THE LAND BELONGS TO THOSE WHO WORK IT AND DEFEND IT

Women human rights defenders, along with our Peoples, communities and organizations, are organized in different territories to resist the violence that besets us, to protect life and collective well-being, and to build hope and alternatives for a life with dignity. Our sole existence as political subjects challenges the patriarchal mandates that seek to silence the power of women and sex-gender dissidences. The world that we struggle for is diametrically opposed to the one they intend to impose on us and, therefore, our work places the interests of the powerful at risk.

In Mesoamerica, we live under an economic, political and cultural model that is a colonial legacy, which manifests in structural forms of oppression and a historical continuity of patriarchal, capitalist and racist violence on women’s bodies and territories. Within the context of global crisis created by this model, our region has experienced worsening economic inequalities, violence, poverty and the impacts of climate change. The power-holders benefit from this model of death; they see repression, violence and the use of force as the only way of containing our collective power.

Over these 13 years, as a direct consequence the extractive capitalist model imposed on our territories, women defenders of land, territory and the environment have made up one of the collectives with the highest number of registered attacks, as observed by the finding that 22.3% of the total 43,186 attacks registered between 2012 and 2024 in Mesoamerica were perpetrated against sister defenders of these rights (Figure 1).

Women defenders of land, territory and the environment defend both our right to remain and reclaim our territories and our right to safeguard the web of life – protecting and defending the rights of nature and ensuring the protection of water, rivers, mountains, forests, seeds and the diversity of animal species. Defending life also involves defending our means of reproducing life and our cosmovisions, which – far from capitalist accumulation and exploitation – establish other connections and ways of relating with the territory and nature. We also defend a way of understanding territory not as a geographic place or for human exploitation, but as a place where our ancestors rest and where we find our identities and our roots.

The majority of women defenders of land, territory and the environment who were attacked are Indigenous, Garífuna, and Afro-descendent women who live in rural areas; we work the land, we conduct grassroots work and we have been excluded from property and decisions about the future of our territories.¹ Faced with nation-States that perpetuate colonial policies to annihilate the cosmovisions, cultures, and languages of Indigenous Peoples and other communities, Indigenous and Afro-descendent women defenders protect our wisdoms, our right to autonomy and cultural identity, our territories and natural resources. Women defenders of land and territory collectively resist and denounce the consequences of dispossession and death brought about by the extractivist capitalist system, because we are convinced that this is crucial in order to protect and sustain life in all its expressions.

1. United Nations General Assembly Human Rights Council:  Situation of women human rights defenders. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders. 2019. ↩︎︎

Our tireless struggles have yielded concrete results, such as the world’s first law banning metal mining approved in El Salvador in 2017 – which was sadly rolled back in December 2024 (See Santa Marta case).¹ Other examples include the 2022 repeal of the death and dispossession project represented by the Employment and Economic Development Zones (ZEDEs) in Honduras as an outcome of the demands voiced by a strong popular and feminist social movement,² and the suspension of the Transoceanic Canal project in Nicaragua as a result of the struggle by the peasants’ movement and environmental organizations in the country (See Francisca Ramírez case). Also inspiring is the 2022 cancellation of the Gunaa Sicaru wind park mega-project in Mexico, thanks to the collective struggle of the Zapotec community of Union Hidalgo that, among other strategies, included transnational litigation in civil courts in Paris (France) against the company Electricite de France (EDF).³ However, confronting the economic interests behind the destruction and appropriation of our lands and territories has also meant that we experience multiple and painful forms of violence.

Between 2012 and 2024, we documented 9,629 attacks against women defenders and organizations that defend land, territory and the environment in Mesoamerica. In this same period, 35 sister defenders were killed.

In Honduras, 62% of all attacks registered during the period were against women defenders of land, territory and the environment, making it the type of right defended with the most documented attacks in the country (6,764). Meanwhile, attacks against women defenders of land and territory registered in Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala during those years account for 13.4%, 12,7% and 12.3% of attacks documented in the respective countries.

Between 2012 and 2024, we also documented 738 attacks linked to actions in defense of the rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendent Peoples and other ethnic groups in the region, whose struggles at times intersect with the defense of land and territory.

