trying to stop the construction of a palm processing plant. In 2012, Congress declared the area where the Guapinol and San Pedro rivers meet a national park, but the following year it drastically reduced the most protected core zone to allow for mining. The first licence was awarded in 2014. Mining companies said their activities wouldn’t cause any contamination, but locals soon saw changes to their water and the fish population. Over 20 local communities organised against mining, and in 2015 they established the Municipal Committee.

In 2018, people formed a Community Council in Guapinol, near Tocoa. Since the complaints they’d filed with Congress, courts and government agencies had got nowhere, locals began an occupation, blocking access to machinery for the Los Pinares mining company for a year. The army and police cleared the camp twice, with the second time a particularly violent occasion. The company then accused 32 protesters of arson, damage, illegal association, kidnapping and usurpation. López was among those charged, accused of being the leader of the alleged illegal association, even though he wasn’t present when the violence took place.

While López and 11 other activists who came forward voluntarily to testify were eventually released after several days, eight others were remanded in custody, spending two and a half years in pretrial detention. They were eventually released in February 2022.

Criminalisation continued: in March 2020, the Court of Appeals reopened the cases against López and four of his colleagues. They were subjected to smear campaigns and received threats from people associated with Los Pinares. Lawyers defending the activists and civil society groups supporting them were harassed, and local community members were constantly intimidated. Over 160 people have been killed in the region since 2010.

In a May 2024 report, the Organization of American States (OAS) described the situation of Honduran human rights defenders as alarming, noting that violence, particularly lethal violence, is mainly and intentionally directed against people defending the environment, land and territory. Year after year, Global Witness reports that Honduras is one of the deadliest countries in the world for land rights and environmental defenders.

Local journalists reporting on illegal extractive practices have also been killed. Recent victims include Luis Alfonso Teruel Vega, a TV journalist from Atima who was killed in January 2024 after reporting on deforestation.

Voices from the frontline

Juana Esquivel is a member of the Municipal Committee in Defence of the Commons and Public Goods of Tocoa.

 

We have been fighting against the Los Pinares/Ecotek megaproject since 2014. We have carried out numerous protests, including holding permanent popular assemblies in front of municipal offices and mass protests. Thanks to these we managed to have Tocoa declared a mining-free municipality and the core zone of the Carlos Escaleras National Park restored.

In 2018, we set up a camp under the banner ‘For Water and Life’, which lasted 88 days. This direct action triggered a wave of criminalisation and persecution. Repression against environmental activism has been fierce, with 32 prosecutions and eight comrades imprisoned for almost three years.

Activists have been murdered and there’s a climate of constant threats and harassment. Hundreds of families have been displaced by threats and the use of excessive force by the authorities and armed groups hired by the company.

The Castro government’s actions on this issue have been negligent and have exacerbated polarisation and conflict. Although the government has made Guapinol a central issue on its political agenda, the release of imprisoned environmental defenders has been the result of years of community mobilisation and resistance rather than direct intervention by central authorities.

A significant government debt to Tocoa and Guapinol remains: the complete cancellation of the Los Pinares/Ecotek megaproject. The community remains vigilant and active, demanding environmental justice and the preservation of its natural resources in the face of corrupt economic and political interests insensitive to local needs.

 

This is an edited extract of our conversation with Juana. Read the full interview here.

Entrenched economic power

Entrenched corrupt networks of political and economic interests that act with impunity have long been the biggest danger to Honduran environmental and land rights defenders. The situation worsened under a repressive regime installed after a 2009 coup, but there were hopes for change with the November 2021 election of leftist leader Xiomara Castro as president.

But while political power can change hands quickly, economic power is much more permanent. Following the change of government, corporate power remained intact and extraction continues to be a key source of elite wealth. Networks of corruption stayed in place, encompassing significant elements of state institutions, including some belonging to Castro’s party Libertad y Refundación (Libre). López was a Tocoa municipal councillor for Libre, and had recently urged the resignation of Tocoa’s mayor, also from Libre, who’d been captured on video negotiating with drug traffickers and prominent national Libre politicians.

The mayor was accused of having links with armed groups working for extractive companies and profiting from facilitating illegal mining in protected areas. He’s also been accused of ignoring a public town hall meeting’s decision to deny permission and instead giving a green light to a huge power plant – part of a megaproject that also includes an open-cast mine and an iron oxide processing facility – that local activists are afraid will cause deforestation, sedimentation and pollution of the Guapinol River.

Castro ran on a platform of change, and when she was sworn in in January 2022, promised ‘no more permits for open mines or exploitation of our minerals, no more concessions to exploit our rivers, watersheds, national parks and cloud forests’. She also promised freedom for the Guapinol political prisoners and justice for Berta Cáceres, a high-profile Indigenous environmental defender murdered in 2016.

Castro’s first steps raised hopes. The Guapinol defenders regained their freedom, and in June 2022 the mastermind of Cáceres’ murder, a former executive of a hydroelectric company Cáceres had mobilised against, was sentenced to over 22 years in prison.

