Narco State - Honduras > Environmentalist murdered after exposing drug gangs bribing officials

 

It's possible Juan Lopez was killed for his campaigning against mining for iron in the jungles of Honduras.

On the other hand, he exposed the reality of the Narco State in Honduran business and politics. They don't like that.

By:NEWS WIRES

An anti-mining activist was shot and killed in Honduras, President Xiomara Castro said, vowing justice for the latest such murder in one of the world's most dangerous countries for environmentalists.

Juan Lopez, 46, was gunned down as he left church Saturday in the northeastern town of Tocoa, his widow Thelma Pena told AFP.

Castro condemned the "vile murder" in a post on the social media platform X late Saturday and said she had ordered an investigation.

"Justice for Juan Lopez," Castro wrote.

Lopez, who belonged to the ruling Libre party, campaigned against open-pit iron ore mining in a forest reserve in the vicinity of Tocoa, where he worked in the town hall.

At a recent news conference he called for the resignation of Libre officials caught on a video negotiating bribes with drug traffickers in 2013.

That video recently ensnared Carlos Zelaya, a brother-in-law of the president. He resigned his seat in congress after admitting he took part in that meeting with drug gangsters.

In an interview with AFP in 2021, Lopez discussed the risks that he said environmental activists face in this poor and violent Central American country.

"If you start defending common interests in this country," he said, "you clash with major interests."

"If you leave home, you always have in mind that you do not know what might happen, if you are going to return," said Lopez.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had ordered protective measures for Lopez due to threats against him and other environmentalists from Tocoa.

Fellow rights defender Joaquin Mejia paid tribute to the environmentalist, calling him "a comrade committed to social change."

Mejia accused authorities of failing to "fulfill their obligation" to protect Lopez.

Honduran attorney general Johel Zelaya said the "reprehensible" murder would not go unpunished, and paid tribute to Lopez's activism.

"His life was an example of struggle. He never gave up in his incessant battle, hand-in-hand with the people to preserve natural resources," Zelaya said on X.

Narco State

The NGO Global Witness says Honduras is one of the world's most dangerous countries for environmental activists.

In 2023 it was ranked third in the world for the number of killings of such activists at 18, tied with Mexico. The top two were Colombia and Brazil.

The organization said that from 2012 to 2023, 148 environmental campaigners were killed in Honduras.

They include Berta Caceres, a high-profile opponent of a controversial hydroelectric dam who was murdered in 2016.

(AFP)

One year on from massacre at women's prison in Narco State Honduras - 46 deaths

23 women prisoners were shot to death, and 23 more were burned to death in prison. This could only happen in a Narco state. Nearly all of Central America is now Narco gang controlled. If America wants to stop the flood of immigrants from Central and South America, they need to neutralize these gangs and invest in the economies that they have been raping for centuries.

 

One year on, Honduras prison massacre survivors still reeling

Issued on: 21/06/2024 - 18:31

Samantha still does not know how she survived the slaughter of 46 fellow inmates in a brutal gang battle at Honduras's only women's prison a year ago, when incarcerated members of the Barrio 18 gang broke into an area of the prison housing the rival Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang, shot several of them, and set fire to the place.

Failed State Made in the USA: Ex-President of Honduras and Coup Victim Zelaya Tells All

I have complained many times about how US corporations have raped Central Americans and many South Americans of their natural resources. And instead of making them wealthy, they are made poorer. Anyone who attempts to change the situation for the betterment of the people is liable to be removed by any means, often being replaced by autocrats completely devoid of conscience. 

I thought I was referring to well in the past, but, it appears that it is still going on in the 21st century. In fact, we can easily blame much of the current migrant crisis on America's southern border on America's political and financial interference in Central America. 

If the USA is going to be the moral leader of the world, it first has to present itself a moral.

Zelaya at a protest against the US-backed Hernandez government © Reuters / Jorge Cabrera

President Jose Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was deposed from power in a military coup after joining a progressive alliance of Latin American leaders and he has “absolutely no doubts” the US was behind his ouster, he tells RT America.

“The US warned me: If you sign the Bolivarian Alternative to the Americas (ALBA), you’re going to have problems with the US. I signed it, and six months later, I had problems,” Zelaya told RT America’s Rick Sanchez.

They kicked me out.

Washington “wave[s] their flags of human rights abroad, but they only apply those concepts to those they consider to be adversaries,” Zelaya says, pointing to his record of poverty reduction and economic growth – “I had the best indicators of human development in Honduran history!”

Because of the company he kept – working with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, and other progressive US bogeymen to further Honduras’ economic development – the US “had an allergic reaction” and moved to take him out, he says.

