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Environmental Human Rights: News & Updates
News Article
June 17, 2021
News Article
May 28, 2021
Please see a summary of the six letters we sent to heads of state and other high-level officials in Colombia, El Salvador, and Honduras, urging their swift action in response to human rights abuses occurring in their countries. We join with civil society groups in Latin America to: -protect people living under threat -demand investigations into human rights crimes -bring human rights criminals to justice IRTF’s Rapid Response Network volunteers write letters in response to urgent human rights cases each month. We send copies of these letters to US ambassadors, embassy human rights officers, the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, regional representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and desk officers at the US State Department. To read the letters, see https://www.irtfcleveland.org/content/rrn, or ask us to mail you hard copies.
News Article
May 27, 2021
After years of organizing by environmental defense groups in Honduras--and solidarity actions by groups in the US and Canada--the US government withdrew financial support this week from a proposed Río Jilamito dam in Honduras that is at the center of a simmering conflict between local residents and developers. Two opponents of the project have been killed. The decision by the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, (DFC), which provides funding for private-sector projects, marked a victory for the activist groups in Honduras and the United States that had urged the agency to drop the project.
RRN Letter
May 16, 2021
Five thousand members of the Indigenous Tolupán community of Agalteca in Yoro Department are being threatened with eviction. Tolupán lands contain precious resources, such as mahogany forests, silver, and iron oxide. To seize those resources, those with economic interests carry out attempts at forcible evictions (some successful). As a consequence of government concessions to mining companies over the past eight years, Tolupán communities have experienced an increase in evictions, as well as destruction of their land and waterways. Those who resist outside encroachment on their ancestral territories suffer attacks, murders, and judicial harassment. Over the past twenty years, forty Tolupán community members have been murdered.
RRN Letter
May 14, 2021
The National Electric Power Company (ENEE) has been granting licenses to private companies to construct thermoelectric generation plants without the prior consultation and consent of impacted populations. In Baracoa, the National Police broke up a demonstration of residents along highway CA-13 by firing tear gas canisters at the residents. Residents are also concerned that they will not be given the opportunity to attend town meetings at which final approval for the electric generation plant will be given. Residents near other thermoelectric plants in Honduras face health risks from being exposed to constant emissions from turbines, including emissions from fuels so toxic that they are banned in other countries.
RRN Letter
May 12, 2021
National Police (and suspected military personnel as well) are waging armed violence against members of the Tolupán indigenous community of San Francisco de Locomapa in Yoro Department. On May 5, National Police fired on their encampment (Campamento Digno por la Defensa del Bosque y el Territorio Tolupán) that was set up to protect a pine forest against illegal logging. Norma Yackelin Ávila suffered a gunshot. We are unsure how many others might have been wounded.
RRN Letter
May 11, 2021
A man was approached by unknown persons on the streets of the Garífuna community Nueva Armenia and threatened: “if you do not want to die, stop hanging around Mabel Robledo, because we have already been authorized them to kill her." A half-hour earlier, an unknown individual entered Mabel Robledo's place of business and threatened: “…we are going to kill you.” This occurred after Mabel Robledo denounced before local and national officials the appropriation of ancestral Garífuna territories by palm growers and the extraction of sand from the Papaloteca River by drug traffickers.
Content Page
May 10, 2021
Dear Friends,
We’re contacting you again to ask urgently for your help to stop new sanctions on Nicaragua. There is currently a bi-partisan bill in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called the RENACER Act that will impose a new set of sanctions on Nicaragua (Illegal coercive measures). Please see talking points below for background information on the RENACER Act.
News Article
May 7, 2021
On April 2, INDEPAZ (Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo de la Paz) documented the 24th massacre of 2021. The three victims in La Pata, Huila Department, belonged to the same family: 55-year-old Luis Eliber Quintero Trujillo and his sons, 32-year-old Ricardo and 29-year-old Luis. By April 26, the 32nd massacre was recorded. It occurred in the rural area of Sonsón, Antioquia Department, where paramilitary groups have recently intensified their activities, particularly around control of illegal mining operations. Three people were shot dead at 9:40pm on Sunday night, April 25. The victims were Yulieth Natalia Díaz Carmona (age 23), Julián Vanegas Marulanda (age 26), and Michel Daiana Sánchez (age 13).
RRN Letter
April 30, 2021
Juan María Cruz is a member of Triunfeño Front in Defense of Life and the Social Environmental Movement of the South for Life (MASS-Vida, Movimiento Ambientalista Social del Sur por la Vida). He was threatened with a firearm by individuals linked to landowners in the logging industry in the community of Santa Catarina in El Triunfo municipality, Choluteca Department. MASS-Vida works to preserve land, water, beaches, and forests in Valle and Choluteca Departments, putting them at odds with companies engaged in extraction of natural resources. As a result, members of MASS-Vida have been subject to criminalization, persecution and selective assassinations, which involve the military, police, and paramilitary forces that are defending the interests of extractivist companies.
