Our work in Honduras

Of 189 countries in the 2021/22 Human Development Index, Honduras is ranked 137th. Seven in ten Hondurans live in poverty, almost five of them in extreme poverty. Since October 2018, large numbers of people have attempted to migrate north, travelling in highly publicized caravans for safety. Remittances from Hondurans living abroad to their families constitute 18% of the Honduran gross domestic product.

Category 4 hurricanes Eta and Iota hit the north coast of Honduras in November 2020. The most severe such natural phenomena in 20 years, they left 91 people dead and adversely affected 600,000 families, with more than 56,000 forced into temporary shelters. Flooding and destroyed infrastructure caused an estimated US$1.8 million in damages, compounding the economic fallout of the COVID 19 pandemic and highlighting Honduras’s extreme vulnerability to climate change.

In November 2021, Honduras elected its first woman president, Xiomara Castro, leader of the progressive Libre Party. Hondurans greeted her election with joyful celebrations after struggling against human rights violations, corruption and drug trafficking during the presidency of Juan Orlando Hernández, currently in prison in the United States on drugs and weapons charges.

Castro inherited the legacy of a 2009 coup d’état against her husband, Manuel Zelaya, who is constitutionally barred from running for a second term as president. The coup was followed by a severe crackdown on social movements, women’s organizations, the human rights sector and the media. Nearly 15 years after the coup, the country’s institutions remain weakened by the corrupt practices of the Hernández administration, its cities are ravaged by gang violence, and anti-democratic laws stifle social movements and muzzle the press.

The former administration embezzled public funds earmarked for health care and food production, using the money to fund political campaigns. The Hernández administration also gave hundreds of concessions of territory and natural resources for extractive projects—including logging, gas drilling, monoculture farming for export, and mining—to its political supporters in the business elite. Communities evicted from their lands by such projects are forced into lives of indigence, squatting in often environmentally dangerous areas without services, and swelling the ranks of the poor in cities, where they are vulnerable to criminal gangs.

The Hernández government promoted megaprojects in mining, logging, and hydro-electric and solar power as the solution to poverty. Instead, those projects brough murders and land evictions, particularly in Indigenous and Garifuna communities. Examples include

• the 2016 assassination of Lenca leader Berta Cáceres, who opposed a hydro-electric project;
  
  
• the July 2020 disappearance of four Garifuna land defenders, kidnapped from their homes by men in police uniforms; and
  
  
• the murder of about 100 leaders of the 20,000-member Tolupan ethnic group, from the north of Honduras, in cases linked to the defence of human rights.
  
  

It is still common for environment defenders to be criminalized by a biased judiciary from the former administration.