“I didn’t have problems with the US,” Zelaya insists. “They simply didn’t accept the competition, because these transnational companies live off monopoly, they live off concessions. When you give them competition in the free market, they stop being capitalist. They become retrograde, authoritarian, and they play coups, wars, invasions.”

Zelaya was removed from power in 2009, deposed by heavily armed soldiers who came to his home while he was in his pajamas, in a coup Hillary Clinton’s State Department refused to call a coup.

Honduras has been sinking into chaos ever since. His progressive reforms such as building schools, adopting a pension system for the elderly and raising the minimum wage have been rolled back, and homicide rates had soared 50 percent by 2011. Trade unionists, journalists, judges, human rights and environmental activists have been targeted for extrajudicial killings.

His efforts to return to power have also been thwarted, once again by the US, he says. After his party won the 2017 election with nearly three quarters of the votes counted, it was the US ambassador who appeared with 5,000 boxes of ballots to declare another candidate the winner. Even the pro-US Organization of American States called for a new round of elections. Instead, the government suspended the constitution and imposed 10 days of martial law, after which the US recognized the rigged results.

“And with that, they impose a dictatorship in Honduras… that’s what we’re protesting against.”

Zelaya says the US sees Honduras “not as a colony or a province. They see us as an empty landscape where they invest and where they impose their rules.”

He does not blame only the Americans for the suffering of Honduras, however.

The Hondurans are guilty, the ones that bow down and kiss the boots of the US, the US military, or kiss up to the capitalist chiefs of Wall Street.

Migrants, Protests & Aid Cuts: Legacy of US-Backed 2009 Coup in Honduras

As with Europe in Africa, the USA in Central America literally raped the countries of their natural resources leaving them in poverty and with dictators who are cruel and brutal. Then America builds walls to keep them from migrating. I know they can't all come to America, but America needs to be working to improve conditions in Central America giving the people hope and a reason to stay.

FILE PHOTO: A migrant holds flags of Honduras and the United States next to US-Mexican border

© Reuters / Kim Kyung-Hoon

As caravans of migrants stream toward the US border and protesters in Honduras demand the president’s resignation, a coup in Tegucigalpa exactly 10 years ago is now making for strange political allies in Washington.

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) thus found herself on the same wavelength as US President Donald Trump when she advocated cutting off the aid to the government of President Juan Orlando Hernandez in March, and tweeted out a photo with the daughter of the slain Honduran activist Berta Caceres on Friday.

Ilhan Omar✔
@IlhanMN

 In 2016, Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was murdered by US-trained Honduran special forces.

The next year, I had the honor of meeting her daughter, Bertha.

Today marks 10 years since the coup in Honduras. We in the US must stop funding its brutality.

Trump also wants to cut US funding to Honduras, but for a completely different reason: along with Guatemala and El Salvador, the country is a major source of migrant “caravans” that have been streaming across the US border over the past year. All three Central American nations have experienced Washington’s meddling throughout their history.

On June 28, 2009, the Honduran military raided the home of President Manuel Zelaya and led him away at gunpoint. He was replaced by Porfirio Lobo Sosa, leader of the National Party, who held the office until 2014, when he handed it over to Hernandez.

The administration of Barack Obama – specifically, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – was involved in planning and executing the coup, it later emerged. Clinton herself admitted it in her memoir “Hard Choices,” first published in 2014. After public scrutiny, however, the part of the book detailing her involvement in Honduras was removed from the paperback edition. 

In the decade since, Honduras has become a human rights nightmare, according to organizations such as Amnesty International, which accused state security forces of routinely engaging in torture and extrajudicial killings. 

Caceres, for instance, was murdered in 2016 in attack widely believed to have been in retaliation for her activism against the construction of the Aguas Zarca dam in the Gualcarque river.

Over the last several months, public anger at Hernandez’s rule has turned into widespread unrest. Riots first began in April, in protest over his plans to privatize the education, healthcare and pension systems of Honduras. In May, demonstrators set fire to the US embassy in Tegucigalpa, and later attacked containers belonging to the Dole Fruit Company. 

Fruit companies are a symbol of US military and political meddling in Central America, which gave rise to the term “banana republic.”

On Tuesday, state security forces opened fire on a group of student protesters, injuring four people. Activists are no longer calling for merely reversing the privatization, but also for  Hernandez to step down.

While Hernandez’s economic policies have created a favorable environment for US multinational corporations, they brought ruin to the small farmers of Honduras, who are fleeing to the US in droves in search of work. 

