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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.

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RRN Letter
RRN Letter: Honduras, 04/30/2021
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.
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RRN Letter
RRN Letter: Honduras, 04/22/2021
April 22, 2021
The Council for the Integral Development of Peasant Women (CODIMCA) has been outspoken against the government's embezzlement and diversion of more than 280 million dollars designated for agricultural projects to the 2013 electoral campaigns of major political parties. The women are being attacked in attempts to silence their voices that denounce corruption and demand justice. On April 14, armed men entered the CODIMCA office in Tegucigalpa seeking Yasmin López, general coordinator. When CODIMCA members refused to provide any information on the whereabouts of Yasmin López, they tied up and beat two colleagues from the technical team, searched the offices, and took several computers containing confidential information.
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News Article
Migrant Justice: Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala deploy troops to lower migration
April 12, 2021

*Thanks to The Associated Press for the article*

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration has struck an agreement with Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala to temporarily surge security forces to their borders in an effort to reduce the tide of migration to the U.S. border.

The agreement comes as the U.S. saw a record number of unaccompanied children attempting to cross the border in March, and the largest number of Border Patrol encounters overall with migrants on the southern border — just under 170,000 — since March 2001. 

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News Article
Environmental Human Rights: To Confront the U.S. Border Crisis, Save Central America’s Forests
April 10, 2021
As we continue to face a refugee crisis on the U.S. southern border, it is imperative to address the destabilizing threat posed by environmental degradation in Central America. In particular, climate change and illegal cattle ranching—often by organized crime and narcotrafficking entities—is driving forest destruction and lawlessness within Central America’s largest wildernesses, directly imperiling the physical, cultural, food and water security of local communities and Indigenous peoples.
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Event
Honduras: Repression, Corruption, Caravans, and Narco-Dictators
April 7, 2021
Dr. Dana Frank, a history professor at UC Santa Cruz, is an expert on Honduras and Honduras/US relations. She explains the current situation: why people are fleeing, the role of the US in supporting the narco-dictatorship, and legislative proposals pending in the US House and US Senate that would cut support to Honduran police/military, as well as to President Juan Orlando Hernández. She is author of Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (2005) . She is currently researching the AFL-CIO’s Cold War in Honduras, 1954-1979.
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RRN Letter
RRN Letter: Honduras, 3/25/2021
March 25, 2021
Juan Carlos Cerros Escalante, age 41, was president of the Nueva Granada Board of Trustees and a leader of the local Lenca indigenous community in his hometown of Chinda, Santa Bárbara Department. On March 21, unknown assailants fired 40 shots at him in front of his children as they were returning from his mother’s house in the village of Nueva Granada, municipality of San Antonio in Cortés Department. Juan Carlos Cerros Escalante led Communities United of Chinda, a local group opposing the “El Tornillito” hydroelectric dam that is being constructed by HIDROVOLCÁN (Hidroeléctrica El Volcán Company) in hamlets near the Rio Ulúa. This dam, which will be the second largest in Honduras, will mean the disappearance of ten communities of an indigenous Lenca population because the livestock, crops and houses of these two municipalities would drown, and their inhabitants would be forced to move.
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RRN Letter
RRN Letter: Honduras, 03/24/21
March 24, 2021
For the past few years, residents of El Guapinol have been organizing against the operations of an iron ore mine that is contaminating the Guapinol and San Pedro Rivers, water sources for populations across three departments in northern Honduras. Eight environmental defenders have been held in "pre-trial detention" since September 2019. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention stressed that there is no legal reason to hold these eight men in pre-trial detention and that there is no legal reason to prosecute them. The UN Working Group also recommended that those responsible for the illegal detention should be investigated, suggesting that the State is punishing them for exercising their legitimate rights in defending the environment.
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News Article
Environmental Human Rights: Indigenous anti-dam activist killed in Honduras
March 22, 2021

A Honduran Lenca Indigenous activist who helped led a fight against the construction of a dam has been killed. Juan Carlos Cerros Escalante led a local group called “Communities United,” which was active in hamlets near the Rio Ulúa and which opposed the El Tornillito hydroelectric dam. He was shot dead in front of his children. “We condemn the killing of yet another comrade and activist,” said Betty Vásquez, the coordinator of the Santa Barbara Environmental Movement. “It is not conceivable, it is not right, that they criminalize people, persecute people and later kill them for defending the land. We consider this a political assassination.”

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News Article
Honduras: Convicted in US Federal Court On Drug Trafficking And Weapons Charges
March 22, 2021

US Federal Court ruling: Geovanny Fuentes Ramirez, a native of Honduras, conspired with high-ranking Honduran politicians and military and National Police to operate a cocaine lab in Honduras and distribute cocaine using air and maritime routes. FUENTES RAMIREZ paid a bribe of at least approximately $25,000 to Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado (“JOH”), who was at the time the president of the Honduran National Congress, and allowed JOH to access millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine from FUENTES RAMIREZ’s laboratory. JOH instructed FUENTES RAMIREZ to report directly to JOH’s brother, Juan Antonio Hernández Alvarado (“Tony Hernández”), for purposes of their drug trafficking partnership. Finally, JOH told FUENTES RAMIREZ that he wanted to make the DEA think that Honduras was fighting drug trafficking, but that instead he was going to eliminate extradition and “stuff drugs up the gringos’ noses,” referring to flooding the United States with cocaine.

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Event
La Lucha Sigue: The Struggle Continues. A film festival in honor of World Water Day, presented by SOA Watch
March 20, 2021 to March 21, 2021
SOA Watch presents a 2-day film festival as a celebration of World Water Day and the communities that put their lives on the line to defend it. Each film will be followed by a community specific panel with fierce Indigenous and Black women leaders. A large group discussion with all the women warriors together will close out the festival. Join us to hear directly from the visionary frontline leaders that are building a global movement to protect the earth, put health over wealth, and show people that another world is possible. Greed and destruction is not our destiny. Free: www.soaw.org
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