By Jim Phillips

On the evening of September 14, Juan Lopez had just finished leading a Saturday evening service at the Catholic church in Tocoa, Honduras. Witnesses say that as he was getting to his car, someone on a motorcycle rode by and shot him multiple times, killing him. Lopez was a teacher, community leader, and a member of the Tocoa municipal council. He was also a human rights activist and the most prominent environmental defender in Honduras since the assassination of water protector Berta Cáceres in 2016. In 2015, the year before her assassination, Cáceres was awarded the international Goldman Prize for Indigenous environmental activism. In 2019 the Institute  for Policy Studies awarded Lopez, on behalf of the Guapinol Water Defenders, the Moffit Letelier Award for the defense of sovereignty, environment, and human rights. 

Lopez was a leader in a group of local people who had been fighting for years to stop a large iron ore mining project in the area that threatened the water for local communities. They are known in Honduras as the Guapinol Water Defenders, and many of them, including Lopez, were imprisoned for their peaceful resistance by the previous government of Juan Orlando Hernandez which many Hondurans called a “narco-dictatorship.” Mining requires enormous amounts of water that is used and polluted in the mining process, leaving people without clean water and, often, with a poisoned or dead environment. The mining company, Los Pinares, is owned by one of the richest families in Honduras. Their mining concession includes lands within the Carlos Escaleras National park, a major environmental reserve that contains the headwaters of several rivers that water the area. People were concerned about the region’s waters and angered that mining was invading a supposedly protected environmental reserve. 

The murder of Juan Lopez is only the latest of a long series of murders of environmental and human rights activists—most of them ordinary local people trying to stop corporate exploitation of their land and water. The murder of Juan Lopez is a reminder that U.S. corporations like Nucor Steel often contract with Honduran mining companies, and may also directly conduct their own mining projects in Honduras. The record of these projects is dismal in terms of human rights and the environment, and it is littered with the bodies of many—like Juan Lopez and Berta Cåceres—who try to protect life and nature.  

The murder of Lopez comes in the context of a heightened campaign to pressure and undermine the legitimacy of the current Honduran President, Xiomara Castro who had pledged reforms. Every murder like that of Lopez is calculated to make Castro’s government look weak and to show that the corporations like Los Pinares and their associates in the U.S. corporate sector are too strong to be controlled, no matter the consequences in the lives of Hondurans. 

The larger issue is the inability of governments to regulate the predations of international corporations on their soil, especially those based on the extraction or destruction of natural resources. As I show in detail in my book, Extracting Honduras: Resource Exploitation, Displacement, and Forced Migration (Lexington Books 2022), such destruction is a root cause of emigration in countries like Honduras. But despite all the hand wringing and vitriol about immigration police and border “security” in U.S. politics, U.S. and other foreign governments that should exercise regulation over the exploits of their corporations in countries like Honduras manifest a singular lack of will to do so. 

At least a few members of the U.S. Congress, Senator Merkley among them, have been active in trying to get the U.S. government to demand accountability from U.S. corporations for what they do in countries like Honduras, or to support the reform efforts of the Castro government. 

The murder of Juan Lopez reminds us of the criminality of an economic system based on the heedless exploitation of natural resources and the earth’s waters. Agnes Baker Pilgrim (Grandma Aggie), defender of our rivers, warned us about this. Juan Lopez died to change it.

Jim Phillips