The political establishment in Washington, however, has considerable interest in keeping Hernandez in power, as he has promised to keep open the US military base at Soto Cano. 

Good grief! How cheaply we sell our soul!

Guns, Explosives, Submarines & Cocaine: US Charges Honduran President’s Brother

Corruption is Everywhere - Certainly in Honduras 

© Reuters / Jorge Cabrera

Tony Hernandez, a former Honduran congressman and brother of the country’s sitting president, has been convicted of drug smuggling, possession of firearms and connections to “deadly and dangerous” gangs from Mexico and Colombia.

The US attorney general and DEA announced Monday that Tony Hernandez has been charged with “conspiring to import cocaine”, possession of “machineguns and explosive devices” as well as lying to federal agents. He appeared in a Miami court after being arrested on November 23rd, and if found guilty is potentially facing life in prison.

Hernandez has a rap sheet that would make Tony Montana proud, using “machinegun toting security” to protect “multi-ton” cocaine shipments, bribing law enforcement in order to secure crucial information for facilitating narcotics shipments and soliciting bribes from large-scale drug dealers, according to the DoJ. Investigators even found packages of cocaine in drug laboratories in Mexico and Colombia that were hubristically stamped with the former lawmaker’s initials “TH”.

The indictment represents official US recognition that massive drug trafficking rings were presumably sanctioned at the highest levels of the Honduran government, including bribes paid to members of the National Congress of Honduras for protection and safe passage. The drugs were smuggled for over a decade, from 2004-2016, by air and by sea, allegedly pushed up through Guatemala and eventually into the United States. In a move the writers of Breaking Bad would probably call far-fetched, the DoJ’s public statement even says that “on at least one occasion” Hernandez used a submarine to transport the goods.

The statement also says that a recording exists of Hernandez giving a $50,000 kickback to a former member of the Honduran National Police to help force “Honduran government entities” to make payments to companies that launder money for a violent drug-trafficking gangs, which essentially amounts to Honduras having state subsidized drug-money laundering services.

Tony’s brother, the president of Honduras, who has ironically been trying to crack down on drug cartels, said that while being entitled to the presumption of innocence “no one is above the law.” So despite being the brother of the head of state, he will be given no advantages that an ordinary citizen would not have during a trial, Juan Orlando Hernandez stated.

Good luck with that, Juan. Any meaningful move to upset the drug cartels will get you killed. Maybe on order of your own brother.

On Other Side of Border, Mexico Detaining Thousands of Migrant Children

By Patrick Timmons

Mexican immigration officials in Tamaulipas state give instructions to a group of Central American

immigrants intercepted as they crossed the country on Feb. 3. Photo by José Martínez/EPA-EFE

MEXICO CITY,  UPI  -- As the United States grapples with the separation of immigrant families, the same thing is happening across the border in Mexico.

When families with children are caught inside Mexico without papers, they are often detained in prison-like conditions and adolescents are often split from their parents.

Mexican law prohibits detaining migrant children, but it happens anyway because state-run children's shelters lack the capacity to handle the tens of thousands of children, mostly from Central American countries. Instead, Mexican immigration authorities detain children and their families and then deport them together after 60 days if there is no political asylum petition.

Official statistics show Mexico detained 16,191 migrant children from January to July 2018. Of those 8,662 were between the ages of 12 and 17; 7,529 were under age 12. Those under 12 are housed with their families; adolescents are detained separately.

Most of those apprehended under age 12 were traveling with at least one adult family member, but 432 were traveling without family.

Migrant advocates in Mexico have renewed their calls for the Mexican government to improve how it treats the migrant families and children it detains after the outcry this summer over the Trump administration's policy of separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Not a crime in Mexico

Unlike in the United States, Mexico does not criminalize the unauthorized entry of migrants, Madeleine Penman, Amnesty International's Mexico researcher, told UPI. When immigration agents discover migrants without papers they take them into custody, placing them in migrant detention centers until they are deported.

It's a policy known as "assisted return," Penman said, noting that Mexico only uses the term deportation for migrants who have violated their visa conditions.

"In 2016, more than 40,000 children were detained in immigration detention. In 2017, child detentions decreased to about 18,000, with the decline mostly because of reduced migration through Mexico. But this year, child detentions have picked up again and 16,000 children have already been through migrant detention centers," Penman said, citing official statistics from Mexico's National Migration Institute.

Most of the migrant children detained by Mexico this year come from the Central American countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. For those under 12, almost 3,500 came from Honduras and almost 3,000 came from Guatemala, with most of these accompanied by family members.

