‘Danger no longer only comes from the hitmen, but from the state’: the Honduran farmers labelled terrorists for protecting their land

He survived a massacre, one of only three who did.

On 21 May, gunmen entered a palm oil farm in Rigores, a small community in the Bajo Aguán valley in Honduras, and opened fire, killing 20 people. “We have seen a lot of violence in the Aguán, but never a massacre like this,” says Malcolm*, Orlean’s father.

Located in north-eastern Honduras, the Bajo Aguán valley is a fertile region that has been the country’s hub for palm oil production – the ubiquitous ingredient used in everything from shampoo to instant noodles. It has also been the site of a bitter 30-year conflict over land, involving small-scale farmers, or campesinos, large palm oil corporations backed by the government, and drug-trafficking groups.

The roots of the conflict can be traced back to a 1992 land reform law that allowed large palm oil companies to buy up campesinos’ smallholdings. Peasant farmers’ organisations say the land was fraudulently taken from them and have tried to reclaim it through lawsuits and occupations. They also allege that the firms have mobilised private security guards and paramilitary groups to kill and intimidate them.

The palm oil companies say the sales were legal and dismiss the allegations.

These allegations of abuses drew international condemnation when it became clear that the World Bank’s private lending arm, the International Finance Corporation, funded Dinant, the palm oil company at the heart of the denunciations. Dinant has repeatedly denied involvement in the murder of civilians and other human rights abuses.

The arrival of drug-trafficking networks added a new dimension to the conflict. In the 2010s, the Bajo Aguán valley emerged as a strategic corridor for cocaine being moved north from Colombia, prompting the US to designate Honduras as a major trafficking hotspot.

Its location, combined with the palm oil industry’s logistical networks and opportunities for money laundering, makes it attractive to traffickers. As these groups have sought greater territorial control, they have become increasingly entangled in the region’s land conflict and have contributed to the killing and displacement of campesino communities.

The result has been a long and violent conflict which, according to estimates by the Honduran Commission for Human Rights (Conadeh), has claimed the lives of more than 200 people, the majority of them campesinos. This makes the conflict in the Bajo Aguán one of the bloodiest conflicts in Honduras, a country already notorious for its high levels of violence against land defenders.

According to the environmental and human rights organisation Global Witness, Honduras consistently ranks as one of the world’s most dangerous countries for those protecting their land.

Now, violence is flaring up once again. According to the conflict monitor Acled, the month the massacre took place – May – was the deadliest in the Bajo Aguán region since it began collecting data in 2018.

And violence has since continued: a few weeks later, a campesino leader was killed in the nearby town of Santa Rosa de Aguán.

Despite the violence against activists, campaigners say the new rightwing government of Nasry “Tito” Asfura, backed by Donald Trump, has created a legal environment that places campesinos and other land defenders in even more danger. It has passed a series of laws aimed at clamping down on organised crime but which human rights organisations warn place land defenders at severe risk of criminalisation.

The first of these legal changes is a reform to the penal code allowing for criminal groups to be designated as terrorist organisations. The law went against the Honduran supreme court’s advice and has been criticised for its open-ended definition of terrorism.

“Under this law,” says Lucía Vigil, from the Centre for the Study of Democracy (Cespad), “any group exercising their democratic right to peaceful protest can be labelled terrorist.”

For Yoni Rivas, spokesperson of the Plataforma Agraria, a regional network of campesino organisations in the Aguán valley, introducing a terrorism law feels like yet another attack on him and his colleagues.

Facing daily death threats, Rivas has been unable to return to his home for the past three years and travels through the valley in an armoured car, a protective measure provided by the Honduran government on the orders of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

“But with a law like this,” Rivas says, “danger no longer only comes from the hitmen who follow me around, it comes directly from the state.”

Two weeks after the terrorism law was passed, the government approved a law that prioritises agribusinesses in land rights cases over the claims made by campesino, Indigenous or other activist groups, according to Lucas Mantelli, a lawyer at the pan-American Centre for Justice and International Law. If any of these communities seek to protest against the land claims, the law justifies immediate police or legal intervention.

Mantelli says the two laws should be understood as interlinked and part of the new government’s strategy. “This legal language is shaped out of a partnership between business groups, elites and the Honduran state to benefit agribusiness at any cost, with complete disregard for the rights of environmental and land defenders,” he says.

The strategy of President Asfura’s new administration is similar to the last time the same rightwing National party was in power. Under the former National party president Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted drug trafficker pardoned by Trump in December, nearly $72m (£57m) was invested in the palm oil industry, despite allegations that it was responsible for human rights abuses.

Campaigners say the military and police consistently turned a blind eye to these abuses and at times contributed to them by harassing and violently evicting campesinos.

Under the former leftwing president Xiomara Castro, who was in power from (2022 until this year), a commission for agrarian security was set up to address the conflict and there were fewer violent evictions of farmers by state forces. “Violence under [Castro] did not decrease, but at least there were some attempts to address the conflict,” Vigil says. “Now, we are returning to a period of state repression towards any civic dissent.”

In Rigores, far from the politics of the capital, few believe the government is there to protect them, regardless of who holds power. According to Conadeh’s estimates, nine out of 10 killings and abuses are never investigated in Bajo Aguán.

The lack of accountability has shaped how communities across the valley live and respond to violence. When word of the massacre spread, family members rushed to the site, searching among the 20 bodies scattered among the farm’s trees and buildings to identify their loved ones.

Before the police could arrive, the community took their slain relatives from the scene, a common practice in the valley, driven by a lack of trust in the authorities and to avoid paying the police an alleged $300 release fee for the bodies.

As media coverage of the massacre intensified, pressure mounted on the police to act. Investigators returned to the community to exhume the bodies and conduct autopsies at the gravesites, while the victims’ families had to stand by and watch.

“And for what?” says Santiago, who lost his three daughters in the massacre. “It is not as if they are going to find who was really responsible for the killings.”

* Names have been changed to protect their identities