Category Archives: Honduras

Indigenous environmental defender killed in latest Honduras attack

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  • Félix Vásquez, 60, shot in own home in front of family
  • Killing followed death threats linked to work on environment

Another indigenous environmentalist has been killed in Honduras, cementing the country’s inglorious ranking as the deadliest place in the world to defend land and natural resources from exploitation.

Félix Vásquez, 60, a veteran leader of the indigenous Lenca people, was shot dead at home in Santiago de Puringla, a rural community in the department of La Paz, western Honduras on the night of 26 December – just weeks after reporting death threats linked to his work. His adult children were beaten and threatened by the four armed assailants in balaclavas, but survived the ordeal.

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‘This was worse than Eta’: Hurricane Iota brings repeat destruction to Honduras

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Second devastating hurricane in two weeks lashes fragile nation and leaves villages submerged

Nery Benitez was working shifts as a baggage handler at San Pedro Sula’s airport when it got flooded by Hurricane Eta. This week it was inundated again as Hurricane Iota struck.

“I had gone seven months without work and three days after I got called back this flooding happened,” the 50-year-old said. “We have family and children. How are we going to feed them?”

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Hurricane Iota lashes Central America – video

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Hurricane Iota has made landfall on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, threatening catastrophic damage. Huge waves crashed into the Colombian island of San Andrés as the storm churned through the region, lashing Nicaragua with winds of up to 155mph (250kmh). 

The latest storm hit just two weeks after Hurricane Eta, which caused havoc across the same parts of Central America. The presidents of Honduras and Guatemala have called on wealthier countries to help deal with the cost of the climate crisis

• This video was amended on 17 November 2020 to remove unrelated footage that had been mistakenly included in a report by the Associated Press

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Tropical Storm Iota may bring more damage to Caribbean after Eta

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Storm may bring dangerous winds, storm surge and as much as 30in of rain to Nicaragua and Honduras

Tropical Storm Iota was brewing in the Caribbean early on Saturday, threatening a second tropical strike for Nicaragua and Honduras, countries recently ransacked by Eta, a category 4 hurricane.

Related: Devastating 2020 Atlantic hurricane season breaks all records

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‘Overwhelming’: Central America braces for new storms in wake of Hurricane Eta

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Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala worst affected with scores dead and more than 200,000 people evacuated from their homes

Central America is braced for further storms this weekend as the region reels from the devastation caused by Hurricane Eta, the Red Cross has warned.

Forecasters believe a weather front forming in the Caribbean has a 90% chance of becoming a cyclone, making it the 30th named Atlantic storm of 2020 in a record-breaking hurricane season, shattering the previous worst year of 28 storms in 2005.

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‘Everything buried in mud’: Hurricane Eta’s devastating blow to Honduras

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Flooding left thousands trapped for days without food or water and death toll may never be known

Across a sea of putrid mud a metre or so deep, Marvin Argueta pointed to the remnants of what a week ago was his home on the banks of the Chamelecón River. He had lost everything – but he still considers himself lucky.

“If we hadn’t got out in time, we all would have died,” said Argueta, 22, who along with his wife and four children abandoned their house when the flood waters reached waist height in the middle of the night. “A friend of mine lost his entire family.”

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Storm Eta death toll rises to 100 after devastating mudslides

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Rescuers reach remote mountain village in Guatemala where people were buried in their homes

The death toll from the calamitous Storm Eta in Central America soared on Friday after the Guatemalan military reached a remote mountainous village where torrential rains had triggered devastating mudslides, killing about 100 people.

Many of the dead were buried in their homes in the remote village of Quejá in the central region of Alta Verapaz, where about 150 houses had been swallowed by mudslides, said army spokesman Rubén Téllez.

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Tropical storm Eta expected to become hurricane and heads to Central America

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System formed in the Caribbean and tied record for most named storms in a single Atlantic hurricane season

Forecasters said they expected the newly-formed Tropical storm Eta to become a hurricane by Monday, shortly after the system formed in the Caribbean and tied the record for most named storms in a single Atlantic hurricane season.

Related: Is climate change making hurricanes worse?

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Thousands of migrants cross into Guatemala with slim hopes of reaching US

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The caravan from Honduras is the biggest since the pandemic hit Central America in March, triggering a rise in unemployment and poverty

Thousands of Honduran migrants hoping to reach the United States have entered Guatemala, testing the newly reopened frontier that had been shut by the coronavirus pandemic.

Authorities had planned to register the migrants as they crossed and offer assistance to those willing to turn back, but early on Thursday, the group pushed past armed guards without registering. By midday more than 3,000 migrants had crossed illegally, said Guatemalan officials.

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La Caravana del Diablo: a migrant caravan in Mexico – photo essay

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Photojournalist Ada Luisa Trillo has won the Guardian’s Portfolio Review award at Format photography festival this year. Her powerful piece of work on the migrant caravan follows the people who left Central American countries to reach the US

In January 2020, fleeing violence and poor economic conditions, a group of Hondurans organised a huge migrant caravan that travelled through Guatemala into Mexico. After travelling for eight days, the caravan crossed the Suchiate River into Mexico and were met by the recently established Guardia Nacional composed of former federal, military and naval police.

