Honduras mayor arrested for alleged role in environmentalist's murder

ListenListen (3 mins)Save

Click here to share on social mediashare-nodesShare

whatsapp-strokecopylinkgoogleAdd Al Jazeera on GoogleinfoThe late Honduran environmentalist Juan Lopez sits on a rock on the outskirts of Tocoa, Honduras, on September 28, 2021 [AFP]By The Associated PressPublished On 12 May 202612 May 2026Honduran authorities have arrested three people, including a powerful politician, accused of plotting the 2024 assassination of an environmental leader, an incident that became a symbol of government corruption.

Adan Funez, former mayor of the city of Tocoa, was captured at his home on Tuesday on suspicion of masterminding the killing of Juan Lopez, following years of accusations by religious and environmental leaders.

Recommended Stories

list of 3 items

• list 1 of 3Conservative lawmaker in Honduras injured after being hit with explosive
• list 2 of 3Trump hosts Honduras’s new president Asfura at Mar-a-Lago in US
• list 3 of 3Press freedom declines in Americas, with US seeing sharpest drop: Report

end of listLopez was an anticorruption crusader who led a community effort against an iron oxide mining project in Colon, a rural region of northwestern Honduras, which activists said endangered the area’s dense jungles and crystalline waters, including protected reserve areas.

Lopez was one of the fiercest critics of Funez, a local mayor at the time, a supporter of the mine and a close ally of Honduras’s former president, Xiomara Castro, whose term ended this year.

In September 2024, Lopez called on Funez to step down because of a corruption scandal.

Days later, the environmental and human rights defender was shot six times in the chest and once in the head by a masked gunman, fuelling demands for justice from Pope Francis, the United Nations and the then-administration of United States President Joe Biden.

Accusations also emerged against Funez, a power-broker in the region’s decades-long bloody agrarian conflict. The death brought back stark memories of the global outcry over the 2016 murder of Honduran environmentalist Berta Caceres.

Funez’s arrest on Tuesday comes more than a year after Lopez’s assassination.

Advertisement The former mayor was detained along with two others, businessman Hector Eduardo Méndez and Juan Angel Ramos Gallegos, whom prosecutors accused of criminal association to the detriment of fundamental rights.

“These three individuals are believed to be the intellectual authors of the environmentalist Juan Lopez’s death,” the Public Prosecutor’s Office spokesperson, Yuri Mora, told The Associated Press news agency.

The detentions come after a handful of other arrests months earlier, but Funez was long pinpointed by local environmental and religious leaders as the man who spearheaded the assassination. The trial of the three men is set to begin next June.

Protecting the environment is a high-risk profession in Honduras. People like Lopez often act as unwanted eyes and ears in resource-rich areas of Latin America, the most deadly region in the world for environmentalists, according to nongovernmental organisation Global Witness.

Global Witness documented 117 killings of environmental and land defenders in Latin America in 2024 alone, amounting to 82 percent of the global total.

In Lopez’s city of Tocoa, environmental defenders fighting the mining project have been targeted for years. Eight activists were imprisoned for more than two years in what lawyers said was retaliation for their work.

Dalila Santiago, a close friend and leader in Lopez’s movement, said that, after rampant impunity in Honduras, Funez’s detention on Tuesday came as a shock.

She added that Honduran authorities must continue to go after others responsible and business leaders behind the mining project.

“We’ve been calling for justice for so long,” Santiago said. “And we need the masterminds behind this to be caught and punished.”