The life and death of Honduran defender Juan López

Honduran land defender Juan López gives a speech at a protest blocking off the highway in front of Guapinol on January 31, 2024. López and others discussed strategies to cancel the Pinares mining project, and denounced the disappearance the previous day of Abel López Perdomo, taken away by armed groups in a separate but interconnected part of the conflicts over land and water in the region. Photo: Jared Olson

Reportage • Jared Olson • November 14, 2024 • Leer en castellano

After mass let out at the San Isidro Church in downtown Tocoa, in northern Honduras, a serious-looking middle aged man, usually with a book in hand, was often seen lingering among the crowd and chatting with worshippers as they dispersed. That man—the outspoken land defender, teacher, and town councilor Juan López—was well-acquainted with the risks of challenging local elites. He was aware the danger had come to a fever pitch as he walked out of church on Saturday, September 14, but he didn’t realize then that he only had minutes left to live. 

Days before, López had done the unthinkable: he had publicly demanded the renunciation of Adán Fúnez, the current mayor for the town of Tocoa and a political power broker for LIBRE, the ostensibly left-leaning party of Honduran President Xiomara Castro. A leaked video came out showing Fúnez having intimate conversations with drug traffickers. Fúnez has long been a key political backer of the controversial Los Pinares mining project, owned by local magnates Lenir Pérez and Ana Facussé. 

López, who was the leader of the Coordinator of Public Goods of the Aguán, (COPA, in its Spanish acronym), a coalition of organizations in defense of land and water in the Aguán Valley region of Honduras, took advantage of the scandal to go on the offensive. He even had someone film his speech demanding Fúnez’s resignation, and the video made the rounds on Facebook and social media as a provocative affront against an entrenched local caudillo. Days later, armed men ambushed López as he left church, killing him instantly. He was 46 years old.

I met López for the first time in December 2019, just after he was released from prison, where he was held alongside thirty-three other men held on trumped up charges for resisting the Los Pinares mine. Los Pinares is an open pit iron-oxide mine illegally carved out of Carlos Escaleras National Park. The project has powerful backers, and until at least 2019, it was quietly backed by Nucor Steel, a US corporation with close political ties to Donald Trump. Eight men, all of them local land defenders, were imprisoned from April 2019 until February, 2022, as were 25 other men—López was among them—who were released within a month. Their mass arrest was the first of many blows against communities who opposed the mine out of concern for the Guapinol river. 

The swampy Caribbean lowlands of the Aguán Valley, hemmed in to the south by the serrated mist-cloaked mountains of Carlos Escaleras National Park, have been transformed by decades of extractivism. The riverine floodplains are today covered with miles upon miles of uniform, pesticide-drenched African palm plantations, and the sierra upended with an open-pit mine that dried out the regional watershed and soiled the quality of remaining water. 

López frequently spoke at protests in the Aguán Valley region, the site of a decades-old dirty war unleashed by extractive interests over control of land and water. He traveled seven hours to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, to advocate for political prisoners and against the ravages of the Los Pinares mine. His stare was cutting and perceptive, and his dark humor livened up every moment, even as he remained serious and committed to la lucha. Every few weeks he would write long, reflective essays that combined theology and his passion for church with the need to protect the planet from the ravages of capitalism. He sent his essays out to his contacts on WhatsApp. 

A teacher by trade, López was a constant reader, according to Leonel George, his fellow councilman and lifelong friend who was imprisoned along with the other criminalized defenders. While they were behind bars at the Támara prison in 2019, George told me, López’ equanimity and desire to share his thoughts turned him into a natural leader. “He would share his evangelical readings and reflections,” George recalled in a phone call. “He was always listened to by the group [of water defenders], and not just by that group but the other prisoners as well.”  

Days before he was assassinated, I was in touch with López to ask about the circumstances of the leaked video of Fúnez. “If LIBRE doesn’t eliminate that sickness (promoters of mining linked to narco-trafficking) as a party it will cease to be a reference point to push for social, economic, cultural, environmental, and political change,” he told me.

Organizing for life

The five municipal councillors in Tocoa have played a significant role in the battle against the granting of mining concessions in the neighboring mountains. These tensions passed under the media radar for years as mining companies and their political, criminal, and military backers played tug-of-war with communities and water defenders over land titles. These disputes have, at periodic inflection points, devolved into repression of protest, criminalizations, and murder. Crucially, the members of the Tocoa council were charged with approving and overseeing the open town hall style meetings (called cabildos abiertos) required by Honduran and international law to seek free, prior, and informed consent from local residents regarding extractive projects in their backyard. In 2019, months after López was freed from prison, a cabildo abierto was held in Tocoa in which the majority of residents voted against open-pit mining, though the declaration went ignored. 

