Crerdit: Orlando Sierra/AFP via Getty Images
By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Oct 18 2024 – Juan López was gunned down on 14 September. An environmental activist, community leader and member of the Municipal Committee in Defence of the Commons and Public Goods of Tocoa, he was the latest victim of extractive greed in Honduras. Communities protecting the rivers that flow through the Bajo Aguán region have seen several of their leaders assassinated.
In 2023, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granted precautionary measures to López and 29 other members of the Municipal Committee and the Justice for the People Law Firm. In response, the state of Honduras was supposed to consult with those affected and adopt all necessary measures to protect their rights to life and personal integrity and ensure they could continue their human rights work without fear of retaliation. It clearly didn’t do any of that.
🕯️Hoy se cumplen 10 días tras el asesinato de Juan López, defensor ambientalista de @guapinolre y regidor de Tocoa.
Exigimos justicia para él y para todas las víctimas de la lucha por los derechos ambientales en #Honduras.#JusticiaParaJuanLopez pic.twitter.com/JpmuWjZHg8— CIVICUS Español (@CIVICUSespanol) September 24, 2024
Environmental conflict
López was one of the leaders of resistance against mining in the Carlos Escaleras National Park. When the first licence was awarded in 2014, over 20 local communities began organising, establishing the Tocoa Municipal Committee in 2015.
In Guapinol, near Tocoa, people formed a Community Council in 2018. Since complaints with Congress, courts and government agencies got nowhere, locals began an occupation, blocking access to machinery for the Los Pinares mining company. The army and police cleared the camp twice, and then the company accused 32 protesters of arson, damage, illegal association, kidnapping and usurpation. López was among those charged, accused of being the leader of an alleged illegal association.
López and 11 other activists who came forward voluntarily to testify were detained for several days, while eight others were remanded in custody, spending two and a half years in pretrial detention. They were eventually released in February 2022.
Criminalisation continued: in March 2020, the Court of Appeals reopened the cases against López and four of his colleagues. They were subjected to smear campaigns and threatened by people associated with Los Pinares. Lawyers defending the activists and civil society groups supporting them were harassed, and local community members were intimidated.
Year after year, Global Witness has found Honduras to be one of the deadliest countries in the world for land rights and environmental defenders. Overall, more than 160 people have been killed in the region since 2010. Lethal violence has also affected journalists reporting on illegal extractive practices, including Luis Alfonso Teruel Vega, killed in January after reporting on deforestation.
Entrenched economic power
Entrenched corrupt networks of political and economic interests that act with impunity have long been the biggest danger to Honduran environmental and land rights defenders. There were hopes for change with the November 2021 election of leftist leader Xiomara Castro as president.
But while political power can change hands quickly, economic power is more permanent. Following the change of government, corporate power remained intact and extraction continues to be a key source of elite wealth. Networks of corruption stayed in place, encompassing significant elements of state institutions, including some belonging to Castro’s party Libertad y Refundación (Libre).
López was a Tocoa municipal councillor for Libre, and had recently urged the resignation of Tocoa’s mayor, also from Libre, accused of having links with armed groups working for extractive companies and profiting from facilitating illegal mining in protected areas. The mayor ignored a public town hall meeting’s decision by giving the green light to a huge power plant, part of a megaproject that also includes an open-cast mine and iron oxide processing facility.
Castro ran on a change platform, and when sworn in in January 2022, promised ‘no more permits for open mines or exploitation of our minerals, no more concessions to exploit our rivers, watersheds, national parks and cloud forests’. She promised freedom for the Guapinol political prisoners and justice for Berta Cáceres, a high-profile Indigenous environmental defender murdered in 2016.
Castro’s first steps raised hopes. The Guapinol defenders regained their freedom, and in June 2022 the mastermind of Cáceres’ murder, a former executive of a hydroelectric company, was sentenced to over 22 years in prison.
In a promising move to counter corruption and impunity, Castro led a reform of the selection process for Supreme Court judges so they’d be chosen from a merit-based list drawn up by an independent committee. Castro’s predecessor was extradited to the USA on drug charges.
Castro announced plans to revive the Mission to Support the Fight against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH), created through an agreement with the Organization of American States in response to 2016 anti-corruption protests but disbanded four years later. In December 2022, the government signed a memorandum of understanding with the UN to work towards establishing a mechanism against corruption and impunity. A team of UN experts came to assess its feasibility, and some early progress was made in repealing laws and decrees that impeded corruption investigations and prosecutions.
But key reforms remain pending, and the proposal to recreate MACCIH or a similar UN-led body never took off. The promised protection mechanism for human rights defenders and journalists, meant to replace the existing ineffective one that lacks financial resources and experienced staff with human rights training, hasn’t materialised.
The militarisation of security has made things worse. In November 2022, Castro declared a state of emergency to deal with soaring levels of crime and gang violence. Extended several times, it remains in force. Security gains have come at an unacceptable human rights cost.
Civil society demands
Civil society condemned López’s killing as part of a pattern of violence against environmental defenders and called out the state’s systematic failure to fulfil its duty to ensure their safety. It urged the government to seek the support of regional and international human rights bodies to investigate the facts and hold the perpetrators to account.
Ten days after López’s murder, the Public Prosecutor’s Office issued an injunction against people linked to two companies owned by the same group, Ecotek and Los Pinares. The office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights welcomed the decision, as did the Tocoa Municipal Committee, although activists also warned that the injunction increased the risk to human rights defenders. The committee reiterated its call for the state to take responsibility for their protection and accountability for all crimes committed against them.
On 4 October, the police arrested López’s alleged killer and one of his accomplices. But this is only a first step, and many more must follow. It’s too late for López, but bringing the perpetrators of his crime to justice – including those who ordered and profited from it – could save the lives of many more.
The government also needs to establish an effective protection mechanism capable of responding to early warnings, rather than trying to remedy serious violations after they’ve occurred.
And even then, it won’t be enough if the root cause of violence – extractivist corruption – remains unaddressed. In February 2024, the government issued a decree to protect areas of the Carlos Escaleras National Park. Local communities welcomed the decision, but continue to demand that all parts of the megaproject be cancelled immediately.
That’s a decision that would require a lot of muscle, because it would hurt very powerful interests. If Castro hasn’t been co-opted and decides to put community rights before business interests, she’ll need strong international support to stand any chance.
Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.
A longer version of this article is available here.
For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org.
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