Environmental Human Rights: News & Updates

The National Commission of Human Rights in Honduras recently reported that more than 60 human rights defenders, including environmental defenders, were killed under violent circumstances during 2020-2025. The majority of those crimes remain in impunity.

We wrote to the National Commissioner to express our dismay over the lack of justice in the case of environmental defender Juan Antonio López, who was assassinated while walking home from church on September 14, 2024 (cf our letter of 21 SEP 2024). Local bishops, the bishops conference of Latin America, and even the late Pope Francis publicly decried his assassination and called for justice.

As a leading member of the Guapinol Environmental Defense Committee (in Tocoa, Colón Department), Juan López worked tirelessly to protect the Guapinol and San Pedro Rivers from the destructive impacts of the Los Pinares/Ecotek mining project in the Montaña de Botaderos “Carlos Escaleras” National Park. Despite a 2024 presidential decree (Decree 18/2024) designating the park as a protected zone, reports persist that the mining company continues to operate illegally in restricted areas, protected by armed groups and with impunity.

Since 2012, Honduras has recorded at least 149 murders of environmental activists, with one of the highest per capita rates in the world. The similarities between the López case and that of murdered Indigenous Lenca environmental defender Berta Cáceres (March 2, 2016) are striking and deeply troubling: obstruction of justice, denial of state responsibility, and failure to dismantle the networks of corruption and violence that enable these crimes.

In the highlands of Izabal Department, the courts are siding with influential landowners who are contesting  ancestral claims of Indigenous Maya Q’eqchi’ communities. (It is also worth noting, as we did in our letter to authorities on April 14, 2025, that many of these same communities that are involved in land disputes are also resisting the expansion of large-scale metallic mining.)

For three days in a row (March 5-7), the National Civilian Police (PNC) fired gunshots in the Maya Q'eqchi' community of Río Tebernal, Livingston municipality. They forcibly removed a few dozen families from their homes.  The living conditions of the families post-eviction are dire. Between March 18 and April 7, observers from a Costa Rican human rights commission documented lack of food, drinking water, electricity, healthcare, and children’s education.

Authorities are also criminalizing land defenders. On March 15, Luis Xol Caal, a leader from the Q’eqchi’ community of Chaab’il Ch’och’ (also in Livingston municipality), was arrested by the National Civil Police (PNC) on false charges of aggravated usurpation, threats, and illegal detention. Luis Xol Caal, a member of the Campesino Committee of the Highlands (CCDA), was detained despite the fact that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) had previously granted precautionary measures to his community, which is situated near the Chocón Machacas nature reserve and with access to the Caribbean Sea. In 2018, community residents testified before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that the private individuals who are claiming land ownership had been using their land for drug trafficking.

We are urging that authorities end the practice of enforced eviction while land rights are still being disputed in the court system. We also urge that they end the criminalization of land defenders.

The harms caused by metallic mining are well-known to the communities of Panzos, Livingston, and El Estor in the Maya Q’eqchi’ region of the Sierra Santa Cruz mountain range. For sixty years, they have been exposed to the pollution caused by the El Fénix nickel mine in El Estor. It was finally in December 2023 when the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that the government of Guatemala is responsible for human rights violations (threats, assaults, killings) and ordered reparation measures.  The following year, Hudbay Minerals Inc. (which owned the El Fénix mine from 2008 to 2011) resolved a decade-long lawsuit brought by victims’ families in a court in Toronto, Canada involving assassination and sexual assault.

When Maya Q’eqchi’ communities learned that Canada-based CAN (Central America Nickel) was seeking to expand mining, they mobilized. On April 7, more than 50 communities came out to start a several day blockade of a main highway in protest. Local municipal officials are also opposed to mining expansions.

IRTF echoes the demand of the local Maya Q’eqchi’ communities to: 1) suspend all mining operations in the Santa Cruz region; 2) form a commission to investigate harms against the Q’eqchi’ people and the environment between 2004-2024 resulting from mining operations; 3) devise a plan for reparations for past harms; and 4) implement a consultation process, based on prior and complete information in the Q'eqchi' language (as required by national and international law, the ILO Convention 169) to decide if mining operations will continue into the future.

Since the implementation of the State of Exception in March 2022, authorities in El Salvador have adopted measures that reflect a widespread pattern of state abuse, including thousands of arbitrary detentions, the systematic use of torture in detention centers, and hundreds of deaths in state custody. Community activists and other human rights defenders are being swept up in the dragnet of mass arrests.

The rural community of La Floresta (in San Juan Opico municipality, La Libertad Department), has been facing eviction threats that could displace over a hundred families, many of whom have lived in the area for more than a decade. UNIDEHC (Unity of Defense for Human and Community Rights) has been providing legal support to the community in its struggle for land rights. In February, the National Civilian Police (PNC) arrested La Floresta community leaders Medardo Rodríguez and Alejandra Cañas. Two weeks later, they arrested José Alberto Pérez Ramírez and María Margarita Flamenco, two members of the community steering council. More than 20 residents of La Floresta have now been arrested and falsely charged with land ursurpation. Police also raided the home of the UNIDEHC director and the organization’s headquarters, arresting its spokesperson Fidel Zavala.

After starting judicial proceedings against Fidel Zavala and the others in March, he was transferred to the notorious Mariona Prison in early April. This is of particular concern because Fidel Zavala has previously denounced torture or other ill-treatment in penitentiary centers, including the abusive treatment of detainees by prison guards at Mariona. We are deeply concerned for his physical and mental well-being. We demand that he be immediately released.

Jaime Alonso Gallego Gómez was one of the most threatened social leaders in northeastern Antioquia. As a founding member of the Segovia and Remedios Mining Roundtable, Jaime Gallego led the ancestral mining movement in his hometown for decades, working to defend his community against the multinational, profit-oriented large-scale mining companies.  After participating in a miners strike in November 2024 (to demand government guarantees for ancestral artisinal mining), a pamphlet was circulated threatening to silence him.

On March 3, Jaime Gallego, better known by his nickname Mongo, and his bodyguard were reported disappeared when the GPS tracker of their National Protection Unit (UNP) vehicle was deactivated as they were traveling to a meeting in Vegachí, Antioquia Department. Six days later, after gunshots were reported in the early morning of March 9, Jaime Gallego was found dead. 

Jaime Alonso Gallego Gómez, ¡presente!