"We've seen a number of cases of babies in detention for weeks on end, and there are mothers breastfeeding in detention centers," Penman said.

Conditions in migrant detention

"The problem is that officials -- out of negligence, out of will, or lack of capacity -- are not able to enforce the law in Mexico prohibiting child detention," said Ximena Suárez Enríquez, the Washington Office on Latin America's assistant director for Mexico, a human rights lobbyist in Washington, D.C.

Mexican immigration authorities can only detain irregular migrants. Political asylum seekers are not detained and are instead released into the community until their application is processed and approved.

Mexico's Human Rights Ombudsman has a dedicated office for migrant rights, headed by Edgar Corzo. The ombudsman has called for Mexican authorities to comply with the law prohibiting detention of migrant children.

The ombudsman issued a recommendation for implementing effective migrant child protection in May in a case of an adolescent Honduran girl arrested in Guanajuato and held in Mexico City's Iztapapala migrant detention facility, where she was raped. She filed a complaint against the facility. But Mexico's immigration authorities deported her to Honduras before an investigation could occur.

Lack of legal protection

Many of the state-run community shelters are similar to the migrant detention facilities, afflicted by negligence, abuse and lack of legal protection.

"Mexican federal and state laws are meant to protect all children," said Alberto Xicotencatl Carrasco, director of the Casa del Migrante in Saltillo, a migrant shelter run by the Catholic Church. "But what happens with migrant children and their families is that federal and state authorities pass the buck off between each other, leaving children in legal limbo and so children do not receive appropriate protection."

"There are many unaccompanied children and the federal immigration authorities send them to state-run children's shelters. But these shelters aren't equipped to provide these children with legal representation and so the child just remains in the shelter. Should they be given political asylum or repatriated? The state-run shelter cannot handle those questions. We have seen cases where unaccompanied migrant children are in state-run shelters for more than a year because they don't have legal representation and they don't have legal status in Mexico," Carrasco said.

The detention facilities and state-run community shelters in Tapachula, Chiapas, illustrate the problems. It's the first Mexican city many migrants encounter traveling north from Guatemala en route to the United States.

Tapachula's migrant detention center is Mexico's largest, and a hub for Mexico's detention of Central Americans crossing from Guatemala. Other large migrant detention facilities are in Veracruz and Mexico City.

In 2015 and 2016, a Citizen's Council with unprecedented access to Mexico's migrant detention centers calculated that 2,000 Central American children arrived in Tapachula each month.

Tapachula's state-run children's shelter has capacity for 64 children.

The children's shelters' minuscule capacity means that Tapachula's migrant detention facility is the only facility Mexican authorities can use to house children detained by immigration authorities.

Hope for change

Migrant advocates are hopeful for change with Mexico's new president taking office on Dec. 1. Corzo recently called on president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador to end the practice of detaining migrant children.

López Obrador campaigned on a message of wanting Mexico to welcome migrants. His nominee for Interior Minister, Olga Sanchez, also said she wants "a more humane, more empathetic policy" toward migrants. The Interior Ministry runs Mexico's immigration enforcement system.

Sanchez said last week Mexico would not be a policeman for migrants for the United States.

Until, and unless the USA gets involved in improving the lives of people in Central America, this migration will continue. America is of the habit of taking from 3rd world countries and is reaping the consequences of that most unChristian attitude. It's time to start giving back or become part of Latin America with its uncontrollable crime, violence and corruption.

Hondurans Hold Mass Protests Calling for New Elections

Corruption is Everywhere - Honduran Politics

By Daniel Uria  

Presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla (L) and former President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras' Opposition Alliance led a rally to call for new elections after the Supreme Electoral Tribunal named Incumbent President Juan Orlando Hernandez winner of the country's controversial November elections. Photo by Jose Valle/EPA

UPI -- Thousands of protesters marched in Honduras on Saturday to oppose what they called a "fraudulent" presidential election.

An estimated 80,000 supporters gathered in San Pedro Sula to call for former Opposition Alliance presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla to replace President Juan Orlando Hernandez in office.

"The people want Salvador Nasralla as the President of Honduras," Nasralla told the crowd. "The people won't stand for this dictatorship, we won't stop until we've removed the corrupt from power."

Protesters waved flags while marching toward the city's Central Park, as demonstrators followed along in vehicles honking their horns.

Former President Manuel Zelaya, the director of the Opposition Alliance, led the march and once again called for a national strike from Jan. 20 to Jan. 27 in the lead up to Hernandez's inauguration.

"We're calling for a national strike blocking all the main public highways, seaports, airports, until the will of the people is respected," he said.