“In every territory where there are Indigenous and Afro-descendent people with the planet’s last resources, women defenders receive direct attacks for defending land and territory... This is to do with an extermination because to advance the extractive model, they have to remove those who care and protect it.”

Melissa Cardoza, Woman Defender from Honduras

The 2023 Global Witness report notes that Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua are among the 10 countries worldwide with the highest number of killings for defending land and the environment.⁴ The State of the Region affirmed that 80.2% of the socio-environmental conflicts in Central America registered in the 1990-2020 period were connected to the extraction of minerals and materials used in construction; conflicts over land use related to activities such as agriculture, fisheries, livestock, and forestry; water management; fossil fuel use; and climate/energy justice.⁵ The Global Atlas of Environmental Justice documented 211 cases of environmental conflicts in Mexico, 31 in Guatemala, 24 in Honduras, 12 in Nicaragua, and 7 in El Salvador.⁶ A large percentage of the Mesoamerican territory is under concession for mining exploitation: 1.6% in Honduras, 4.84% in Guatemala,⁷ 11% in Mexico⁸ and 23% in Nicaragua.⁹

1. IM-Defensoras: SORORIDAD / #LeyAprobada #ElSalvadorLibreDeMineríaMetálica ↩︎︎
2. IM-Defensoras: [PRONUNCIAMIENTO] Red Nacional de Defensoras de Derechos Humanos en Honduras ante extradición de JOH y derogación de las ZEDES. https://im-defensoras.org/es/2022/04/pronunciamiento-red-nacional-de-defensoras-de-derechos-humanos-en-honduras-2/  ↩︎︎
3. ProDESC: Set back to EDF in Mexico! The Zapotec community of Unión Hidalgo and ProDESC achieve the definitive cancellation of the wind park megaproject “Gunaa Sicarú”. 2 June 2022. ↩︎︎
4. Global Witness: Standing firm. The Land and Environmental Defenders on the frontlines of the climate crisis. September 2023. ↩︎︎
5. Estado de la región: Conflictividad ambiental: una aproximación para el análisis de las presiones sobre los ecosistemas y sus recursos. 2021. ↩︎︎
6. EJAtlas – Global Atlas of Environmental Justice. https://ejatlas.org/  ↩︎︎
7. Martínez Espinoza, M.I., 2017. El extractivismo minero en América Latina: planteamientos, paralelismos y presunciones desde el caso de Guatemala. In Perfiles Latinoamericanos, 27 (53). https://doi.org/10.18504/pl2753-001-2019 ↩︎︎
8. La Jornada: “Concesionado a mineras, 11% del país hasta por 100 años”. 20 May 2021. ↩︎︎
9. Fundación del Río: Nicaragua y su oro perverso. 14 July 2022. ↩︎︎

Given this context, our region stands out for attacks perpetrated during collective actions organized by women defenders and communities who maintain their struggles alive in the face of extractivism’s advance on agribusiness, mining and logging (See Santa Marta case). The collective character of these attacks relates to the fact that defending land and the commons cannot be individualized,¹ because it is impossible to defend territory without community and collectivity. Thus, many of the attacks that we register – such as the militarization of territories and evictions – involve generalized direct violence against the community, including against minors and elders, among other vulnerable groups (see Agua Blanca Sur case).

1. Vázquez, E. 2019. ¿Defensoras o comunidades en resistencia? Los procesos colectivos de defensa territorial frente a la individualización del “defensor/a ambiental”. In Informe de la Ruta por la verdad y la justicia para la naturaleza y los pueblos. Acción Ecológica. ↩︎︎

An analysis of the evolution of attacks against women defenders of land, territory and the environment between 2012 and 2024 reveals three significant peaks. The first peak is in 2017, the year following the assassination of Berta Cáceres; the second peak appears in 2020, reflected in the authoritarian responses by governments to the syndemic due to COVID-19; and the third peak is in 2022, marked by the policies to deepen the militarization of territories and the increase in evictions.

