Rapid Response Network

We wrote to officials in Honduras about the assassination attempt on Abelino Sánchez, regional secretary of the National Union of Rural Workers (CNTC), and president of the Aguacatal Peasant Cooperative in Villanueva, Cortés Department. On January 25 at 7pm, two unknown men entered his home in the community of El Aguacate. After saying “we want land,” the two men shot him twice, once in the chest and once in the arm. He was hospitalized for his injuries.

Abelino Sánchez is a member of the National Network of Defenders of Land and Territory (RENADETT). He has accompanied many peasant groups and is a tireless defender of land, territory, and human rights. In particular, the CNTC, which includes five peasant organizations, has been frequently involved in land occupations with large landholders, during which many campesinos have been subjected to violence and intimidation by members of private security forces and police. After the attack, his family commented that as a result of his work to defend the land and environment, Abelino Sánchez had been receiving death threats for approximately two months prior.

We wrote to officials in Honduras about the double assassination on January 18 of campesino leader José Omar Cruz Tomé and his father-in-law Andy Martínez Murillo  in Tocoa, Colón, in the Bajo Aguán Valley.

 José Omar Cruz Tomé was the president of the Los Laureles Campesino Cooperative. Residents of Los Laureles and other campesino cooperatives in the area have been subject to constant threats from and attacks by a private security company that works for the Dinant Corporation. According to the Plataforma Agraria, the mining company Inversiones los Pinares/Ecotek (owned by Lenir Pérez and Ana Facussé) and the Dinant Corporation (also owned by the Facussé family) are the main generators of violence and human rights violations against defenders of water and land in the Bajo Aguán region. Dinant’s security company is known to coordinate its operations with paramilitary groups that have acted with impunity in the region for the past decade.

We wrote to authorities in Guatemala about a court-ordered community consultation process regarding the mine Progreso VII Derivada, which is operated by a subsidiary of US-based Kappes, Cassidy and Associates (KCA). The gold mine (also known as El Tambor) stretches across parts of two municipalities in Guatemala Department: San José del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc. It has been controversial since 2011 when the Ministry of Energy and Mines granted a 25-year license for exploration. Since then, local residents have paid the price for their opposition, citing threats to water supplies and the lack of prior consultation. There have been several threats and multiple killings, including a massacre of ten Indigenous Maya Kaqchikel protesters in September 2013. Now that the new consultation process will be starting soon, environmental defenders are reporting a new wave of threats and intimidation in order to dissuade them from participating. The company is also applying pressure, having brought a $400 million claim against the Guatemalan government for suspending the mining permit, claiming the decision violates the Central America Free Trade Agreement. 

We wrote to officials in Honduras about our concern for Marlon Calles, an environmental activist from La Paz, who was the victim of physical violence and intimidation as a result of his work to protect and defend the forest and natural resources of the area around the El Jilguero mountain.

A truck driver ran over him over on January 5. Fortunately, not seriously injured, Marlon Calles picked himself up from the street and confronted the driver. The driver told Marlon Calles that he remembered his face because Marlon had caused him to lose money by blocking the logging road that ascends the mountain. This appears to be a deliberate attack on Marlon Calles in retaliation for his efforts to protect the forest from being destroyed.

We are urging that authorities: 1) investigate the identity (and connection to the local logging company) of the truck driver who ran over Marlon Calles, 2) take measures to guarantee the safety of Marlon Calles and all environmental activists, and 3) investigate and hold accountable illegal logging operations throughout Honduras and stop them from clearcutting the forests

You can read the full letter at

While visiting fellow employees in a neighborhood in Santander de Quilichao, Cauca Department, on January 2, someone shot public employees union leader Mariela Reyes Montenegro from behind and fled on a motorcycle operated by another individual. For 20 years she had served as a leader in the sub-directorate and the women's secretariat of the National Union of Workers and Employees of Public Services, Information Technologies, Communications, Television, Autonomous Corporations, and Decentralized and Territorial Institutes of Colombia (SintraEmsdes). The local union chapter said she was a staunch defender of workers' and women’s rights.

We are urging that authorities: 1) conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into the assassination of Mariela Reyes Montenegro, publish the results, and bring those responsible to justice; 2) implement protection measures for social leaders in Cauca Department, and 3) investigate any assassination plots against other union and social leaders in Santander de Quilichao

You can read the full letter at

Five years of persecution of the residents of Guapinol in the Aguán Valley (Colón Department) points to an illegal iron oxide mine owned by Inversiones Los Pinares, located in a carved out slice of the Montaña de Botaderos National Park “Carlos Escaleras.”  Guapinol Environmental Defense Committee members are mourning the recent double assassination of their comrades Aly Domínguez and Jairo Bonilla, gunned down on January 7 while returning from work.

