Reportage • Jared Olson • April 26, 2024 • Leer en castellano

The last Tuesday in January started like any other for Abel López Perdomo. He got up before dawn and slipped out of the bamboo and tarpaulin shack that he shared with his wife and three children, who continued sleeping inside. He and two friends hopped into the cab of a rusty dump truck, which had been filled with thousands of pounds of thorny, maroon African Palm fruits the night before. They began a bone-jarring drive along dirt roads through plantations and cattle ranches.  

It should have been just another day of hard labor, extreme heat and thin margins for the three men. But, as routine as it seemed, they knew that the trip was risky: they were driving deep into the Margen Izquierda (which translates roughly as “Left Bank”), a 50-kilometer stretch of plantations north of the Aguán River in northern Honduras, an area notorious for paramilitary activity.

López Perdomo gripped the steering wheel as a red Ford SUV swerved in front of their truck. Masked men jumped out and pulled out AK-47s as they approached the dump truck. They dragged López Perdomo out of the driver’s seat and forced him into their vehicle at gunpoint. 

López Perdomo hasn’t been seen since, but, tragically, this was not an isolated occurrence. At least 10 land or water defenders have been killed in Honduras since the December 2022 intensification of the dirty war against agricultural workers and rural communities in Honduras.

Businesses involved in extractive industries, including major palm oil conglomerates, have been linked to paramilitary groups like the one suspected in López Perdomo’s disappearance. 

Regardless of government promises for change, irregular armed groups continue to operate with impunity. The self-styled progressive government of Xiomara Castro has done little to rein in their abuses. In fact, some claim that she has empowered the oligarchs who profit from the violence. 

Organized, against all odds

López Perdomo was no stranger to risk. He was a dedicated member of the land rights movement and a spokesperson for the Remolinos Cooperative, a group organizing to reclaim land seized by palm oil conglomerates in Honduras’s Aguán region. Together with 39 other leaders, he was slapped with usurpation charges in early 2022 for his role in defending his community’s right to the land.

In the 1990s, major palm oil conglomerates like the Dinant Corporation, Oleopalma and Jaremar seized around 20,000 hectares of lands that families had worked for more than a decade. The bosses—most of them from elite Honduran families—were empowered by structural adjustment measures and neoliberal reforms that made it easy for them to snatch up smallholder land. 

Encouraged by a growing demand for processed foods and green energy as well as loans from the World Bank, a new crop of plantation owners—who would come to own more 70 percent of the land in the Aguán region—transformed subsistence plots where African palm grew alongside mango, guavas, bananas, and cattle into parts of their agro-industrial empires.

The situation in the Aguán region deteriorated after the Honduran military carried out a coup in 2009 with the tacit support of the US State Department. Campesino groups, frustrated after years of glacial progress in their efforts to legally reclaim land, began to occupy plantations. The plantation owners reacted with a campaign of assassinations, massacres and disappearances that continues to this day. 

Over the last 15 years, private and state security forces have killed at least 180 organized agricultural workers. More recently, semi-autonomous assassins and paramilitary groups became increasingly important. Some of these have documented ties to private security operatives known to have worked for for palm corporations, as well as to military officers. 

The Remolinos Cooperative farm, like many others, was founded during a period of agrarian reform in the late 1980s. Two decades later, Inversiones Ceibeña bought the farm and the Remolinos Cooperatives was shuttered. The original members of the cooperative, together with their sons and daughters, held titles to the land, which they successfully reoccupied in December 2021 after an initial failed attempt during which private security guards and a US-trained SWAT team injured seven cooperative members.

Upon taking office in January 2022, the Castro government signaled it would work to resolve the conflict. After seven months in office, her government declared that it would create a “Tripartite Commission” to investigate fraudulent land grabs and human rights abuses associated with the Aguán land conflict. 

The creation of the Commission was meant to be a first step toward ending abuses in one of the bloodiest social conflicts in the country. Over halfway into Castro’s term, the Commission is still in the planning stage, having done little more than make a series of preliminary visits to the region by government functionaries as well as representatives from the United Nations, which has pledged support to the project. 

As with other cooperatives, even as it made big promises about ending the conflict, the Castro government refused to legalize the Remolinos Cooperative for almost a year. This forced cooperative members to sell their harvest to unlicensed middlemen who buy their fruit for rock bottom prices and then resell it, and opens farmers up to all kinds of abuse.

López Perdomo kept meticulous notes on the amount of fruit Remolinos produced and sold and he was determined to make the middleman pay fairly. Crucially, amid internal debates over whether or not they should pay extortion to one criminal group, with the hope that it would protect them from rival criminal organizations, he resolutely opposed paying up.

Many agricultural workers saw the Commission as a source of hope. “The Tripartite Commission should strike a balance between the state, campesino groups, and the private businesses with whom we’re in conflict,” said Juan Miguel Turcios, the vice president of the Camarones cooperative. I asked him and other members of the cooperative how militarization coincides with surges of killings. “When they do the dirty work of killing there are always soldiers in the area,” Andrés Pascual, the secretary for Camarones said, indicating state forces' refusal to find, capture, and prosecute the assassins threatening cooperatives.