The March 2016 assassination of our sister Berta Cáceres, a Lenca Indigenous community leader who sought to protect the Gualcarque river by resisting against the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam project (See Berta Cáceres case) marked a turning point in Honduras and the rest of the region, giving visibility both to the leadership exercised by indigenous women against capitalist extractivism, and to the different expressions of violence and impunity they face. Thus, in 2017, the year following her assassination, there was a substantial increase in attacks that are related to those experienced by Honduran women defenders who opposed megaprojects and demanded justice for Berta. Since then, through our registry system, we saw in the messages conveyed by the attacks against women defenders of land and territory the trends and patterns that seek – without success – to extinguish their struggles.¹From the assassination of Berta Cáceres in March 2016 until December 2024, 22 women defenders of land, territory and the environment were killed in Mesoamerica: 6 in Mexico, 3 in Guatemala, 2 in El Salvador, 9 in Honduras, and 2 in Nicaragua.

Later, with the start of the COVID-19 syndemic in 2020, we noted an increase in attacks against women defenders of land, territory and the environment in every country in the region. Although with different nuances in each country, this situation reflected the context of growing authoritarian policies that used the health emergency as a pretext to impose repressive measures, restrict rights and deepen militarization processes. Thus, movement restrictions for human rights defenders enabled the advance of dispossession policies against women’s bodies and territories. In Central America, governments sought refuge in the need to overcome the economic crisis in the aftermath of the syndemic, and as such increased mining concessions and boosted other extractive industries such as monocultures.²

Starting in 2022, we identified a new regional surge in attacks against women defenders of land, territory and the environment. Figure 2 shows how attacks against these women defenders increased significantly in 2023 (160% comparted to the previous year, 2022). Collective attacks played an important role in this increase, as they went from accounting for 46% of attacks registered in 2020 to 86% in 2024. In recent years, collective attacks have involved the excessive use of force, with the overt backing of authorities and armed forces, coupled with the militarization of territories and the manipulation of judicial frameworks legalizing repression and violence.

In Honduras, this increase is a result of the intensification of land conflicts since the creation of the Commission for Agrarian Security and Access to Land, which has legitimized mass evictions (See Agua Blanca Sur case) and uses the law to criminalize those who fight for land and while favoring oil and sugar companies and landowning sectors (See María Concepción Hernández case). Just in the last 3 years (2022-2024), we registered 4,851 attacks against women defenders of land and territory in the country. An emblematic case is the attacks against the Garífuna Peoples, who have faced killings, forced disappearances,³ arsons in their ancestral healing centers, arbitrary detentions, institutionalized racism, and attacks on their spirituality,⁴ among others – as part of the attempted grabbing of their ancestral lands (See Miriam Miranda case).

Between 2022 and 2024, we registered 860 attacks against women defenders of land, territory and the environment in Mexico, who confront the important economic interests behind extractive and infrastructure projects (See Kenia Hernández case). Some of the registered attacks took place within the context of resistance to the Mayan train megaproject, the mega-pig farm in Yucatan, the inter-oceanic corridor in Oaxaca, the Bonafont Company’s water exploitation in Puebla, as well as different real estate projects throughout the country.

Finally, the December 2024 approval of the law on metal mining in El Salvador, repealing the historic prohibition of this environmentally harmful activity, has unleashed a process of popular mobilization that – given the current state of emergency along with the criminalization of five environmentalists from the Santa Marta Community and the situation of risk and threat faced by this community as a whole (See Santa Marta case) – reminds us that our achievements can be reversed and that we must never stop vindicating and defending them, and calls on us to remain alert to a possible increase in attacks against women defenders of land, territory and the environment in this country.

