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Honduras: News & Updates
Honduras did not experience civil war in the 1980s, but its geography (bordering El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua) made it a key location for US military operations: training Salvadoran soldiers, a base for Nicaraguan contras, military exercises for US troops. The notorious Honduran death squad Battalion 316 was created, funded and trained by the US. The state-sponsored terror resulted in the forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings of approximately 200 people during the 1980s. Many more were abducted and tortured. The 2009 military coup d’etat spawned a resurgence of state repression against the civilian population that continues today.
Learn more here:
News Article
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!
News Article
November 12, 2021
Honduras will hold presidential, legislative, and local elections November 28th under a cloud of concerns. An array of presidential and legislative candidates are competing who habe allegations against them of corruption and connections to money laundering and drug trafficking. Violence stalks the process. Thirty candidates and close family members have been killed.
News Article
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.
News Article
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.
RRN Case Update
October 31, 2021
October 2021 - RRN Letters Summary
Please see below a summary of the letters we sent to heads of state and other high-level officials in Colombia, Guatemala, 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 (RRN) volunteers write six 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 on 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
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.
RRN Letter
October 24, 2021
We wrote to officials in Honduras expressing our outrage about violence waged against three LGBTI leaders in three areas of the country: Erika Tatiana Martínez García, who was murdered in her home on September 26 (Copán Department), Fausto Vásquez, whose bed was set on fire on September 30 (La Paz Department), and Victoria Rodríguez, who was beaten in her home on October 7 (Comayagua Department). LGBTI rights groups report that 390 LGBTI people have been murdered in Honduras in the past 12 years, including 17 this year. In only nine percent of the cases has there been a murder conviction; more than 90 percent of the cases remain in impunity. Tatiana's murder, Fausto’s harassment, and Vicky’s attack must all be seen as transgressions against protections that human rights defenders should receive. The government of Honduras should adhere to the ruling handed down by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (June 28, 2021) when it found the State responsible for the murder of transwoman Vicky Hernández on June 28, 2009. There must be accountability and an end to the impunity provided to the perpetrators of these crimes.
RRN Letter
October 23, 2021
We wrote to officials in Honduras about a pattern of violence being inflicted on elected officials and candidates of the opposition LIBRE party (Freedom and Refoundation Party). A mayoral candidate for the municipality of Santa Ana de Yusguare in Choluteca, Nery Fernando Reyes, was shot to death on October 8. The following day, there was an attempted killing of Olivia Marcela Zúniga Cáceres, a LIBRE party congresswoman, at her home in La Esperanza, Intibucá. The legislator is the daughter of Berta Cáceres, the indigenous environmental defender who was assassinated in March 2016. According to the National Observatory on Violence at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (ONV-UNAH), 15 people linked to politics have been murdered from December 2020 to September 15, 2021. The assassination of Nery Fernando Reyes Pineda and the attempted assassination of Olivia Marcela Zúniga Cáceres are recent examples of an ongoing climate of anti-LIBRE hate crimes leading up to the presidential elections, which are scheduled for November 28.
News Article
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.
News Article
October 13, 2021
The thirteen Catholic bishops pointed out that the rule of law is essential for the rehabilitation of democracy, which is why the "good work" of three elements must be guaranteed: the participation of the people through the vote, the actions of the political parties and their leaders; and finally the actions of the electoral authorities. They asked citizens to overcome "feelings of indifference, apathy and skepticism," go to the polls urgently and elect "honest, responsible and sensitive candidates to the needs of the people." They outlined the vote as a sacred action "that you cannot give to those who do not deserve it."