Statement for the Congressional Record
on Juan López
Senator Peter Welch (D-Vt.)
September 18, 2024
Madam President, over the past six years, my office, and the office of my predecessor Senator Leahy, have received reports of recurring threats, attacks, arbitrary arrests, and assassinations of members of the Guapinol, Tocoa, and other communities in the Bajo Aguán region of Honduras. Those crimes were intended to intimidate and silence those who opposed an open-pit iron oxide mine and the Ecotek Thermoelectric Project which threaten their livelihoods and the region’s environment, and who challenged the companies and corrupt officials who profit from those projects.
Then on Saturday, September 14th, I learned of the murder of Honduran environmental activist Juan López, the latest victim of this epidemic of vigilante violence. Mr. López, a winner of the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award in 2019, had been a victim of wrongful imprisonment, false prosecution, and had spoken out against corrupt officials in Tocoa.
This outrageous crime struck a nerve for me because Mr. López’s murder was the latest in a pattern of similar killings. There have been six other assassinations of members of the Guapinol water defenders. No one has been prosecuted or punished for those crimes, or for the murders of scores of other environmental and human rights defenders in Honduras.
Juan López, like Berta Cáceres—whose murder in 2016 was linked to officers of the company responsible for the hydroelectric project she and others in her Indigenous community opposed—was a person of integrity. Both were courageous defenders of the environment and their communities, threatened by powerful interests supported by the corrupt Honduran government of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández who, throughout that period and until his arrest and conviction for drug trafficking, was supported by the United States.
Mr. López’s was killed after the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) issued Precautionary Measures in October 2023. The issuance of an IACHR protective measure is a mechanism to insist that the Honduran government protect individuals who are at severe and urgent risk of irreparable harm to their rights to life and safety. But the Honduran government failed to implement effective protective measures on behalf of these communities or their advocates like Mr. López.
Such measures, if not enforced, are no better than the paper they are printed on. And that is the reality in Honduras, where people like Juan López have had no one and nothing to protect them.
Instead, it is the victims, the activists, who are arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned, accused of crimes which in reality amount to nothing more than peacefully defending their land and their right to a healthy environment. Some have languished in pre-trial detention for years, for simply protesting a mine that has polluted the water source of thousands of people.
Madam President, Honduras is currently a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council. Members of the Council have a responsibility to uphold human rights standards. That has been a criterion of membership since the Council was established in 2006. Yet the human rights of people like Juan López and the other Guapinol water defenders are routinely violated with impunity.
My thoughts and condolences are with Mr. López’s family, and with the other families in the Bajo Aguán communities. In response to this pattern of violence and the assassination of Mr. López last Saturday, I believe that, at a minimum, three things need to be done, beginning immediately, and I urge the U.S. Ambassador to Honduras to insist on them as well:
- An international commission of experts to support the Honduran prosecutor’s investigation of the murder of Juan López, to ensure the investigation is credible, thorough, and impartial;
- Protection for human rights defenders at risk in the Bajo Aguán region; and
- Investigations of the abuses and corruption denounced by Juan López and the pattern of violence against the Guapinol defenders.
The threats, false arrests, wrongful imprisonment, murder, and impunity in the Bajo Aguán have been tolerated—and in effect tacitly and even actively encouraged—by Honduran officials for far too long. It has also received far too little attention from the United States and other governments that have put the interests of foreign investors above those of the impoverished people who live in that troubled region. I hope that Juan López’s death will not only be answered by holding accountable those responsible, but that it will also mark the beginning of real change in the Bajo Aguán. The people of those communities should not have to live in fear that powerful companies and corrupt officials will steal their land, pollute their rivers, and murder them for peacefully defending the natural resources that are rightfully theirs.
Download the Statement for the Congressional Record.