1. IM-Defensoras: Tendencia en defensoras de tierra, territorio y justicia. 2021. ↩︎︎
2. Acafremin: La pandemia de la Covid-19 y el aumento de las industrias extractivas en los países de Centroamérica. 17 August 20202. ↩︎︎
3. IM-Defensoras: [Alerta Defensoras] HONDURAS / Criminalizan a defensoras garífunas tras detenerlas en violento e ilegal desalojo de la comunidad de Punta Gorda, Roatán. 9 November 2022. ↩︎︎
4. IM-Defensoras: [Alerta Defensoras] HONDURAS / Racismo institucionalizado contra defensoras y defensores de la tierra ancestral de Punta Gorda. 25 November 2022. ↩︎︎

On the night of 2 March 2016, hired killers linked to the company Desarrollos Energéticos (DESA) broke into the home of Lenca woman defender Berta Cáceres in La Esperanza, Intibucá, and shot her to death. Berta was a well-known feminist woman defender of land and territory, Coordinator of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) and member of the National Network of Women Human Rights Defenders in Honduras. She was awarded the 2015 Goldman Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for environmental defenders. Her assassination had an immediate and unprecedented global impact, sparking numerous expressions of condemnation and demands for justice all over the world.

A week earlier, Berta had denounced in a press conference the murder of four leaders of her community and the growing context of threats, attacks and harassment against COPINH and the communities resisting DESA’s Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam project that threatened the very existence of the Gualcarque River – a sacred river vital for the subsistence of the Lenca communities.

Her murder was the culmination of a long string of attacks against Berta, her organization and her close circle – including arbitrary detentions, criminalization, harassment, death threats, among others. This had led the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to grant her precautionary measures in 2009, which the State never complied with. COPINH calls this a “territorial femicide”, since by killing Berta they sought to silence not only her, but also the struggle of the organization and the communities she led in the defense of the Lenca ancestral territory, whose control and seizure is the ultimate goal of the perpetrators.

Since then, COPINH has unceasingly led a demand for justice that to date has resulted in the cancelling of the Agua Zarca project and the prosecution and conviction of 8 people, including the material authors and some of the intellectual authors such as DESA manager David Castillo and Sergio Rodríguez, an employee of the Atala family, who own the company. This search for justice has not been free of attacks against COPINH, Berta’s family as well as organizations, journalists and human rights defenders who have supported them.

Despite all that has been achieved, justice in the Berta Cáceres case will not be complete so long as the extractivist policies of territorial dispossession of the Lenca communities persist and the main masterminds of her crime remain in impunity – the Atala family, whose involvement in the murder the Honduran justice system has refused to consider, despite several indications in this regards. That is why, in February 2025, as a result of the work of COPINH and CEJIL, an Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts was established in Honduras with a mandate that includes investigating the intellectual authorship of the crime and its impact on the Lenca communities, and proposing a comprehensive reparations plan.

On the night of 18 October 2020, Kenia Hernández was arbitarily detained at a toll booth in the state of Puebla and – after several hours during which her whereabouts were unknown – she was transferred to a prison in the state of Mexico. Six days later, on 24 October, just hours after a judge in the state of Mexico granted her release on bail, Kenia was arrested once again, this time under orders of a federal judge. She was accused of alleged crimes of “armed robbery” and “attacks on public thouroughfares” to the detriment of the Federal Roads and Bridges institution (CAPUFE) and Autovías Concesionaria Mexiquenses. This was the third arrest she experienced in just four months, having being arrested for the first time on 6 June and spending 5 days deprived of her liberty. Since then, Kenia has been imprisoned facing state and federal judicial processes for eleven alleged crimes that carry an accummulated jail sentence of more than twenty years. All of these charges are connected to protest actions to demand free transit on the country’s roads.

Kenia is an Amuzga woman lawyer and feminist. As coordinator of the Zapata Vive Libertarian Collective and as a co-founder and member of the Movement for the Freedom of Political Prisoners in the State of Guerrero (MOLPEG), she has accompanied survivors of gender-based violence and relatives of victims of feminicide, people unjustly deprived of their liberty and people affected by the activities of multinational extractive companies. Prior to her arrest, Kenia had to leave the state of Guerrero due to the persecution and threats she received from state and paramilitary actors due to her work as a woman defender.

