In her home in Santa Bárbara, Betty Vasquez describes how in pre-colonial times the territory around the Honduran city was governed by the indigenous Lenca, who distributed land by consensus via local assemblies or held it communally.
“Rivers were not used as borders like the Rio Bravo [that divides Mexico and the US today],” she says. “They were used as a means for communities to travel and trade.”
As a leader of the Santa Bárbara Environmental Movement, Vasquez (54) is one of many members of the surviving Lenca community who have become involved in land rights campaigns. Hanging on the walls of Vasquez’s home and painted on the streets outside are murals of Berta Cáceres, the prominent environmental activist and Lenca leader.
Cáceres was murdered in 2016, after years of death threats and state persecution linked to her campaign against the construction of a multimillion dollar water dam on the Gualcarque River.
In 2022, Roberto David Castillo, formerly the head of electric dam company Desa, was sentenced to 22 years and six months for his role in the murder.
Mining and hydroelectric dams have long been championed by the Honduran ruling and business elite as economic engines for the impoverished Central American state, but indigenous communities say licences for the extractive enterprises to operate on their land are routinely granted without consultation and threaten the water sources and ecosystem they rely on for survival.
Juan López was one of four Honduran human rights defenders killed last year. The outspoken local councillor of Lenca heritage was shot dead last September by a masked assailant as he left mass at a Catholic church in Tocoa, northern Honduras.
López’s killing followed the murders in 2023 of three activists he had worked alongside as part of a coalition protesting against iron-ore mining that was polluting the Guapinol River in the Carlos Escaleras National Park.
“His killers wanted to silence that voice and stop the criticism,” Adilia Castro, an activist from Tocoa.
Just days before López was murdered, he had called for the resignation of Adán Fúnez, the controversial and powerful mayor of Tocoa.
López said Fúnez was no longer suitable for leading the municipality after appearing in a widely circulated video negotiating with drug traffickers and with politicians from the ruling Libre Party.
Prosecutors told the Associated Press that Fúnez was a “person of interest” in López’s murder investigation. Fúnez has denied involvement in the killing of López in interviews with local media and subsequently announced he will not seek another term as mayor of Tocoa.
Tocoa lies along an arterial route for gangs trafficking drugs and people throughout Latin America and into the US. Armed criminal gangs often work in tandem with local businesses and corrupt officials, rendering swathes of the country in effect lawless and local indigenous communities vulnerable to exploitation.
Honduran activists are facing a heightened personal risk, with the UN reporting that in 2023 a total of 15 human rights defenders and journalists were killed in Honduras while 453 were harassed, threatened or intimidated, the majority while defending territory and the environment.
“The protection of water, air and the land is a right for all of humanity and should not depend on us fighting these struggles,” Vasquez says. “We are defending both our bodies and our land.”
After returning to the White House last month, US president Donald Trump introduced a 90-day freeze on US foreign aid, subject to a narrow and temporary waiver for programmes classed as “life-saving humanitarian assistance”.
“There is an atmosphere of worry among organisations,” Vasquez says in a WhatsApp message to The Irish Times after the suspension, adding that there is a lot of concern about how projects focused on migrants or gender issues will be affected as well as US-funded government programmes in Honduras.
Since 1961, when the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was established by president John F Kennedy at the height of the Cold War to deliver humanitarian aid and promote US soft power, American aid has been deeply rooted in “the social and political fabric of all the Central American countries”, says Jorge Cuéllar, an assistant professor at Dartmouth University’s department of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies.
USAID, as well as the EU humanitarian aid office, funds many programmes focusing on women’s rights, indigenous rights and climate change and on disaster relief after frequent extreme weather events, often filling a gap left by the weak Central American state.
USAID’s presence in Central America expanded under the Biden administration, which attempted to focus on the root causes of migration. “USAID hasn’t always been the most successful,” Cuéllar says, “but, nonetheless, there have been strategic advancements and I think if [USAID] hadn’t been there, things would have been much worse.”
The suspension of nearly $2 billion of aid by the Trump administration is “actively weakening efforts to address the reasons millions are fleeing Latin America and the Caribbean, like armed conflicts, violent organised crime, rampant corruption, democratic backsliding, closing civic space, weak justice systems and rule of law”, said the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights advocacy group.
Cuéllar says unless any withdrawn US aid is replaced by the EU or China, Central American communities will be less prepared for extreme weather events and take longer to recover from them.
In a press statement, US secretary of state Marco Rubio said the Trump administration foreign policy priorities included curbing mass migration, ending “climate policies that weaken America” and “a return to American energy dominance”.
Cuéllar says violations of indigenous land rights in Honduras and neighbouring Guatemala and El Salvador are likely to continue with more mining concessions granted, citing how the authoritarian government of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador overturned a seven-year ban on metals mining last December.
“The Salvadoran government is trying to get the blessing of the United States, and the Trump administration specifically, to look at these things as positive developments for the country’s economy,” Cuéllar says.
“I think we’re returning to a moment where these countries will be open for business once again, and the Trump administration will take advantage of that, despite the impacts that it might have on indigenous peoples who, in the end, will become part of the large demographics of people who migrate towards the United States.”
