Gunmen killed 20 people at a palm oil farm in Rigores, in Honduras’s Bajo Aguán valley, on 21 May, in the region’s deadliest month since monitoring began in 2018. Fifteen-year-old Orlean survived the attack, while his uncle and two cousins were among those killed.
The massacre has exposed the continuing danger faced by small-scale farmers in a region marked by three decades of land disputes, drug trafficking and alleged abuses linked to agribusiness. Campaigners now say recent laws under President Nasry “Tito” Asfura’s rightwing government could put community leaders at further risk by treating protest and land claims as criminal activity.
A long-running land conflict turns deadlier
The Bajo Aguán valley is Honduras’s main palm oil-producing area and a strategic route for cocaine moving north from Colombia. Its farms and transport networks have also made it attractive for money laundering, according to the account of the conflict. Drug-trafficking groups seeking territorial control have become entangled in disputes between campesinos, or peasant farmers, and large palm oil companies.
The conflict dates back to a 1992 land reform law that allowed major palm oil businesses to purchase smallholdings. Farmers’ organisations say land was obtained fraudulently and have pursued claims through lawsuits and occupations. Palm oil companies maintain that the sales were lawful and deny accusations that private guards or paramilitary groups were used against farmers.
More than 200 people, most of them campesinos, have been killed in the conflict, according to estimates by the Honduran Commission for Human Rights, known as Conadeh. Acled, a conflict-monitoring organisation, recorded May as the most violent month in the valley since its data collection began in 2018; a campesino leader was also killed weeks later in nearby Santa Rosa de Aguán.
New laws raise fears of state prosecution
The Asfura administration has introduced legislation intended to combat organised crime, but human rights groups warn that its broad provisions could be used against land defenders. A penal code reform permits criminal groups to be classified as terrorist organisations, despite advice from Honduras’s supreme court against the measure.
Lucía Vigil of the Centre for the Study of Democracy said the law’s definition of terrorism was sufficiently open-ended that groups engaging in peaceful protest could be labelled terrorist. Yoni Rivas, a spokesperson for the Plataforma Agraria network, said the change added state action to the threats already posed by armed men following him.
Rivas has lived away from his home for three years because of daily death threats and travels in an armoured vehicle provided under an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights protection measure. The government also approved a land law two weeks after the terrorism reform that, according to lawyer Lucas Mantelli of the pan-American Centre for Justice and International Law, gives agribusiness claims priority over those of campesino, Indigenous and other activist groups.
Accountability remains scarce in the valley
The new measures follow a history of state involvement and inaction. During the previous National party administration of Juan Orlando Hernández, almost $72m was invested in the palm oil sector despite allegations of human rights abuses. Campaigners say police and military forces sometimes harassed or forcibly removed farmers, while also failing to stop abuses.
Under former leftwing President Xiomara Castro, who governed from 2022 until this year, an agrarian security commission was created and violent evictions by state forces became less frequent. Vigil said the violence did not end, but that the government made some effort to address the dispute. She described the current period as a return to repression of civic dissent.
Conadeh estimates that nine out of 10 killings and abuses in Bajo Aguán are never investigated. After the Rigores attack, residents removed the victims’ bodies before police arrived, reflecting distrust of authorities and claims that police demand an alleged $300 fee to release bodies. Investigators later exhumed the remains and performed autopsies, but families questioned whether those steps would identify those responsible.
The unresolved question is whether the government’s new security and land measures will produce prosecutions of armed perpetrators or instead intensify pressure on the communities contesting agribusiness claims. For residents of Bajo Aguán, the answer will depend on whether authorities investigate the massacre and protect land defenders without treating peaceful organising as terrorism.
Related coverage:
No comments yet. Start the discussion.