On Dec. 20, 2006, environmental activists Heraldo Zuniga and Roger Ivan Cartagena were shot to death in the central plaza outside the mayor’s office in Guarizama municipality, in the Honduran department of Olancho, bordering Nicaragua. The two men were activists with the Environmental Movement of Olancho (MAO), a Greengrants grantee.
MAO was founded by Father Andre Tamayo, who received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2005 in honor of the organization’s efforts to ban further logging and reform the government’s forestry policies. Greengrants, working together with other organizations like Global Response, has supported MAO since 2003, when it organized the first “March for Life,” demanding an end to corrupt logging practices in the Olancho region.
According to MAO:
“On Tuesday, only two days before his murder, our compañero Heraldo had shared his concern about death threats received from Salama-based loggers employed by the Sansone logging company. MAO had denounced these individuals for harassing and threatening to murder Heraldo and others before the tribunals. The Inter-American Human Rights Court ordered the Honduran government to provide protective measures. We now see the results.
The murder was carried out by Salama-based police sargeant Juan Lanza, who brought the two murdered men to Guarizama, where his accomplices finished the job. Considering these facts, there is not much to hope for in a state in which the public security forces are made up of assassins paid by the shadiest interests in the country—the logging and mining sectors.
Both compañeros were left lying outside in the municipal plaza in the center of town. Heraldo did not die immediately and was thus able to denounce the loggers for paying sargeant Juan Lanza to ambush and murder them.”
Global Response reports that in response to MAO’s reports of frequent death threats, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ordered Honduras to take “protective measures” to guarantee the safety of Father Tamayo and other MAO members. By January 7, the Honduran government must report to the Commission on the “protective measures” it has implemented. Whatever they may be, they were not sufficient to prevent the murders of MAO members Heraldo Zuniga and Roger Ivan Cartagena on December 20.
MAO is asking the international community to put pressure on Honduran government officials to enact and enforce “protective measures” and to bring the killers to justice.
If you would like to help do something about the killings, and about the precarious situation faced by envionmentalists in Honduras, click here to participate in Global Reponse’s letter-writing campaign.