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Environmental Human Rights: News & Updates

News Article
2021 IRTF Commemoration program book, recordings, highlights
November 17, 2021
Thank you to the more than 120 people who attended the IRTF annual Commemoration of the Martyrs online on Sunday, November 7. You helped to create a beautiful and moving tribute to human rights defenders throughout southern Mexico, Central America, and Colombia. Here you will find links to (1) Commemoration program book 2021, (2) Zoom recording of the event, (3) Facebook livestream recording, (4) playlist from the social hour, (5) an additional play list, (6) how you can add your name to urgent human rights letters, (7) donations for the Honduras support fund, (8) IRTF Legacy Circle planned giving fund, and (9) highlights from the speakers' presentations. Thank you!
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News Article
Guatemala: Indigenous mine opponents targeted in raids during state of siege in El Estor
November 15, 2021
In the midst of a long conflict and recent protest over a nickel mine in El Estor, in eastern Guatemala, police have carried out more than 40 raids and 60 arrests, and the government has declared a 30-day state of emergency. Indigenous Mayan opponents to the mine say they were never properly consulted about the mine and its impacts on their lands, livelihoods and lake, and protested on the town’s main road, refusing passage to mining vehicles. Four police were shot during the police crackdown on protests by what the government blames as armed protestors, although mine opponents say the assailants were not involved in the protest. There are concerns mining operations will pose environmental damages to Guatemala’s largest lake, home to diverse fish, bird, reptile and mammal species, including the endangered Guatemalan black howler monkey (Alouatta pigra).
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News Article
Colombia: Deforestation and Conflict
November 11, 2021
In the five years following its historic 2016 peace accord, Colombia has seen a surge of forest razing and land clearance amid continuing unrest in the countryside. The rate of tree loss, which greatly lowers the country’s chances of meeting its zero-deforestation goal by 2030, is tied to conflict and violence. These ties are complex. Deforestation began to rise soon after the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which had operated mostly from rural areas, declared a ceasefire in December 2014. It then gathered steam after the 2016 accord was signed. The rebels’ departure from their strongholds provided an opportunity for other insurgencies and organised crime to assert control. With state authority in the countryside still feeble, those groups pushed back the forest to expand enterprises like coca growing, cattle ranching, illegal gold mining and logging, sometimes working with legal businesses. To arrest the damage, Bogotá should fix its approach to prosecuting environmental crime, implement peace accord commitments relating to the environment and urgently bolster its natural resource management systems. (Bram Ebus, Crisis Group consultant for the Andes, investigates how deforestation in Colombia is often linked to conflict.)
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News Article
Honduras: Why Arbitrary Ruling to Move Guapinol Trial Location Is Repudiable
November 11, 2021

After the recent bond hearing concluded, the Guapinol water defenders were told that the court would rule on whether or not to release them within 24 hours, which is what the Criminal Procedural Code establishes. The family members of the defenders didn't wait for the ruling outside the court. They traveled by busloads more than an hour away to the jail in Olanchito to be near their loved ones, awaiting the decision. Late that night, after no news and after the Court clearly passed the established time to deliver its ruling, the families returned home. The following day, with still no news, they made another hour-long trip to the court in Trujillo. Outside, entire families and their communities congregated peacefully, under police watch. They shared food, chanted, and used the time to denounce the environmental destruction being caused by illegal mining in the Carlos Escaleras National Park by the Grupo Emco open-pit iron oxide mining project. They held posters and banners of their loved ones, hoping they would be finally freed after 26 months of detention deemed arbitrary by the UN.

