In late May, the Comisión Interamericana De Derechos Humanos/Interamerican Human Rights Commission (CIDH) releases a report detailing numerous and sustained human rights abuses in Honduras against environmental rights activists. Honduras is a country that has long been plagued with human rights violations, such as life-threatening prison conditions, illegal home searches, and arbitrary killings. The victims of these abuses are journalists, incarcerated persons, women, children, and members of the LGBTQ+ community, but in addition to these groups, a disproportionate majority of the victims are environmental rights activists. These activists consist of both conservationists and members of Indigenous communities who speak against the harm being done to the environment and local ecosystems.
The violence/human rights violations against environmental activists can be traced back to longstanding conflicts between manufacturing companies, extractive industries such as coal or metal mining, and large-scale agriculture. Even as homicides trend downward in urban areas they continue to rise in rural parts of the country. In 2022, due to a conflict between environmental activists and loggers in the municipality of El Rosario, Olancho, the homicide rate sat at roughly one murder per every one hundred thousand residents. This is compared with a national homicide rate of thirty-five and half per one hundred thousand people. The report states that one source of conflict is likely the lack of official land ownership registries as by 2020 it was reported that roughly 80% of all privately owned land had an inadequate title or lacked one entirely.
In the Bajo Aguán region, where the conflict is the most severe, locals have butted heads with businessmen over ownership and pollution brought on by mining. This clash has resulted in intimidation, kidnappings/disappearances, and brutal deaths at the hands of privately contracted paramilitary groups. Between 2014 and 2016 over 86 bodies were recovered and deemed to be violent deaths.
The Honduran Government has received a significant amount of criticism for not doing enough to end the violence. Even international mechanisms for ending the violence have been less than successful and the report notes that there are sometimes too many organizations merely repeating the work that others have done before them instead of focusing on a different area. “Honduras has the opportunity to regain confidence in state institutions,” the CIDH said in a press release, “and to do so it must prioritize strengthening institutions, providing them with sufficient resources, ensuring public management capacity, and implementing policies and budgets from the highest possible levels.”
Click here for the report
Click here for the press release