Honduras: News & Updates

The Honduran people will participate massively in these elections as an expression of social exasperation from the deepening of social inequality, the impoverishment that now impacts 73% of the population, the migration crisis, the systematic violation of human rights, the criminalization of social protest, the multiple expressions of violence in general and in particular against girls and women. Honduras will not change at the ballot box but voting against the dictatorship that governs us will be one step. The majority of the Honduran people will vote to reject these accumulated ills.

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.