source: NACLA
On July 6, over 200 police officers entered the Garífuna community of San Juan to carry out an eviction. They deployed tear gas, fired live ammunition and arbitrarily detained five human rights defenders and members of the Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña (OFRANEH)—Deinor Osmany Mejía Arzu, Irbin Rene López Cortes, Carlos Enrique Fernández Guzmán, Onil Rigoberto Hernández Zelaya and Sara Abigail Acosta. While security forces eventually withdrew and those arrested have since been released, no one has been held accountable and the community members are now facing charges of “aggravated usurpation.”
The incident took place in the context of Decree No. 107-2026, the Law for the Strengthening and Protection of the Agro-Industrial Sector, Energy Projects, Tourism, Livestock, and Small Agricultural Producers, which was enacted on June 26 by the new right-wing administration of Nasry Asfura. The law affords special protections to strategic investment projects in the name of national security. This eviction is the first carried out within the framework of the new legislation, and it contradicts a police directive issued on June 27, which explicitly states that Indigenous and Tribal lands would be exempt from such measures, in accordance with ILO Convention 169, ratified by Honduras in 1995.
IACHR Rulings and Historical Violence
“The police are waging war on the Garífuna community,” said Miriam Miranda, President of OFRANEH, on social media. In a press release published the day of the eviction, the organization said that criminalisation had reached an unacceptable level: “This action represents a profound injustice and grave violation of human rights and international obligations of the State of Honduras.”
Such cases of state violence are nothing new for the Garífuna people. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) has ruled against Honduras on four separate occasions for violating the collective territorial and human rights of Garífuna communities, including in the community of San Juan as recently as 2023. Edy Tabora, a human rights lawyer and co-founder of the law firm Bufete Justicia Para los Pueblos (Justice for the Peoples) says that these rulings constitute international recognition of the ancestral nature of the land and establish that it must be returned to the Garífuna people after decades of litigation.
Tabora also pointed to the case of Punta Gorda, Roatán. In November 2022, Honduran military and police forcibly removed 110 Garífuna people from their homes in the first ‘preventive eviction’ under the country’s revised penal code. “The first Garífuna community, when the Garífuna people arrived from San Vicente, was established in this place,” said Tabora. “So the case was symbolic because the first eviction under this reform was applied to reclaimed Garífuna territory, and community members were accused of usurpation.” The eviction took place during the administration of former President Xiomara Castro, of the left-wing Libre party, whose campaign featured far-reaching promises to the country’s 48 Garífuna communities.
These rulings constitute international recognition of the ancestral nature of the land and establish that it must be returned to the Garífuna people after decades of litigation.
Protecting the Interests of the Powerful
Tabora explained that there are four main components to the new legislation. The most concerning is the first, which declares land dedicated to the agro-industrial, energy and tourism sectors to be immune to expropriation, effectively excluding them from agrarian reform processes or being declared of public interest. The second component relaxes environmental licensing procedures, ordering the immediate issue of permits. The third and fourth components order the police and the military to execute eviction orders without these needing to be seen by a judge or associated with any criminal proceedings, and to repress any protests or demonstrations that might affect the circulation of agricultural products or raw materials.
“It’s like a king’s edict, a dictatorial edict,” said Tabora. “It puts the security forces at the service of private interests. […] There are thousands upon thousands of murders in the country that have been reported but not investigated. The corporate government has the capacity to mobilize 1000 police officers to evict a few families who have nothing and throw them out on the street but not to deal with profound social problems: femicides, murders, extortion, drugs and people trafficking.”
Over 30 Honduran grassroots organisations, including OFRANEH, the Central Nacional de Trabajadores del Campo (CNTC) and Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisations of Honduras (Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras, COPINH), described the law as “a regulatory framework designed to protect the interests of powerful economic groups over the rights of the Honduran people.”
