Omar Cruz Tomé.Courtesy Agrarian Platform
EL PAÍS offers the América Futura section open for its daily and global informative contribution on sustainable development.
If you want to support our journalism, subscribe
here
.
This Wednesday at 7:01 p.m. the fateful WhatsApp message arrived: “He is dead.”
Only eight minutes had passed since the first, in which Yoni Rivas, from the Aguán Valley Agrarian Platform, was warned that Omar Cruz Tomé, president of the Los Laureles peasant cooperative, had been shot at least 12 times in his house in Tocoa, Colón, in the north of the country.
Cruz, 46, is the third social leader assassinated in Honduras so far this year, Aly Domínguez and Jairo Bonilla were the first victims of the year in the world.
"These murders are to terrify us," Rivas said by phone, hours after the activist's funeral.
Despite the threats that he began to receive in January 2022 and being under the national protection mechanism, he never had a security scheme.
In the attack, he also murdered his mother-in-law, Andy Martinez.
Cruz's colleagues directly point to the Dinant company as being behind the murder.
On January 11, the activist had denounced Miguel Mauricio, leader of that Honduran agricultural firm, before the Public Ministry for being an "actor and accomplice" of an armed criminal structure called "Los Cachos," according to a public letter to the presidency. , issued by the human rights firm Estudios para la Dignidad.
The company, however, has denied being linked to armed groups.
"If there are elements to link any person with the commission of any crime, Dinant will not hesitate to collaborate with the authorities, to file complaints and demand justice, as we have done for years against thefts and the violence against peasants, authorities and workers in Aguán”, read one of their communiqués.
However, there has still been no pronouncement after the murder of Cruz.
With him, there are already 160 violent deaths to residents of Aguán since 2010.
Rivas had seen Cruz that same morning at a meeting between several cooperatives that make up the Aguán Valley Agrarian Platform, an organization that has been defending the recovery of land by peasants for more than 25 years.
“We shared some reports that we were preparing and talked about the risk situation in the area,” he explains.
The comrade, who still can't conjugate the verbs in the past when he refers to Cruz, is indefatigable: “We were going to prepare… We are going to prepare an advocacy tour on the lack of justice in our territory.
And about how the agribusiness wants to get us out of the way, ”he says.
Until now, the National Police have not provided details about the violent death of the human rights defender.
According to Rivas, the threats to his partner were "frequent."
“Neighbors had told him that there were several men taking photos when he went in and out of his house,” he explains.
“It has happened to all of us.
They have come to tell me what day they were planning to kill me, so that I would not go to my house to sleep”.
On October 27, the Agrarian Platform denounced the existence of a plan by agro-industrial companies in the area to assassinate the main leaders of Aguán.
“We knew this could happen,” he says.
Los Laureles is one of 84 agricultural cooperatives that were initially created in the Honduran land reform process.
This was the owner of more than 600 hectares of land.
Some peasants have been stripped of them by Dinant, according to the organization.
The entity that Cruz presided over was one of the best coordinated and one of the most attacked.
The leader had been denounced along with 17 other activists by this company for "aggravated usurpation" of the land, although he was acquitted months later.
“This murder aims to dismantle the peasant struggle in the Aguán Valley, where the agro-industrialists have irregular possession of the best lands in this country,” says Víctor Fernández, a member of the Human Rights Law Firm Studies for Dignity,
who carry the legal and criminal representation of the Agrarian Platform and also of the Cooperativa de los Laureles.
"It implies a qualitative increase in the systematic violence of these groups in alliance with armed groups and with the State, which endorses their dispossession."
Fernández is blunt: “This was a preventable death, the State was aware of the risk it was running.
And since it is avoidable, it is responsible.
It is an obligation to investigate the systematic violence in the sector”.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (Oacnudh) condemned the events on Thursday and urged the State of Honduras "to intervene in a timely, adequate, comprehensive manner and in guarantee of human rights to protect the population, particularly human rights defenders, of the generalized violence in the Aguán area.”
This murder comes just 11 days after another brutal killing of two Honduran leaders.
On January 7, Aly Domínguez and Jairo Bonilla, defenders of the rivers of the Carlos Escaleras National Park, were assassinated in Guapinol.
They and about thirty activists had spent five years denouncing the contamination of open-cast mining in the area, which, they say, causes allergic reactions and discomfort in the community.
The three are faces of a trend that does not stop and that maintains Latin America and the Caribbean as the deadliest region for human rights defenders.
A trend that breaks thousands of families and underlines the idea that protecting the territory costs your life.
Cruz's companions assure that, at least their cause, will not be orphaned.
"We are going to continue defending what is ours," Rivas settles.
