Environmental Human Rights: News & Updates

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 authorities in Guatemala to protest the forced displacement of the Maya Q’eqchi’ community of Chapín Abajo in El Estor, Izabal Department, carried out by agents of the National Civilian Police (PNC) and paramilitary forces.

On December 6, Guatemalan security forces arrived to carry out an eviction on behalf of the palm oil company NaturAceites, a member of the international Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. Together with paramilitary forces, they raided homes of families, stealing their food and personal belongings. They fired tear gas on the residents. An investigative delegation arrived later and confirmed that several people were injured. A 17-year-old was seriously wounded and hospitalized in critical condition. At least one other young man was missing. Two other men suffered gunshot wounds. Several women were beaten and sustained injuries to their faces and bodies.

During the past several months, several Q'eqchi' communities have been evicted in the region of Alta Verapaz, Izabal and Petén.

We wrote to authorities in Guatemala urging protection for Luis Adolfo Ich Choc, an elected representative of the Ancestral Council of the Q'eqchi' People of El Estor, Izabal Department. In recent months, Luis Adolfo Ich Choc has been the victim of robbery (September 16) and a beating that left him with a fractured shoulder (October 19). He is being targeted because of his active role in the organized resistance to the El Fénix nickel mine.

The nickel mining operation has been a source of contention and violence for many years in El Estor, a community where 90% of the inhabitants are indigenous Maya Q’eqchi’. The Swiss-Russian consortium Solway Investment Group purchased the mine from HudBay Minerals in 2011; the mine is operated by its subsidiary, the Guatemalan Nickel Company (CGN). For the past 15 years, impacted residents have reiterated that the Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM) did not obtain their free, prior, and informed consent as required by national and international law (ILO Convention 169, the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention of 1989). In its ruling in 2019, the Constitutional Court of Guatemala ratified the right to consultation and resolved that the mining company had to suspend its mining activity.  The company later carried out a “consultation” but excluded many key actors, including the fishing communities and the local indigenous authorities. The mining operations continue in defiance of the spirit of the court ruling.