‘Danger no longer only comes from the hitmen, but from the state’: the Honduran farmers labelled terrorists for protecting their land
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- Gunmen killed 20 people at a palm oil farm in Rigores, Honduras on 21 May — only three survived, including 15-year-old Orlean, who lost his uncle and two cousins — making it the deadliest attack in the Bajo Aguán valley since ACLED began collecting data in 2018.
- President Nasry "Tito" Asfura's rightwing government has passed two laws human rights groups say criminalize land defenders: a penal-code reform designating criminal groups as terrorist organizations (against the supreme court's advice), and a law prioritizing agribusiness land claims over campesino, Indigenous, or activist claims.
- The Bajo Aguán conflict, rooted in a 1992 land reform law that let palm oil companies buy up smallholders' land, has killed more than 200 people per the Honduran Commission for Human Rights (Conadeh) — with nine of 10 killings and abuses never investigated.
- The World Bank's International Finance Corporation funded Dinant, the palm oil company at the heart of the conflict; Dinant has repeatedly denied involvement in murder and human rights abuses despite international condemnation.
- Drug-trafficking networks became entangled in the conflict in the 2010s as the Bajo Aguán emerged as a cocaine corridor from Colombia, with palm oil logistics attractive for money laundering and territorial control.
- Former president Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted drug trafficker pardoned by Trump in December, oversaw nearly $72m (£57m) in palm oil investment during his presidency despite allegations of human rights abuses.
Why it matters: For the 200+ people already killed in the Bajo Aguán conflict, the new 'terrorism' designation transforms a corporate-violence problem into state-sanctioned criminalization of farmers. With 90% of killings uninvestigated and a pardoned-drug-trafficker president's palm-oil playbook now resumed, campesino communities have fewer legal avenues — and less ability to distinguish between corporate and state threats.
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