Perfil de Contra Corriente

A day after two well-known environmentalists from Guapinol were murdered, a Twitter smear campaign dating back to 2021 intensified once again. The campaign accuses members of an environmentalist group that opposes a mine development of being ‘fake environmentalists’ and taking part in the murders of 10 people in the thick of the conflict.

In the coastal border area between Honduras and Guatemala lies the land once slated for the Cuyamel-Omoa National Park (El Parque Nacional Cuyamel-Omoa – PANACO). In 2011, Honduran environmental authorities, with information and support from different NGOs, proposed that a protected area be created there. The wetlands of the region belong to the second most important coral reef barrier in the world: the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System. Indeed, the biodiversity of this area and its ecosystem services are so important that, in 2013, Omoa was declared a site of international importance no. 2133 by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (making the region a ‘Ramsar site’). It is now dying in the face of the advance of oil palm and king grass monocultures, under the complacent gaze of Honduran environmental authorities.