“They are killing our leaders one by one,” said a forwarded text message. It came from someone in the indigenous Tolupán community of El Portillo, in rural Honduras.
Read a Spanish-language version of this story here.
The previous week, I had pitched an article about nine indigenous people in Honduras—Alisson Pineda, Wendy Pineda, José María Pineda, Ángela Murillo, Celso Cabrera, Óscar Cabrera, Óscar Vieda, Sergio Ávila, and Ramón Matute—all of whom are facing criminal charges for defending their ancestral territory.
Before I could even finish writing the piece, another family member had been murdered.
On September 27, 2019, Milgen Idán Soto Ávila was found murdered in the same location where INMARE, a private timber company that is currently prosecuting his relatives for protesting logging, has been at work.
Milgen was a talkative and inquisitive twenty-nine-year-old who was a constant presence in the Dignified Camp in Defense of Ancestral Territory, established by community members working with the Movimiento Amplio por la Dignidad y Justicia (or MADJ). The camp’s purpose is to stop the company from logging in the pine forest that has belonged to the Tolupán tribe since they were resettled to this area, San Francisco de Locomapa in the department of Yoro, in 1864.
Before I could even finish writing the piece, another family member had been murdered.
I remember Milgen Soto well, not only because we had a long conversation but also because each time I am in Honduras I look carefully at everyone and worry about who might not be there the next time I return. Milgen was a committed compañero with big ideas about how to create a better society, and we shared a lively conversation about global politics and the contradictions of his experiences in extreme poverty despite his historical right to the land.
In May, I wrote about Ramón Matute and the spirit raising ceremony for his brother and father, murdered earlier this year. Shortly after the publication of that piece, Ramón and eight others from the community were arrested and are now facing criminal charges. Their crime? “Obstructing the forest management plan.”
Internationally over 100 organizations have signed a letter in solidarity with the land defenders “condemning the criminalization of legitimate protest actions.” Although Milgen was not arrested, he was formally denounced in the timber company’s complaint.
Radio Dignidad
Krausch 1
At an encampment protesting logging, Milgen Soto holds a photo of his cousin Samael Matute, murdered for his defense of the pine forests of San Francisco de Locomapa, Yoro, Honduras. Milgen himself is now dead, his body found on September 27, 2019.
On September 29, before I had fully assimilated the reality of Milgen’s death, I received news of the murder of yet another Tolupán leader. Adolfo Redondo had been reportedly shot to death by unknown individuals. This information was at first hard to confirm, because, as the text message from El Portillo put it, “We are cut off from communication. There’s no electricity in the area and no Internet.”
Milgen was the third person murdered in the same small community this year alone, and the ninth murdered in the conflict over logging since 2013. Yet the Honduran state has failed to offer the protections required under international law, or to follow even basic criminal judicial procedures.
Salomón and Samael Matute were murdered in February, but, “there has been no substantial advance in the investigation,” says Mario Iraheta, legal representative for the Tolupán community in the suit for protective measures and member of the legal team of MADJ. “The material authors [of the crime] continue to walk free in the area, without an order for their arrest.”
Instead, government resources are being used to criminalize the land defenders themselves, who are all beneficiaries of protective measures from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
While very much in the news, Brazil is not the only country where forests are on fire. On a visit to San Francisco de Locomapa in April, the smoke from the forest fires was so bad that an entire group of international observers from Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective—which included me—went home ill after just a single afternoon spent there.
It’s not clear exactly who is setting the fires, which always seem to be raging, but the health of the forest and the Tolupán people is suffering. Community members say they suffer from a variety of respiratory afflictions.
A September 30 statement released by MADJ asked “Who are the killers of the Tolupán people?”
“We invite the organized and unorganized Honduran public to identify the intellectual authors of the dictatorship, the violence, the inequality, the poverty, as those who dispossess and who murder,” reads the statement. “And to go beyond the classic question that seeks to locate the material authors and to transform it into ‘who ordered or consented to their assassinations?’”
The charges against the Movimiento members is not an isolated case. Environmental defenders from Guapinol have been held in pre-trial detention for a month because of their opposition to a mining project.
Darwin Alachán
A group of Tolupán people, criminalized for protesting to defend their ancestral territory, pose outside the courthouse in the department of Yoro, Honduras.
“Court proceedings, paired with active repression by government security forces reveal the commitment of protecting corporate interests over human rights in Honduras,” Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective Honduras Program coordinators Corie Welch and Alejandra Rincón say in an email interview. “Under the regime that came into power in 2009, we’ve seen collaboration between powerful elites and the government in Honduras, expanding concessions for extraction and using police and military to enforce the construction of these projects.”
The irony is thick. Antonio “Tony” Hernández, the brother of President Juan Orlando Hernández, is facing trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan, accused by the U.S. Department of Justice of drug trafficking, money laundering, and coordinating murder. The trial opens on October 2 and President Hernández is identified as “co-conspirator 4” along with former Honduran president Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo.
Both men, the only two presidents to have run campaigns since the 2009 coup in Honduras, are alleged in court documents to have used drug trafficking funds for their campaigns, although neither has been charged in the United States.
Honduras is not simply a “failed state;” it is actively warped by corporate and international interests. The government, itself on trial for corruption and narcotrafficking, is launching criminal charges against some of its most precarious citizens for protests in defense of their own forest. Meanwhile, the United States maintains a close relationship with the Honduran administration.
Hondurans are mobilizing inside of Honduras. But the reality of imperialism in Central America makes the Hondurans’ problem a global one. Changing the political reality in their country will require a strong solidarity movement in the United States. As long as Juan Orlando Hernández is granted legitimacy by the U.S. government and other international regimes, he can remain in power. His brother’s current criminal case is a test of that legitimacy.
Jose María, an elder in the community of San Francisco de Locomapa, has a favorite saying: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of freedom.”