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Record 212 land and environment activists killed last year

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Global Witness campaigners warn of risk of further killings during Covid-19 lockdowns

A record number of people were killed last year for defending their land and environment, according to research that highlights the routine murder of activists who oppose extractive industries driving the climate crisis and the destruction of nature.

More than four defenders were killed every week in 2019, according to an annual death toll compiled by the independent watchdog Global Witness, amid growing evidence of opportunistic killings during the Covid-19 lockdown in which activists were left as “sitting ducks” in their own homes.

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Fears growing for five indigenous Garifuna men abducted in Honduras

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The Triunfo de la Cruz region has been embroiled in a struggle to save their ancestral land from developers and drug traffickers

Fears are growing for the safety of five black indigenous men in Honduras who were abducted from their homes last weekend by heavily armed gunmen in police uniforms.

The victims are Garifuna fishermen from the town Triunfo de la Cruz on the north coast – a region where communities are embroiled in a longstanding struggle to save their ancestral land from drug traffickers, palm oil magnates and tourism developers aided by corrupt officials and institutions.

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Twitter deletes 20,000 fake accounts linked to Saudi, Serbian and Egyptian governments

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Accounts also linked to Honduras and Indonesia violated policy and were ‘targeted attempt to undermine the public conversation’

Twitter has deleted 20,000 fake accounts linked to the governments of Serbia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Honduras and Indonesia, saying they violated company policy and were a “targeted attempt to undermine the public conversation”.

Yoel Roth, the head of site integrity, said the removal of the accounts was part of the company’s ongoing “work to detect and investigate state-backed information operations”.

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US prosecutors accuse Honduran president of taking drug money

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Juan Orlando Hernández allegedly took $25,000 in 2013 in exchange for protecting trafficker from law enforcement

US prosecutors have said that the president of Honduras met a drug trafficker in around 2013 and took $25,000 in exchange for protecting the trafficker from law enforcement.

The US attorney’s office for the southern district of New York issued a statement referring to President Juan Orlando Hernández only as a “high-ranking Honduran official” or as “CC-4”, a co-conspirator.

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How the American dream died on the world’s busiest border

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It is a place where worlds converge, a vast melting pot of different peoples, all in search of a better life. Yet the US-Mexico border is also, increasingly, a focal point for human suffering

Milson, from Honduras, sits with his 14-year-old daughter, Loany, on the reedy riverbank beside the bridge connecting Matamoros, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, with downtown Brownsville, Texas, across the Rio Grande.

On the far reach – a few yards but another world away – is a vast tent (officially a “soft-sided facility”) erected to cope with the sheer numbers seeking asylum in the US. In a few weeks’ time, on the date stipulated on their “notice to appear” document, the people staying here will have their “credible fear interview” by video link.

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Hundreds of Central American migrants rounded up by guardsmen at Mexico border – video

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National guardsmen in riot gear have blocked the path of hundreds of Central Americans near the town of Frontera Hidalgo in southern Mexico. 

Security forces corralled the migrants and hauled them on to buses, as Mexico continues with efforts to contain mass migration under pressure from the Trump administration.


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Central American migrants meet with armed guardsmen at Mexico border

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Mexico continues with efforts to contain the procession under pressure from the Trump administration

National guardsmen in riot gear have corralled hundreds of Central Americans and hauled them on to buses as Mexico continues with efforts to contain mass migration, under pressure from the Trump administration.

Security forces blocked the migrants’ path near the town of Frontera Hidalgo on Thursday afternoon, after hundreds had swept into Mexico across the Suchiate River that divides the country from Guatemala.

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Scuffles erupt between migrants and troops at Guatemala-Mexico border – video report

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Scuffles have broken out between hundreds of Central American migrants and National Guard agents at the border between Guatemala and Mexico. The troops formed a barrier to stop the migrants from entering deeper into Mexico as they attempted to cross into the US

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US agents aid in Guatemalan crackdown on hundreds of migrants headed north

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Move in effect dashes migrants’ plans to travel together in a ‘caravan’ to the United States

Guatemalan police accompanied by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have swept up hundreds of migrants, returning them to the Honduran border and in effect dashing their plans to travel together in a “caravan” to the United States.

Other, smaller groups traveled on in dribs and drabs in a movement involving several thousand people but very different from previous caravans.

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More than 300 human rights activists were killed in 2019, report reveals

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Colombia was the bloodiest nation with 103 murders and the Philippines was second, followed by Brazil, Honduras and Mexico

More than 300 human rights defenders working to protect the environment, free speech, LGBTQ rights and indigenous lands in 31 countries were killed in 2019, a new report reveals.

Two thirds of the total killings took place in Latin America where impunity from prosecution is the norm.

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