(Zambrano) Hundreds of protesters blocked Honduras’ main highway on Monday, demanding “justice” for murdered environmental defenders Berta Cáceres in 2016 and Juan López on September 14, AFP reported.
“Justice for Berta”, “Justice for Juan López” chanted the demonstrators at the call of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), blocking from dawn until midday the road linking the capital Tegucigalpa to the second city of the country, San Pedro Sula (North).
“More than eight years after the cruel assassination” of Berta Cáceres, 44, “we still see the fragility and corruption of the judicial system in Honduras,” COPINH said in a statement.
PHOTO ORLANDO SIERRA, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
“More than eight years after the cruel assassination” of Berta Cáceres, 44, “we still see the fragility and corruption of the judicial system in Honduras,” COPINH said in a statement.
“The impunity in this case is a constant reminder of the injustices faced by those who defend human rights and ancestral territories,” it added.
“Today, this same impunity threatens to repeat itself with the assassination of Juan Lopez, a new martyr in the struggle to defend the territories,” the organization adds.
Mr. Lopez, 46, was shot dead in his car as he left a church in the municipality of Tocoa, 220 km northeast of Tegucigalpa.
Pope Francis condemned the assassination on Sunday. “I learned with sorrow that Juan Antonio López, delegate of the Word of God, coordinator of the social pastoral ministry of the diocese of Trujillo and founding member of the pastoral ministry of integral ecology in Honduras, was assassinated in Honduras,” said the Argentine pontiff.
Mr. Lopez accused a mining group of operating an open-pit mine in conditions that damaged a forest reserve near Tocoa.
PHOTO ORLANDO SIERRA, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Juan Lopez, 46, was shot dead in his car as he left a church in the municipality of Tocoa, 220 km northeast of Tegucigalpa.
He told AFP in 2021 that he feared for his life, explaining that he had been warned that the same thing would happen to him as to Berta Cáceres, who was shot dead on March 2, 2016 because she opposed the construction of a hydroelectric dam in the west of the country.
COPINH has asked the Supreme Court to “confirm” the sentence handed down to eight people convicted in the first instance for the assassination of the activist.
Honduras is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for environmental defenders, with 18 murders in 2023, according to the NGO Global Witness.