In a promising move to counter corruption and impunity, a month after taking office, Castro led a reform of the selection process for Supreme Court judges so they’d be chosen from a merit-based list drawn up by an independent committee. Two months later, her predecessor was extradited to the USA to face drug charges.

Castro then announced plans to revive the Mission to Support the Fight against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH), created through an agreement with the OAS in response to 2016 anti-corruption protests but disbanded four years later. In December 2022, the government signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Nations (UN) to work together towards establishing an international, independent, impartial and autonomous mechanism against corruption and impunity in Honduras. A team of UN experts came to assess its feasibility, and some early progress was made in repealing laws and decrees that impeded the investigation and prosecution of corruption.

But key reforms – including the reversal of a penal code amendment that reduced penalties for corruption and organised crime, and the repeal of a decree that established parliamentary immunity – remain pending, and the proposal to recreate MACCIH or a similar UN-led body never took off. The promised protection mechanism for human rights defenders and journalists that was meant to replace the existing ineffective one, which lacks financial resources and experienced staff with human rights training, hasn’t materialised either.

The militarisation of security has only made things worse. In November 2022, Castro declared a state of emergency to deal with soaring levels of crime and gang violence. She has extended it several times, and it remains in force. The homicide rate has fallen, but by the end of 2023 Honduras was still the second most violent country in Latin America. And any security gain has come at a high human rights cost: according to the National Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office, since December 2022, 2,147 complaints related to the state of emergency have been filed against security forces for abuse of authority, incrimination with false evidence, theft, inhuman and cruel treatment, death threats, enforced disappearance and murder.

Voices from the frontline

Carlos Leonel George is communications officer for the Municipal Committee in Defence of the Commons and Public Goods of Tocoa.

 

The government has made some serious mistakes. One of the most critical has been the closure of the Presidential House to citizens and community organisations, limiting our access to spaces for dialogue. We have requested a meeting through the secretariat of the presidency, but we have never received a response. The president has prioritised her relationship with business, abandoning our communities.

We also expected President Castro to implement social programmes in the communities that defend their territory, but to not to damage its relations with mining companies, the government has only provided assistance to communities that don’t oppose mining projects. There has also been no progress in the necessary demilitarisation of society.

Castro should speed up the establishment of the International Commission Against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras and take urgent measures to protect human rights defenders and their communities.

The international community must commit to promoting the development of projects that benefit communities, not just companies and governments. It must also recognise the right of communities to decide on their future and development. The failure of international bodies to act makes them complicit in serious human rights violations, including forced displacement and the killing of human rights defenders. Many embassies and organisations have chosen to remain silent in the face of the violence we face, prioritising the protection of their companies’ economic interests, despite knowing full well what’s happening.

 

This is an edited extract of our conversation with Carlos. Read the full interview here.

Civil society demands action

Following López’s murder, over 100 civil society organisations from Honduras, Latin America and around the world sent a letter to Castro condemning the killing as part of a pattern of violence against environmental defenders and calling out the state’s systematic failure to fulfil its duty to ensure their safety. They urged the government to seek the support of regional and international human rights bodies to investigate the facts and hold the perpetrators to account.

Castro promised to bring the full weight of law enforcement into the investigation, and 10 days after López’s murder, the Public Prosecutor’s Office issued an injunction against people linked to two companies owned by the same group, Ecotek and Los Pinares. The office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights welcomed the decision, as did the Tocoa Municipal Committee, although activists also warned that the injunction increased the risk to human rights defenders. The committee reiterated its call for the state to take responsibility for their protection and for accountability for all crimes committed against them.

On 4 October, the police arrested López’s alleged killer and one of his accomplices. But this was only a first step, and many more must follow. It’s too late for López, but bringing the perpetrators of his crime to justice – including those who ordered and profited from it, not just those who carried it out – could save the lives of many more.

The government also needs to establish an effective protection mechanism capable of responding to early warnings, rather than trying to remedy serious violations after they’ve occurred.

And even then, it won’t be enough if the root cause of the violence – extractivist corruption – remains unaddressed. In February 2024, the government issued a decree to protect areas of the Carlos Escaleras National Park. Local communities welcomed the decision, but continued to demand that all components of the megaproject be cancelled immediately and the environmental damage already caused be repaired.

That’s a decision that would require a lot of muscle, because it would hurt very powerful interests. If Castro hasn’t been co-opted and decides to put community rights before business interests, she’ll need strong international support to stand any chance.

OUR CALLS FOR ACTION

  • The government of Honduras must impartially investigate all murders of human rights defenders, bring those responsible to justice and compensate victims.
  • The government must set up an effective protection mechanism for human rights defenders and journalists under threat.
  • The international community must support the government to strengthen the investigative capacities of law enforcement agencies and the ability of courts to deliver justice.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

Cover photo by Orlando Sierra/AFP via Getty Images