The Military Police of Public Order, PMOP, arrived in the community of Guapinol to protect the mining company Inversiones Los Pinares. Local community members have carried out protest actions against the company that continues its operations despite the fact that the government of President Xiomara Castro announced last February the cancellation of the licenses and to make Honduras free of open-pit mining. The PMOP was the right arm of former President Juan Orlando Hernández, who bet on having his own security corps to fight efforts by human rights activists to protect their rights.
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Environmental Human Rights: News & Updates
The assassination of Berta Cáceres has been dealt on various occasions in Honduran courts. In June the sentencing of David Castillo finally took place and the case even entered the Dutch legal system. This month, another important aspect of the case, corruption dealt in the Gualcarque Fraud case, went to trial. July also saw the devastating second anniversary of the forced disappearance of the four Garifuna men and leaders from the Garifuna community of Triunfo de la Cruz. Two social leaders, Edward Iván Cáceres and Ubodoro Arriaga Izaguirre were murdered this month. But there was also some good news. A judge dropped the usurpation charges against members of indigenous defenders from Marcala and the Radio Progreso correspondent Sonia Pérez. A key topic this month continued to be the selection of the new Supreme Court judges which should take place in September. After weeks of debates, in Congress, but also more broadly, a new framework for the selection of the Nominating Board for the judges was approved on July 19. It is now up to the seven mandated organizations to appoint their representatives to the board. July also saw another highlevel multiple murder. Among the victims were the 19-year old son of former president Pepe Lobo, the 23-year old nephew of former general Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, and the nephew of Nationalist congressman Walter Chávez. Welcome to another month in Honduras.
Four years after the installation of the Camp for Water and for Life, defenders of Guapinol reiterated their commitment to the defense of the river and the demand for the cancellation of illegal mining operations in the Carlos Escaleras National Park. “They tried to silence our opposition to illegal mining with jail and repression. They tried to end our love for the river, but they can't." The Committee for the Defense of Common and Public Assets pointed out that the opposition of the communities to the mining projects and the defense of the Carlos Escaleras National Park persists despite the violent attacks, criminalization, imprisonment, and hate campaigns against them.
Nacla reports on the destruction of a 200-year old Maya Chortí cemetery by the mining company Aura Minerals. "MINOSA, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based multinational mining company Aura Minerals, enjoys free rein in the municipality of La Unión. Despite the legally binding decision taken at the 2015 cabildo abierto, the company had exhumed over a hundred bodies by 2018 as part of its strategy to exploit the gold deposits below the cemetery. The company did so in full view of municipal authorities, who on a number of occasions colluded with MINOSA to undermine community decision-making power. (...) In the weeks and months that followed, MINOSA seems to have given up any pretense of respect for Honduran law. Shortly after the initial mass exhumations, an appeals court overturned Judge Tabora’s ruling. In March, the Ministry of Natural Resources issued a subsequent executive notice reiterating the company’s obligation to halt all activity in the area. Video footage of mining activities taken after the communique’s publication indicate that the company has continued to prepare the area for exploitation."
On behalf of IRTF’s Rapid Response Network (RRN) members, we wrote six letters this month to heads of state and other high-level officials in Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras, urging their swift action in response to human rights abuses occurring in their countries. We join with civil society groups in Latin America to: (1) protect people living under threat, (2) demand investigations into human rights crimes, (3) bring human rights criminals to justice.
IRTF’s Rapid Response Network (RRN) volunteers write six letters in response to urgent human rights cases each month. We send copies of these letters to US ambassadors, embassy human rights officers, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, regional representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and desk officers at the US State Department. To read the letters, see https://www.irtfcleveland.org/content/rrn , or ask us to mail you hard copies.
We wrote once again to officials in Guatemala about the unjust criminalization of environmental defenders who are part of the local resistance to the El Fénix nickel mine in El Estor (Izabal Department), run by the Guatemala Nickel Company (CGN) and owned by Switzerland-based Solway Investments. Residents of El Estor have been victims of land grabbing, arson, and repression. The contamination of Lake Izabal has had severe consequences on the local fishing community. María Magdalena Cuc Choc was first detained and unjustly criminalized in 2018 for the alleged crimes of threats, illegal detention and aggravated usurpation during the eviction of the community of Chab’il Ch’och’ in 2017. On June 27, the judge acquitted her of two crimes but sentenced her to two years for the charge of aggravated usurpation. She was given the option to pay 7,500 quetzales—about US $920—to commute her sentence.
We condemn acts of state violence and criminalization of Indigenous environmental rights defenders in El Estor
National and regional forest management plans are threatening the ancestral forests of the Indigenous Tolupán people of Yoro Department. Because deforestation has caused some water sources to go dry, the Tolupán Tribe of San Francisco de Locomapa tribe has asked the National Institute for Conservation and Forest Development (ICF) to take action to protect their forest rights. Police and courts routinely side with the interests of private companies instead of protecting the tribe. Police have attacked some community members. Nine Tolupán defenders are facing criminalization instigated by the INMARE logging company. The tribe has recorded at least ten murders of Tolupán land rights leaders, even some who had precautionary measures.
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, 2022, April 11, 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.
Those who try to protect their water sources and cemetery are regularly threatened. Fredy García, a resident of Azacualpa, filed a complaint with the Public Ministry against Jacobo Paz, a manager of the San Andrés gold mining project, and Dimar Miranda Pérez, a contractor for the mining company, because of the contamination of a vital water source. In retaliation, people have been coming to the home of Fredy García and threatening him.
Five months and 22 days into government, open-pit mining continues to be an unaddressed promise by the administration of President Xiomara Castro. In her government plan, Castro promised to "eliminate open-pit mining concessions that threaten the nation's natural heritage and displace communities". The leader of the Municipal Committee in Defense of the Common and Public Goods of Tocoa, Reynaldo Domínguez, made a call to retake President Castro's speech regarding the suspension of projects that involve open pit mining and that hurt the life of the communities. Domínguez pointed out that in the communities surrounding the Carlos Escaleras National Park, environmental contamination is an ongoing and pressing issue.
A petition for a criminal probe against the Dutch state-run development bank FMO has been filed in the Netherlands for alleged complicity in bloodshed in Honduras. FMO, the acronym for the Netherlands Development Finance Company, had been involved in financing the controversial Agua Zarca dam project in northwest Honduras from 2014 to 2017. The project, slated for construction in Indigenous Lenca territory, drew international scrutiny after several murders surrounding the project, including the 2016 assassination of world-renowned Indigenous water defender Berta Cáceres. Cáceres had led the resistance to the dam, which many Indigenous people said would displace them from the Gualcarque river, regarded as sacred. She was later killed by a hit squad whose members had connections to both the Honduran military as well as DESA, the dam-building company receiving loan money from FMO. “For the Lenca people this new legal action is the opportunity to reveal the criminal activity inherent to the financing of the Agua Zarca,” Berta's daughter Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres told Al Jazeera. It is also a way, she said, “to know that my mother wasn’t mistaken in establishing that these businesses and these banks are criminals”.