MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Oct 18 (IPS) – Juan López was gunned down on 14 September. An environmental activist, neighborhood chief and member of the Municipal Committee in Defence of the Commons and Public Items of Tocoa, he was the most recent sufferer of extractive greed in Honduras. Communities defending the rivers that move by the Bajo Aguán area have seen a number of of their leaders assassinated.
In 2023, the Inter-American Fee on Human Rights granted precautionary measures to López and 29 different members of the Municipal Committee and the Justice for the Folks Regulation Agency. In response, the state of Honduras was speculated to seek the advice of with these affected and undertake all essential measures to guard their rights to life and private integrity and guarantee they may proceed their human rights work with out worry of retaliation. It clearly did not 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.#JusticiaParaJuanLopezpic.twitter.com/JpmuWjZHg8
— CIVICUS Español (@CIVICUSespanol) September 24, 2024
Environmental battle
López was one of many leaders of resistance in opposition to mining within the Carlos Escaleras Nationwide Park. When the primary licence was awarded in 2014, over 20 native communities started organising, establishing the Tocoa Municipal Committee in 2015.
In Guapinol, close to Tocoa, folks fashioned a Neighborhood Council in 2018. Since complaints with Congress, courts and authorities companies bought nowhere, locals started an occupation, blocking entry to equipment for the Los Pinares mining firm. The military and police cleared the camp twice, after which the corporate accused 32 protesters of arson, injury, unlawful affiliation, kidnapping and usurpation. López was amongst these charged, accused of being the chief of an alleged unlawful affiliation.
López and 11 different activists who got here ahead voluntarily to testify have been detained for a number of days, whereas eight others have been remanded in custody, spending two and a half years in pretrial detention. They have been finally launched in February 2022.
Criminalisation continued: in March 2020, the Court docket of Appeals reopened the instances in opposition to López and 4 of his colleagues. They have been subjected to smear campaigns and threatened by folks related to Los Pinares. Legal professionals defending the activists and civil society teams supporting them have been harassed, and area people members have been intimidated.
Yr after 12 months, International Witness has discovered Honduras to be one of many deadliest international locations on this planet for land rights and environmental defenders. General, greater than 160 folks have been killed within the area since 2010. Deadly violence has additionally affected journalists reporting on unlawful extractive practices, together with Luis Alfonso Teruel Vega, killed in January after reporting on deforestation.
Entrenched financial energy
Entrenched corrupt networks of political and financial pursuits that act with impunity have lengthy been the most important hazard to Honduran environmental and land rights defenders. There have been hopes for change with the November 2021 election of leftist chief Xiomara Castro as president.
However whereas political energy can change fingers shortly, financial energy is extra everlasting. Following the change of presidency, company energy remained intact and extraction continues to be a key supply of elite wealth. Networks of corruption stayed in place, encompassing important parts of state establishments, together with some belonging to Castro’s occasion Libertad y Refundación (Libre).
López was a Tocoa municipal councillor for Libre, and had lately urged the resignation of Tocoa’s mayor, additionally from Libre, accused of getting hyperlinks with armed teams working for extractive firms and taking advantage of facilitating unlawful mining in protected areas. The mayor ignored a public city corridor assembly’s determination by giving the inexperienced gentle to an enormous energy plant, a part of a megaproject that additionally consists of an open-cast mine and iron oxide processing facility.
Castro ran on a change platform, and when sworn in in January 2022, promised ‘no extra permits for open mines or exploitation of our minerals, no extra concessions to take advantage of our rivers, watersheds, nationwide 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’ homicide, a former government of a hydroelectric firm, was sentenced to over 22 years in jail.
In a promising transfer to counter corruption and impunity, Castro led a reform of the choice course of for Supreme Court docket judges so that they’d be chosen from a merit-based checklist drawn up by an impartial committee. Castro’s predecessor was extradited to the USA on drug fees.
Castro introduced plans to revive the Mission to Help the Battle in opposition to Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH), created by an settlement with the Group of American States in response to 2016 anti-corruption protests however disbanded 4 years later. In December 2022, the federal government signed a memorandum of understanding with the UN to work in direction of establishing a mechanism in opposition to corruption and impunity. A staff of UN consultants got here to evaluate its feasibility, and a few early progress was made in repealing legal guidelines and decrees that impeded corruption investigations and prosecutions.
However key reforms stay pending, and the proposal to recreate MACCIH or an identical UN-led physique by no means took off. The promised safety mechanism for human rights defenders and journalists, meant to interchange the prevailing ineffective one which lacks monetary sources and skilled employees with human rights coaching, hasn’t materialised.
The militarisation of safety has made issues worse. In November 2022, Castro declared a state of emergency to cope with hovering ranges of crime and gang violence. Prolonged a number of instances, it stays in power. Safety positive aspects have come at an unacceptable human rights value.
Civil society calls for
Civil society condemned López’s killing as a part of a sample of violence in opposition to environmental defenders and known as out the state’s systematic failure to fulfil its responsibility to make sure their security. It urged the federal government to hunt the help of regional and worldwide human rights our bodies to analyze the information and maintain the perpetrators to account.
Ten days after López’s homicide, the Public Prosecutor’s Workplace issued an injunction in opposition to folks linked to 2 firms owned by the identical group, Ecotek and Los Pinares. The workplace of the UN Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights welcomed the choice, as did the Tocoa Municipal Committee, though activists additionally warned that the injunction elevated the danger to human rights defenders. The committee reiterated its name for the state to take duty for his or her safety and accountability for all crimes dedicated in opposition to them.
On 4 October, the police arrested López’s alleged killer and considered one of his accomplices. However that is solely a primary step, and plenty of extra should comply with. It is too late for López, however bringing the perpetrators of his crime to justice – together with those that ordered and profited from it – might save the lives of many extra.
The federal government additionally wants to determine an efficient safety mechanism able to responding to early warnings, somewhat than making an attempt to treatment severe violations after they’ve occurred.
And even then, it will not be sufficient if the foundation reason for violence – extractivist corruption – stays unaddressed. In February 2024, the federal government issued a decree to guard areas of the Carlos Escaleras Nationwide Park. Native communities welcomed the choice, however proceed to demand that every one components of the megaproject be cancelled instantly.
That is a call that may require loads of muscle, as a result of it might damage very highly effective pursuits. If Castro hasn’t been co-opted and decides to place neighborhood rights earlier than enterprise pursuits, she’ll want robust worldwide help to face any likelihood.
Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Analysis Specialist, co-director and author for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.
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