Despite a court order to stop expansion of its open-pit gold mining operations in La Unión, Miami-based Aura Minerals continues the destruction of an Indigenous Maya Chortí community in Copán Department in western Honduras. At the heart of the matter for local residents is the contamination of vital water sources and the destruction of their 200-year-old Azacualpa community cemetery. As we described in previous letters (cf December 2, 2021; January 25, April 11, July 21, 2022) army and police were deployed to ensure the exhumations of graves, to facilitate expansion of the San Andrés gold mine, which is owned by US- and Canada-based Aura Minerals and operated by its Honduran subsidiary MINOSA (Minerales de Occidente SA). On March 30, 2022, the government of Honduras ordered MINOSA to stop its operations, but the destruction has continued. In early November, the Supreme Court of Justice in Tegucigalpa admitted a writ of habeas corpus filed by lawyers on behalf of community residents, demanding from the Ministry of Health and the mining company to disclose the location of the illegally exhumed bodies.
We wrote to authorities in Honduras, urging them to: (1) guarantee that the appointed executing judges effectively locate the exhumed corpses of the Azacualpa cemetery, (2) support and adopt all decisions necessary to return those corpses to the cemetery in La Unión, Copán, and (3) order an immediate retreat of the mining company MINOSA and all its affiliates, including armed forces, from the cemetery hill and the local community and revoke any outstanding mining approvals for the company