Nasralla refuses to recognize the results of the Nov. 26 election, plagued with accusations of fraud and corruption. He asserts that he won the polls and would be willing to repeat them.

Honduras' Supreme Electoral Tribunal, or TSE, declared Hernandez the official winner of the election with 42.95 percent of the votes versus Nasralla's 41.42 percent on Dec. 17.

The Opposition Alliance presented 12 "irregularities" that occurred during and after the polling process, but the TSE said the appeal didn't establish grounds to nullify the election.

Narsalla has accused the TSE of "manipulating" polling numbers to benefit Hernandez. 

Election observers from the European Union have said the TSE and the National Party must "depoliticize."

Honduras Sends in Troops to Quell Violent Protests over Disputed Election

Corruption is Everywhere - Certainly in Honduras

© Moises Ayala / Reuters

Honduras has handed emergency powers to its army and police to quell the unrest and protests that have been wracking the country this week as votes are counted in a highly disputed and scrutinized election.

As of 11pm Friday, the government had suspended constitutional guarantees and imposed a curfew for the next 10 days, aimed at stemming the protests which have led to at least one death and 20 injuries, as well as widespread looting, following the election which took place last Sunday.

A supporter of presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla holds a bag with cookies next to burning

tires during a protest caused by the delayed vote count for the presidential election at Villanueva

neighborhood in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, December 1, 2017 © Edgard Garrido / Reuters

"The suspension of constitutional guarantees was approved so that the armed forces and the national police can contain this wave of violence that has engulfed the country," government official Ebal Diaz said on national television on Friday.

The protests have been ongoing over the past few days as the opposition, suspecting electoral fraud, have demanded a recount of the vote.

Police officers and the Army guard the city after the Honduras government enforced a curfew on Saturday

while still mired in chaos over a contested presidential election that has triggered looting and protests

in Tegucigalpa, Honduras December 2, 2017 © Jorge Cabrera / Reuters

On Wednesday, all parties to the election signed a document vowing to respect the final result of the ongoing vote count. However, a few hours later the electoral tribunal claimed there had been a computer glitch, which was followed by incumbent President Juan Orlando Hernandez gaining the lead over his main rival, former TV host Salvador Nasralla. 

The electoral tribunal is appointed by Congress, which is in turn controlled by Hernandez’s ruling center-right National Party, leading Nasralla to declare he would refuse to acknowledge the results unless there is a full recount in three disputed regions, amounting to over 5,000 ballot boxes.

"Here in Honduras, we are in a situation of fraud against me… I won the elections with 70 percent of the vote, with 116,000 more votes than Hernandez,” Nasralla said in a Facebook post to his supporters on Friday, teleSUR reported.

“Mathematically, it is impossible that this would change even with the 30 percent of the ballots left to count."

Though Nasralla has urged his supporters to protest peacefully, demonstrators have set up roadblocks, lit bonfires, and thrown rocks and wood at police, who have responded with tear gas and water cannons. Columns of smoke from burning tires could be seen rising above the capital, Tegucigalpa, and the Public Safety Department has reported disturbances in at least eight other cities. Schools, universities and businesses have announced they would close to avoid trouble over the weekend.

"Juan Orlando is a dictator and does not want to leave," one protester told RT’s Ruptly video agency.

Honduras has long been seen as a strategic country by the United States since the 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was a “banana republic” run by US corporations.

During the civil wars which plagued Central America in the 1980s, the country was used as a supply hub by the CIA – in cahoots with local drug traffickers – for the right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua. That era saw widespread extrajudicial killings and disappearances of leftists and opposition figures, and recent times have been no less turbulent. In June 2009, left-wing president Manuel Zelaya was overthrown in a coup, forced onboard a military plane and flown to nearby Costa Rica while still in his pajamas.

Honduras now suffers from widespread poverty as well as extreme levels of violence from warring street gangs and drug mafias. President Hernandez has been credited with lowering the homicide rate, though it remains one of the highest in the world, as well as boosting the economy. Backed by the United States, Hernandez is seen as an ally in the war on drugs. But he has also been accused of illegal fundraising and clinging on to power, while corruption and drug trafficking remain widespread.

His opponent, Salvador Nasralla, is a popular former TV host of Lebanese descent who has pledged to fight corruption. His Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship coalition includes the Liberty and Refoundation Party, or Libre, led by ex-president Manuel Zelaya. Zelaya has called for international observers to monitor the ongoing vote count to resolve the crisis.

They should have had international observers there from the beginning. Very few 3rd world leaders are willing to give up their power for the sake of fair elections.