Aly Domínguez was among 32 community leaders falsely accused of crimes by an iron oxide mining company owned by Lenir Pérez and his wife Ana Facussé, daughter of the deceased oligarch and land baron Miguel Facussé, who was also the owner of Dinant. (Dinant is suspected of surveilling and planning assassinations of community leaders in the Aguán Valley; cf our letter of November 23, 2022). Aly Domínguez and Jairo Bonilla had been receiving threats for weeks before their murders. The Municipal Committee in Defense of the Common and Public Goods of Tocoa has denounced since August 2022 a hate and smear campaign that has escalated to surveillance, harassment, and threats against the lives of leaders who oppose the mining concession (granted under the previous presidential administration) because of environmental harms.

In addtion to our repeated call to cancel the mining concession, we demand an independent investigation that is not conducted in Tocoa by the same police and prosecutors responsible for criminalizing the Guapinol environmental defenders. The brother of Aly Domíguez, Reynaldo Domínguez is another of the 32 Guapinol residents criminalized and one of eight who were jailed for 914 days. 

You can read the full letter at

On the night of December 21, 2022, land defender Mauricio Esquivel, 53 years old, was assassinated. He was intercepted while heading to town; his body was dumped, death squad style, on the road the following morning.

Mauricio Esquivel was a member of the Farmers' Agricultural Production Cooperative “El Tranvío,” located outside of Trujillo, in the Aguán Valley region of Colón. The cooperative is in a land dispute with the powerful Dinant corporation which operates a plantation on land that the cooperative says was stolen from them.

Extreme violence like the assassination of Mauricio Esquivel is occurring within the context of criminalization of land defenders and an upsurge of extrajudicial killings. Campesino leaders are labeled as “objects of extermination.”  The threats to them are real. Aguán Valley residents are facing an unprecedented wave of dozens of brazen death squad style murders. The assassins openly advertise the targets as alleged gang members, with blood smeared posters.

We are urging that the State of Honduras take responsibility for protecting land rights defenders and, in addition to investigating the killing of Mauricio Esquivel, implement several important steps: (1) develop mechanisms to stop the murders, violent dispossession, criminalization, persecution, and threats against land rights defenders, (2) investigate the criminalization of defenders who are being labeled as "targets of extermination," (3) instruct representatives of the justice system to abide by the law and not act biasedly in favor of powerful groups that have historically violated the rights of the peasant sector, and (4) instruct the National Police to desist from the siege against land rights defenders

You can read the full letter below. 

We wrote to the human rights ombudsman of El Salvador and a regional justice of the peace to express our concerns over the criminalization of five water defenders in Cabañas Department and call for their immediate release from pre-trial detention.

Arrested on January 11, by order of the attorney general, were: Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez, Teodoro Antonio Pacheco (director of ADES, Association for Social-Economic Development of El Salvador), and Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega (legal advisor for ADES).

The arrests appear to be politically motivated. For months, the government has led a state offensive against civil society organizations, which, in the case of ADES, could be related to the current administration’s reported intentions to resume mining exploitation projects. These individuals are active in the National Roundtable on Metallic Mining and were among the leaders of the successful campaign that convinced the Salvadoran legislature to unanimously pass a ban on open-pit mining of metals in 2017 to save the nation's rivers. Now, under enormous pressure to find new sources of revenue, the government is reportedly considering overturning the historic ban on metallic mining.

We wrote to officials in Colombia urging an investigation into death threats against Darnelly Rodríguez, director of Centro Pazífico in Cali, Valle del Cauca Department, and  nominee for the 2022 Colombia National Human Rights Prize. On December 24, 2022, she received a death threat from the paramilitary organization Autodefensas Gaitanistas (AGC, or Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces) that listed her by name.  This is one of multiple threats that Darnelly Rodríguez has received from the AGC since the Centro Pazífico opened. These threats have been sent by email, left at public buildings, even delivered to her home. Earlier this year, her office at the Centro Pazífico was broken into; files and computer thumb drives were taken. 

Serving one of the regions most affected by Colombia's political violence, Centro Pazífico, is a refuge for social leaders fleeing violence.

We wrote to officials in Honduras about the attempted assassination of yet another Indigenous Lenca community leader, Nery Gonzáez, of the Achiotal community in Siguatepeque, in the department of Comayagua.

Nery González is one of the campesino leaders in Achiotal who is part of an effort to reclaim lands in order to plant food crops. On December 11, an unknown assailant shot him in the head while he was walking into his home. He was transferred to Hospital Escuela in Tegucigalpa where he was conscious but in serious condition. In spite of the fact that he was attacked at his home, by an unknown armed man, the police never came to his home to investigate and, as of December 15, had not yet conducted any investigation into the facts of the case.

Due to the farmers’ work there of reclaiming their ancestral lands, residents of Achiotal have been criminalized and persecuted by large private landowners, the National Police and the military. In October 2020, the National Police entered—at dawn—several houses without a search warrant and arrested six members of COPINH (Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras). They were previously victims of multiple attacks in order to evict them from the land. Two years later they are still facing unjust criminal charges.