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News Article
Honduras: Violent Infiltration
November 6, 2021
Daniel García received the text message, which showed the muzzle of an AK-47 above a blurry road, at 7:30 p.m. “You’re alive because God is great and powerful,” the sender wrote, “but I don’t think you’ll have the same luck this week. I’ll see you soon, love.” García knew the message was serious. Rumor had it he’d been placed on a kill list of five land rights activists in Honduras. The first of the five, his friend Juan Manuel Moncada, had been assassinated just four days earlier. The paramilitaries’ strategy begins with infiltrating social movements, killing off key members, and then installing armed groups inside communities to terrorize their residents into exile or silence, according to eyewitness testimony, interviews with more than a dozen local residents, and affidavits made on behalf of asylum-seekers in the U.S. If successful, the armed groups will extinguish land rights movements and seize back control of the palm oil lands the Dinant corporation claims it owns. Both Dinant and the paramilitaries have ties to Xatruch Special Forces base in Tocoa, being trained by members of the U.S. Army from Joint Task Force-Bravo.
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News Article
Guatemala: Town of El Estor Locked in Battle with El Fénix Nickel Mine
October 28, 2021

In 2017, a red slick spread over Lake Izabal, which the community blamed on pollution from a nickel mine, owned by Switzerland-based Solway Investments. In resulting protests, Cristobal Pop, 44, a fisherman was imprisoned, and his comrade Carlos Maaz shot dead. This month, the community of El Estor in Izabal Department resumed demonstrations, accusing CGN (the domestic subsidiary of Solway) of continuing to mine at El Fénix despite a 2019 Constitutional Court order for it to suspend operations. The court ruled in favor of local communities, who said they had not been consulted about the opening of the mine or its effects on them. The government was ordered to open fresh consultations, but the people of El Estor say they are being excluded.

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News Article
Honduras: ‘We can’t live like this’: climate shocks rain down on Honduras’s poorest
October 28, 2021
It was around dusk on the third consecutive day of heavy rain when the River Aguán burst its banks and muddy waters surged through the rural community of Chapagua in northeast Honduras, sweeping away crops, motorbikes and livestock.
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News Article
Honduras: Libres los defensores de la tierra José Santos Vijil y Víctor Vásquez
October 15, 2021
After four days of oral and public trial, today the indigenous Lenca campesinos, José Santos Vijil and Víctor Vásquez, were finally released, having been criminalized for their struggle in defense of the land and territory in the department of La Paz. Vijil and Vásquez had been in prison for nine months for false criminal charges of forced displacement. They were being charge under a law that was designed to prosecute the displacement caused by criminal gangs against communities and neighborhoods affected by their illegal activities. But the Public Ministry has illegally used this law to harass and prosecute defenders of human rights that defend their territory. They are now free to organize their defense from outside of prison. Their lawyer is Edy Tabora. The trial is to take place in Comayagua where both the Sentencing Court and the Court of Appeals are located.
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News Article
Honduras: Sentencing Court in Comayagua Denies Liberty to Environmental Defenders Víctor Vásquez & José Santos Vigil
October 13, 2021
Since December 2020, Víctor Vásquez, a member of the General Coordination of the Independent Lenca Indigenous Movement of La Paz Honduras (MILPAH), and Santos Vigil, member of the Nueva Esperanza Peasant Base, have been imprisoned in the Penal Center of La Paz, accused of the crime of forced displacement. Víctor accompanied the peasants of the Nueva Esperanza Base, but they were unjustly accused by the alleged owners of three crimes, of which the judge rejected two, but they remain deprived of liberty for the crime of forced displacement. The legislature created the crime of forced displacement to prosecute the displacement caused by criminal gangs against communities and neighborhoods affected by their illegal activities. But now the Public Ministry is using it to illegally harass and prosecute human rights defenders who defend their territory, who fight for protection the environment and access to land. The Coalition Against Impunity has denounced the criminalization of these Lenca environmental defenders.
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News Article
Honduras: There's a Plan of Genocide Against the Garífuna People
October 13, 2021
Excerpt: This is a time when the State is very clear that it is going to do everything possible to deprive the Garífuna community of its territory to hand it over to investors. That is why we reaffirm that there is a genocidal plan against the Garífuna people. And that is why we are making a call to see what is happening in Honduras. People have left the country en masse and continue to leave. The Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris, says “don't come.” However, the United States continues to support corrupt governments like this one, governments that violate human rights. We all have the right to migrate, but we also have the right to stay in the country and live well. Because this is a country where we could live in well-being, only that it is captured by a mafia that does not let us live.
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