During Juan Orlando Hernández’s government (2014-2022), at least eight people were murdered over the Los Pinares mine (local activists have argued there were at least a handful of killings that took place in the mountainous San Pedro Sector that went unregistered). Eight prisoners were briefly held in the military-controlled maximum security prison known as La Tolva before they were transferred to the medium-security Olanchito prison. They were warned by fellow inmates that unknown actors were looking to contract hit men to murder them behind bars. Theirs would come to be a cause celebre representing the fight against the mine, and the men became known colloquially as the “Guapinol Eight.” 

During their trial in January and February 2022, when the water defense movement kept constant watch over a solidarity encampment outside the Tocoa courthouse, López was a frequent figure among the crowds beneath the luffing tarp tents, where residents drank coffee, served meals, and chewed sticks of raw sugarcane while discussing strategies to defend the Aguán’s rivers. Though the judge condemned the Guapinol Eight, things took an astonishing turn when Castro pardoned them almost immediately afterwards. 

Days later, President Castro announced she would put an end to open pit mining in Honduras. But within months Castro named Fúnez governor of the Colón department, a position he kept at the same time as being Tocoa’s mayor. Fúnez admitted that the initial mining concession granted to EMCO Holding, the predecessor of Pinares, was sought by the heads of the Cachiros drug gang. He then powered ahead with another cabildo abierto on April 29, 2022, in an area with a disproportionate amount of Pinares employees. 

López and his friend and fellow town councillor Leonel George went to that event. They witnessed several hundred residents attend a barbeque managed by Pinares employees, overseen by a brigade of soldiers and private security operatives. It was a trap designed to stoke pro-mine support with the acquiescent complicity of the government, López told me at the time.

In November 2022 the Castro government declared a national state of emergency, sending the military into the streets in the name of cracking down on gangs and criminal structures. Militarization was followed by a wave of killings of social leaders, primarily but not exclusively in the Aguán Valley. Around two dozen members of social movements or collective organizations have been murdered since early 2023. 

Amidst surging killings and paramilitary activity, López continued to work to unite the water defenders fighting Pinares with thousands of impoverished, criminalized campesinos retaking corporate palm plantation lands into a common cause against the economic elite, centered around the Facussé family and interwoven with the highest rungs of Honduras’s political and military elite. 

One rainy afternoon in January 2024, the day after land defender Abel López Perdomo was disappeared by as part of an land conflict over palm plantations seized by the same elites invested in Los Pinares, López climbed atop a yellow excavator draped with anti-mine posters. Members of a broad coalition shut down transit on the only highway along the north coast highway for almost twelve hours to demand the shutdown of Los Pinares.

Speaking before hundreds, López careful, deliberate words described a growing consciousness among youth who started the protest that morning, braving hours of non-stop rain to speak out against Perdomo’s disappearance and discussed how to stop the mining project. 

Powerful, dangerous men

“Adán [Fúnez] has at his employ a group of sicarios… in the village of Quebrada de Arena,” the same village where residents accuse an armed group called Los Cachos of working on behalf of the Dinant Corporation, an anonymous source from the Aguán told me. “With these kinds of killings they’re looking to stoke fear in the population. It all depends on the attitude of the people,” said my source, who requested anonymity because of the continued threat of armed groups operating with impunity in the region.

“These aren’t just assassinations,” Yoni Rivas, a member of COPA and lifelong land defense activist who knew López for years, told Ojalá. “They are psychological operations meant to create terror and uncertainty.”

Residents are demanding a comprehensive investigation into the crime. But when news of López’s death made the rounds, few doubted as to why a leader like him would have been killed. 

Beyond high-profile killings like that of López, whose deaths are registered in the yearly tallies of murdered land defenders published by organizations like Global Witness and denounced by groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, there are far more people slain or disappeared who weren’t as politically visible. López’s murder ignited outrage through Honduras, where he was well known among journalists, human rights activists, and religious and political figures. Even the Pope expressed his condolences for the crime. On October 4th, three weeks after the murder, the suspect accused of killing López was arrested alongside two suspected accomplices in Tocoa. But those who planned and paid for the murder continue to walk free.

On October 21 George announced that he will seek to unseat Fúnez as the mayor of Tocoa in elections to take place a year from now. But the specter of his murdered friend and colleague looms over him. “He always showed himself to be coherent in what he believed, what he said, and what he did, as much in church as in the street, in social struggle, as well as in the municipal government,” George told Ojalá. 

Like Berta Cáceres and so many others, López met the bitter fate of becoming a movement martyr. “There is nothing more revolutionary than peace,” wrote López in one of his essays published on Facebook, where his profile photo was that of Archbishop Oscar Romero. “You can’t get to peace through manipulation, lies, corruption… To get to peace, you need to go through the path of truth and justice.”