Honduras: News & Updates

Campesino organizers in the Bajo Aguán Valley of Honduras persist in their struggle for access to land to to grow food for their families. The challenges are daunting: false criminalization of their leaders and continued assassinations. Long-standing land conflicts between campesinos and businesspersons in the Bajo Aguán have placed campesino leaders at serious risk for many years. Despite the granting of precautionary protective measures to 123 leaders in the region by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the killings continue. Assassinated in recent weeks were: Santos Marcelo Torres, former member of the campesino organization Movimiento Campesino Fundación Gregorio Chávez (MCRCG, also known as “Gregorio Chávez”) (June 26, 2021) and Juan Manuel Moncada, a recent leader of “Gregorio Chávez” (July 6, 2021). Falsely criminalized are two current leaders of “Gregorio Chávez”: Jaime Adali Cabrera del Cid and Hipólito Rivas. We demand that the Honduran Council of Private Enterprise (COHEP) stop making statements that stigmatize and falsely accuse the land defenders in the Bajo Aguán. We demand that the government of Honduras fully implement precautionary protective measures for land defenders in the Bajo Aguán Valley.

Police in Honduras routinely use violence to repress freedom of expression. On August 1, while reporting for TVC Corporation, police officers in Intibucá shoved journalist Henry Fiallos to the ground and broke his mobile phone. Henry Fiallos had been receiving death threats (threatening to kill his children) because of his reporting on the case of Keyla Martínez (cf IRTF RRN letter February 15, 2021), who was killed in police custody in February. This is not the first time that police attacked Henry Fiallos. In July 2020, while the journalist and his cameraman were covering an attempted escape of inmates from La Esperanza prison, a police officer was recorded on video hitting the cameraman on his right arm to prevent him from recording the unfolding news events. We demand an immediate investigation and disciplinary action against the police who assaulted journalist Henry Fiallos.

The government of Honduras—in collusion with mining companies—continues to harass and criminalize environmental defenders. On July 23 the National Police unjustly detained (and, fortunately, later released) Reynaldo Domínguez. Reynaldo is one of many environmental defenders in the northern coastal departments of Honduras who continue to defend the Guapinol River and advocate for the release of the Guapinol 8—eight environmental defenders who have been in pre-trial detention since September 2019. He is active with the Committee Pro-Defense for the Common Good, which is working to get the government to cancel the environmental license granted to the company Inversiones Los Pinares to operate an iron oxide mine within the Montaña de Botaderos National Park. It is widely understood that the extraction of iron oxide is intended for the production of steel by Nucor Corporation, which is based in North Carolina in the United States.

Members of the Environmental Committee of the Siria Valley live with constant threat. In 2019, during an in-country visit by delegates of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), environmentalist Olga Velázquez gave testimony that she was being subjected to intimidation and surveillance by strange men at night. Flash forward two years later. At approximately 8:00pm on July 28, five men dressed in Preventive Police uniforms arrived at her house in Cedros municipality, Francisco Morazán Department. They did not arrive in a police patrol car. Olga recognized the civilian car as one similar to one parked in front of her house a few days prior. In an act of intimidation, three of the men entered her house without justification or confirming their identities.