Honduras mayor arrested for masterminding environmentalist’s killing

Honduran 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, following years of accusations by religious and environmental leaders.

Juan Lopez was an anti-corruption 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, as well as 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 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 the assassination.

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,” Public Prosecutor’s Office spokesperson Yuri Mora told The Associated Press.

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 two years in what lawyers said was retaliation for their work.