State Institutions as ‘Agents of Dispossession’
San Juan, the first documented eviction under the new law, is not an isolated case. According to a report published by the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CESPAD) on July 9, it is the sixth eviction this year after those in La Estanzuela, Tegucigalpa; El Palmar, Villanueva, and Pueblo Nuevo, Cortés; and Villa de San Antonio, Comayagua. Together, these evictions forcibly removed over 530 families—some of whom had lived there for more than 20 years—through the use of psychological violence, the destruction of homes, tear gas, burning subsistence crops, arbitrary arrests and the detention and separation of minors from their families.
The enactment of the law also comes amidst a series of other incidents of violence against workers and activists. On May 1, CNTC members were threatened at a demonstration. On May 21, 20 rural workers were massacred on an oil palm plantation in the community of Rigores, Bajo Aguán. On June 3, four Indigenous land defenders were sentenced for usurpation following the eviction of their community from their ancestral lands in June 2023. Then, on July 8, María Hilda Martel, a community leader from Rigores was arbitrarily detained, and on July 12, heavily armed men entered the Garífuna community of Tornabé and threatened community members in what they described as an attempt to steal their land.
The enactment of the law also comes amidst a series of other incidents of violence against workers and activists.
On August 5, a second eviction was carried out in the community of Tulito, Choluteca, forcibly removing 86 families from their homes. Denia Castillo, a lawyer with the Red de Abogadas Defensoras de Honduras (RADDH) who is working with the community, said that the companies claiming to own the land had filed for eviction on six previous occasions but their claims were dismissed due to irregularities.
In this context, Decree No. 107-2026 and the National Police Circular DGPN-(S/D)-No. 009-2026—which orders the security forces to act immediately on “illegal occupations”—merely serve to entrench an existing state policy of dispossession, repression and criminalisation.
“We’re seeing a process of re-concentration of power”, said Kevin Isidro of CESPAD, in an event for La Vía Campesina. According to Isidro, “the capture of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the judicial system and the Ministries of Security and Defence has the objective of using these institutional capacities to promote and defend certain interests. (…) In this sense state institutions act as agents of dispossession.”
Popular Resistance and Legal Action
In response to these developments, a broad coalition of grassroots movements representing Afro-descendant, Indigenous, and campesino peoples have come together to demand the repeal of Decree No. 107-2026 and an end to the violent dispossession of their communities. On social media, OFRANEH declared a state of “peaceful rebellion and permanent mobilization” after temporarily blocking the CA-13 highway on July 15, while a mass protest was held on July 20, Lempira Day, in honour of the Lenca Indigenous leader who fought to defend his people against Spanish colonisers in 1536.
As well as taking to the streets, social movements are pursuing legal action, having first appeared before the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ) on June 16 to present a petition of habeas corpus in favour of 217 territories across the country. This was followed by a petition for a writ of protection on June 30. More recently, on July 29, OFRANEH and over 40 other organisations gathered outside the National Congress to announce that they were bringing a lawsuit against the individuals responsible for the law, for “promoting legislation that hands the territories and commons of the country over to powerful economic groups, in open violation of the Constitution of the Republic, human rights and national interest.”
Meanwhile, the CNTC has submitted an urgent complaint to the United Nations Human Rights Council, highlighting the violation of rights recognized in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), as well as ILO Convention 169 and the rulings of the IACHR in favour of Garífuna communities. Dozens of international organisations have also put pressure on the Honduran government in an open letter, calling on it to guarantee compliance with the IACHR rulings, “suspend application of the law and the implementation of any new eviction or action that may threaten the fundamental rights of campesino communities and ancestral communities and peoples of Honduras,” and take all necessary measures to ensure the protection of land and territorial defenders in the country.
“Our struggle answers exclusively to defence of the Constitution, compliance with the four international rulings of the IACHR in the cases of Garífuna communities, [and the protection of] human rights and territories vis-à-vis a model of unbridled capitalism that promotes dispossession of peoples; criminalises, persecutes, assassinates and disappears those who defend their territories; and hands national patrimony over to powerful national and transnational economic groups,” wrote OFRANEH and other social movements in a press release issued on July 29. “For this reason, we will continue to promote new legal, political and protest actions until we achieve the repeal of these laws and full respect for the rights of our peoples,” they concluded.