Kenia has been imprisoned in various jails, including a high-security jail CEFERESO 16 in the state of Morelos, to which she was transferred after the Attorney General’s Office and CAPUFE representatives accused her of being “a person who puts society at risk because she demonstrates a lot.” In this prison, Kenia suffered conditions of precariousness, mistreatment and violation of her rights that placed her life and integrity at risk, including denial of access to medical attention and drinking water, extreme situations of isolation, control of her correspondence and restrictions on meetings with her legal defense and visits with her children, which is why she went on hunger strike twice. Even under these conditions, Kenia did not stop working as a rights defender and, among other actions, she organized workshops for indigenous women and promoted self-care among the other inmates, since several suicides have been recorded in this prison. Her struggle and the work of the organizations that accompany her led to her transfer to a less restrictive prison, where she is currently held.

Kenia’s case is an example of the persecution and cruelty with which the capitalist, racist and patriarchal system seeks to subdue indigenous women who dare to stand up and organize to defend territory and the commons.

On the afternoon of Sunday, 22 September 2019, agents of the Police Investigation Division (DPI) arrived at the home of María Concepción Hernández with an arrest warrant. María is a member of the Association for the Development of the Zacate Grande Peninsula (ADEPZA) and of the National Network of Women Human Rights Defenders in Honduras. The police agents arrested María and transferred her to the Amapala police post. The following day, María Concepción was released with alternative measures to imprisonment, facing charges for alleged crimes of “land usurpation” and “continued and aggravated damages” against Jorge Cassis Leiva, a landowner who – using threats, attacks and intimidation – sought to evict peasants from the community of Playa Blanca, in the Zacate Grande peninsula, who have legitimate ownership of their land.

Two months later, on 25 November, the woman defender appeared voluntarily to an initial hearing in the criminalization process she was facing and she was detained again, this time along with her under-age son and two other defenders – Santos Hernández and Abel Pérez – who were criminalized in another process. All of them were held in custody pending their arraignment hearing that was scheduled for the following day.

María Concepción was cleared of all charges against her. However, almost four years after the events described above, on 1 April 2023, DPI agents detained her again when she went to the Nacaome Prison to visit her partner, Santos Hernández. When detaining her, the agents cited an arrest warrant dated 29 August 2019 – the same warrant with which they arrested her the first time and that should have been annulled since the woman defender had been acquitted of the charges connected to the warrant. At the time of this third arrest, María Concepción was with her under-age son, who was left totally defenseless and vulnerable. Furthermore, when members of ADEPZA and the Network of Women Lawyers and Human Rights Defenders went to the prison, the DPI authorities denied them contact with María Concepción and refused to provide information about her condition and situation. In the end, thanks to the accompaniment of these organizations and the pressure and solidarity expressed, the woman defender was released and the arrest warrant annuled.

The criminalization and judicial persecution faced by María Concepción Hernández and other sister defenders of ADEPZA – as well as the impunity in which the repeated violence against them remains – are linked to the fact that the Zacate Grande peninsula is a strategic geographical area for the economic interests of landowners and companies (an Employment and Economic Development Zone (ZEDE) was planned to be installed there) and are based on the complicity of the economic powers with corrupt police and justice institutions.

On September 2018, peasant leader Francisca Ramírez, known as Doña Chica, publicly stated that she was going into exile from her country, Nicaragua, due to the constant attacks, threats and harassment she was experiencing. A few months earlier, in July, Edén Pastora, a veteran member of the governing party, had made statements in a pro-government television station where he singled her out and threatened, “La Chica Ramírez is looking to be imprisoned and killed because she is already very troublesome, first with the Canal and now with this...” (referring to her statements about the serious human rights violations being committed in the country.)

Pastora’s serious remarks came at a time when Nicaragua was submerged in a wave of government violence, repression and political persecution that had left hundreds of people dead and in political prison since the start of popular protests against social security reforms on 18 April; these protests were preceded by another important movement of indignation and protest regarding the fire at the Indio Maíz Reserve, one of the largest natural reserves in the country. That same April, Doña Chica suffered an attempt on her life while leading a march in Nueva Guinea.

The political persecution and attacks against Francisca started years earlier when – as coordinator of the Council for the Defense of Land, Lake and Sovereignty – she played a key role in the struggle against the Inter-Oceanic Canal, a mega-project financed with foreign capital that would cut across the country from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific. The construction of the canal endangered the Great Lake Cocibolca, one of the main drinking water reserves in Central America, and would entail expulsion, dispossession and misery for the peasant communities in the affected territories.