The Commission has moved slowly over the last two years and the Aguán region has been remilitarized. The government remains unable to stop extreme violence and torture, like the disappearance of López Perdomo. 

Alfredo Reyes Barahona is the President of the La Chile cooperative, which has been locked in a standoff following their occupation of land claimed by the Dinant Corporation for over a year. He said that the Tripartite Commission’s slow progress and the state’s failure to protect members of his cooperative from hired killers have discouraged many in the land rights movement, even those who still hold out hope for its success and especially those living in rural settlements stalked by hitmen and other armed men. 

“We haven’t received any help from [Castro],” said Reyes Barahona. “In her political campaign she promised to protect the campesino sector, but they haven’t given us food and they’ve never provided any support.”

Instead, the Honduran government declared a state of emergency last November, styled after Nayib Bukele’s state of exception in El Salvador, which has sent over 60,000 people to prison without charge. The Honduran military was deployed throughout the country and organizers in the Aguán region told me the activities of paramilitary groups working at the behest of palm oil corporations have surged in tandem. 

A month after President Castro declared the state of emergency—which remains in effect—a wave of assassinations and disappearances left at least 11 land and water defenders dead or disappeared, including López Perdomo. From my reporting, I’m aware of additional victims whose families are too afraid to publicly denounce the murders. 

The search for López Perdomo

After the gunmen seized López Perdomo, his friends turned the truck around and drove back to Remolinos to share the news. By noon, enraged workers from the cooperative went to the Tocoa offices of the Coordinator of Popular Organizations in Aguán, a coalition of organizations that defends land and water. 

At 3 PM that afternoon, a dozen members of the cooperative and leaders of the land rights movement sat in on a pained meeting with a representative of Honduran National Police. Even so, as is routine in these cases, the police were slow to react on the day López Perdomo was disappeared.

The next day, with rain drenching the muddy plantations of the Margen Izquierda, around a hundred members of the Remolinos cooperative piled into pickup trucks to search for their compañero. 

I joined the farmers as they hiked through a swampy, semi-forested landscape of abandoned looking cattle-ranches and island-like stands of African palm. However, after the first hike, in which the farmers forged a creek and fanned out for half an hour to look for their friend, military and police operatives assigned to accompany the search announced that everyone, except five people, had to go home because of the extreme danger of armed groups in the area. This demobilized the massive group that had shown up to look for López Perdomo.

Yet for the remainder of the search, after most of the now-demoralized cooperative members went home, the escort of more than 40 military and police operatives didn’t seem worried about armed groups at all. As we walked along the banks of the Aguán river, the soldiers sat in their trucks and scrolled on their phones. Others, who had already tired of looking, chatted about how much they wanted a Honduran Bukele. 

A mechanism to protect local workers was introduced almost a decade ago under the rightwing government of Juan Orlando Hernández, but land defenders face even more extreme dangers today. 

There has been no sign of a truce that would allow the Tripartite Commission to advance in a manner that is fair to farmers. “Every time there are advances [on the part of the Commission], there is repression,” said Melvin López, a member of the Camarones cooperative.

Take the case of Omar Cruz, the former president of the Laureles Cooperative. He was included within a government protection mechanism and repeatedly requested a security detail following threats, but his calls were ignored. Cruz was involved in a legal campaign against the Dinant Corporation, whom he accused of financing an armed group called Los Cachos. 

During the last days of his life, in January 2023, police who were manning Dinant Corporation checkpoints put Cruz under illegal surveillance. He and his brother-in-law were shot to death in a hail of gunfire in a dark, dirt-roaded neighborhood next to their plantation on January 18. 

Locals point to an obvious double standard in the way that the armed forces and the justice system operate. Judges are quick to authorize police and military evictions of campesino organizations, but fail to protect workers. They have also been known to cooperate with paramilitary groups protecting palm plantations on behalf of their owners. 

In October, more than 800 members of Honduran National Police evicted campesinos from the Isletas Cooperative from land that they had reclaimed, but made no effort to expel irregular armed groups from plantation land to which small farmers have title.

In the weeks following López Perdomo’s disappearance, members of the Remolinos cooperative scoured the length of the Aguán river in a wooden boat. Their efforts turned up no trace of their colleague.

Then, on March 18th, gunmen assassinated Marvin Dubon, a 23-year-old member of the Tranvío cooperative, as he was riding his motorcycle back from the nearby village of La Confianza. As is typical in Honduras, authorities have not investigated the killing. 

One resident of the region who asked to remain anonymous, said that community members suspect Los Cachos—the same armed group Omar Cruz alleged was financed by Dinant in a complaint to the Public Ministry the week before he was murdered—are behind the killings. 

“Ever since we entered [the plantation] here we have received threats from that group,” he said. “That’s the price we pay for being in the struggle.”