During her struggle against the canal, Doña Chica and her family were repeatedly attacked. She experienced arbitrary detentions in 2014, 2015 and 2016 – the last one took place when she was participating in the “Mesoamerican Caravan for Good Living” along with other peasant leaders and young environmentalists from different countries who were also detained and eventually expelled from the country. The police confiscated the vehicle she used to travel and conduct her work, and on a separate occasion they partially destroyed it. Moreover, her house was raided; her son was assaulted; and she and other women defenders who opposed the Canal were constantly harassed and subjected to defamation and smear campaigns. As a result, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granted her precautionary measures in 2017.

When the socio-political crisis erupted in April 2018, Doña Chica participated in the protests and, because of her internationally recognized track record of struggle against the Canal, she emerged as one of the leading voices with legitimacy denouncing the brutal human rights violations that the government was committing, which in turn intensified the harassment, threats and attacks against her.

The attacks against Doña Chica did not stop once she was in exile; she was arbitrarily stripped of her Nicaraguan nationality, her assets were confiscated and she was declared a fugitive from justice, in addition to being the target of several attacks by digital media channels that seek to stigmatize and discredit her.

Just in the last five years, from January 2020 to December 2024, our registry system documented 98 attacks against Garífuna woman defender Miriam Miranda, coordinator of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) and member of the National Network of Women Human Rights Defenders in Honduras. Of these attacks, 62 were perpetrated directly against her personally and 36 took place when she was participating in collective actions. These numbers reflect the situation of permanent risk and threat in which the woman defender lives, despite being beneficiary of precautionary measures granted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) since 2011.

The repetition and recurrence of attacks against Miriam Miranda are related to the fact that she is one of the most visible and recognized voices, both nationally and internationally, defending the rights of the Garífuna Peoples and denouncing the systematic violence that this peoples face in Honduras. This violence includes the dispossession of their ancestral lands, violent evictions of communities in resistance, femicides and related impunity, criminalization, forced disappearance and murder of their leaders, attacks and ridicule of their cosmovision, institutional racism, among other criminal expressions of the racist and colonial capitalism that reigns in the country.

Throughout her long trajectory as a woman defender, Miriam has suffered a wide range of attacks of all types and severity. Many have been perpetrated by State institutions, such as authorities, public security forces – police and military – and judicial entities; many others by actors linked to de facto powers such as landowners, national and foreign businessmen and members of organized crime. One of the most serious attacks against her – given that her life was in serious danger – was the kidnapping she experienced in 2014, along with other OFRANEH members, at the hands of armed men linked to organized crime, from which they were able to escape thanks to the support of the Vallecito community. Another grave attack was the attempt on her life that took place in September 2023, when armed men with assault rifles surrounded her house; fortunately, the attack was not successful thanks, once again, to the support and collective protection practices of the Vallecito community. Added to these are multiple threats and acts of intimidation, defamation campaigns, several attempts to criminalize her, harassment and judicial persecution, attacks during peaceful protests, and the constant arbitrary arrests and detentions she is subjected to by the security forces.

Miriam’s case is paradigmatic both because it reflects the flagrant negligence of the authorities responsible for guaranteeing her protection – despite the existence of mandates such as that of the IACHR – and because it highlights the importance of community and collective protection practices, for which OFRANEH and the Vallecito community are a model in the entire region.

In the early morning of 11 January 2023, agents from the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) and the National Civil Police (PNC) arrested five environmental defenders and community leaders from Santa Marta, in the department of Cabañas, all of them members of the Association for Social Economic Development (ADES Santa Marta). Eight days later, they were remanded in custody for an alleged crime that occurred decades earlier, during the internal armed conflict. This ruling was made without solid evidence and on the basis of contradictory evidence; they were also charged with “illicit association”, a crime established under the state of emergency in force in the country for the last nine months.

From the very beginning, the community of Santa Marta and other human rights organizations expressed their fear that a hidden motive for the criminalization of the environmentalists could be the government’s intention to pave the way – through repression and silencing of leaders – for legalizing metal mining again, since the community of Santa Marta was one of the main leaders of the popular movement that achieved the country’s ban on this extractive activity in 2017.

With the five environmentalists jailed, the community mobilized to secure their freedom, organizing solidarity campaigns that reverberated nationally and internationally, and succeeded in getting international human rights bodies and mechanisms to issue statements. Many of the actions were led by women defenders from the community, among them the partners and daughters of the criminalized defenders, who became more visible and were therefore exposed to different types of attacks and increased risk, since all of this occurred in the context of a state of emergency in which all kinds of arbitrary acts and rights violations were committed. In December 2023, one day after a communication from the UN Human Rights Rapporteur expressing concern about the situation of the five environmentalists was published, Manuel Gámez was arbitrarily detained. Manuel is the son of Vidalina Morales, president of ADES and one of the most visible voices from the community, internationally recognized for her tireless struggle in defense of the environment.

Following the accompaniment and solidarity mobilizations, in October 2024, the Sensuntepeque Sentencing Court declared the five environmentalists innocent of the charges against them and ordered their release. However, just one month later, in November, at the request of El Salvador’s Attorney General’s Office, the outcome of the trial was annulled and a retrial was ordered, thus violating one of the basic principles of due criminal process that establishes that no one can be tried twice for the same charge.

It was not long before these events confirmed the initial fears. On 23 December, with votes from the governing party and its allies, the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador approved the General Law on Mining for Metals, reversing the ban on this activity that is so harmful for the environment, communities and people. Since then, the threats, intimidation and surveillance against members of the community and of ADES Santa Marta have intensified, while social movements and organizations throughout the country begin to mobilize once again to say “NO to mining”.

In the early morning of 22 January 2025, without a warrant, more than 100 police officers entered an area of land recovered by the Independent Movement of Landless Men and Women in the Agua Blanca Sur community of El Progreso, Yoro, and evicted more than 250 families living there. During the eviction, employees of the AZUNOSA sugar company, acting with police protection, attacked and threatened peasants in the community and used heavy machinery to destroy more than 300 square meters of corn, bean and cassava crops that represented the families’ livelihood.

A few months earlier, on 5 June 2024, the families from the community of Agua Blaca Sur had experienced a similar eviction, during which the police beat peasants – including minors – and sprayed them with tear gas, while AZUNOSA employees used heavy machinery to demolish their belongings and destroy their fields.

Attacks against the peasants of the Agua Blanca Sur community committed by AZUNOSA and the police and judicial institutions of the Honduran State began in 2023, after the Agua Blanca Sur Group, which is affiliated with the National Farmworkers Central of El Progreso, began a process of land recovery. The peasants began to experience harassment by members of the National Police, who arrived at the properties without a court order threatening to evict them. They also denounced the presence of drones flying over the land. On the morning of 15 November 2023, the police arrested Maribel Díaz García – who was in her home – without an arrest warrant, accusing her of the crime of land usurpation and taking her to the Police Investigation Office in El Progreso, where she was released after a few hours on bail. The next day, the National Police and AZUNOSA security guards followed up on their threats and evicted the area.

On month later, on 4 December 2023, another woman defender from the peasant group Agua Blanca Sur – Jensy Manzanares – was arrested, charged with “land usurpation”. At that point, there were already eight peasant women criminalized. A few days later, on 12 December, the Police conducted another eviction, this time with an order from the Judge of El Progreso that was notified by Judge Diana Nuñes, who gave thirty minutes for families to remove their belongings – a short time-frame that was not respected, as the authorities proceeded to enter with heavy machinery destroying everything, including bushels of corn.

The illegal violent evictions experienced by the peasants of Agua Blanca Sur since 2023, which include the participation of private companies that exercise violence with total impunity, is a pattern in Honduras; similar experiences are reported by peasant communities in Aguán and other territories, as well as Lenca and Garífuna communities. All of them clearly show the instrumentalization of legal frameworks to benefit the powerful and dispossess and criminalize those who defend land and the commons.