In the early morning of May 21, armed men ambushed a group of 20 campesinos gathered in a church before starting the day’s work in Rigores, Trujillo, in the Bajo Aguán Valley of Honduras. The attackers opened fire and massacred everyone.
Although the direct perpetrators and masterminds of the massacre remain unknown, Honduran and regional reporting agree on several core facts: the massacre occurred on a farm where African Palm cultivation prevails, there were 20 victims—including 3 women and 2 children—and all the victims were from the aldeas of Rigores and Panamá.
In the wake of the massacres, campesino leaders warn that the situation has generated fear amongst community members, though they remain unbowed. “We live here, and here is where we’re going to continue confronting the situations we are faced with,” exclaimed Brigido García, a 76-year-old grandfather and member of the Rigores Campesino Movement. García lost six family members in the massacre.
In addition to grieving, local campesinos have had to deal with a mass media campaign vilifying the victims and blaming them for the massacre. Grassroots campesino and Indigenous actors are pushing back against that narrative, framing it as part of a much larger story. This tragedy is part of ongoing struggles for land between poor campesinos and powerful landowners, corporations, state and security officials, and foreign investors with notorious ties to organized crime, all backed by a renewed right-wing political coalition linked to a broader Latin American and U.S. right.
The massacre unfolded amid rightward political shift in the country, marked by the contested election of right-wing candidate and National Party member Nasry Asfura and the U.S. pardon for former President Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), a convicted drug trafficker and member of Asfura’s National Party. In effect, the country is once again falling into a hyper-militarized security posture, deeper alignment with Washington, and weaker anti-corruption commitments, all to the benefit of landowners who use state and extrajudicial methods to consolidate their landholdings. Yoni Rivas, spokesperson for the Agrarian Platform and a renowned campesino leader, explains that it is clear that “violent reforms and projects are being pushed on the Honduran people because of the [U.S.] empire.”
The Roots of Conflict in Bajo Aguán
The Bajo Aguán Valley, located along Honduras’s northern Caribbean coast, is among the country’s most fertile agricultural regions. Its rich soil has made it ideal for large-scale cultivation, particularly of African palm for palm oil production, a commodity that has fueled both economic development and violent dispossession.
During the 1970s, the organizing of radical campesinos forced the Honduran government—then under U.S.-backed military rule—to pass a series of agrarian reforms that redistributed land to campesinos, recognized the right to collective ownership, and restricted sale to private investors. The Aguán became a center of cooperative agriculture, with campesino organizations managing significant portions of the valley’s most valuable land, which they used to produce food and generate cash for the majority of the area’s poor and landless.
Its rich soil has made it ideal for large-scale cultivation, particularly of African palm for palm oil production, a commodity that has fueled both economic development and violent dispossession.
Later, in the early 1990s, the Honduran government—under pressure from the United States, international financial institutions, and domestic elites—enacted sweeping agrarian counter-reforms to restructure the country’s agrarian system by shifting toward export-oriented agribusiness over domestic production, weakening national currencies, and lifting agricultural tariffs. In 1992, the government passed the controversial Law of Modernization and Development of the Agricultural Sector—popularly known as the “Norton Law” after U.S. economist Roger Norton, who helped draft it. The law modified the provisions of the agrarian reform laws by allowing private and agrarian reform lands to be rented or sold. It also opened the floodgates for large landowners and investors to monopolize large landholdings. Between 1990 and 1994, more than half of the land previously distributed in the country was sold, including over 70 percent of the land in the Aguán.
Almost immediately, the cooperatives protested; in May of that year, over 5,000 campesinos occupied several farms to protest the passage of the law and planned a march to the capital to demand access to over 300,000 hectares of land at risk of being lost to private hands. That same month, landowners attacked campesinos in the Cortés region, leaving four people seriously injured.
As the campesinos had predicted, the impact was immediate and devastating. Land that they had worked for decades suddenly became vulnerable to privatization. Small-scale cooperative farming was rapidly transformed into an enclave of industrial agriculture, with profits flowing to a handful of corporations as campesino families faced food insecurity and displacement.
Land Grabs and Violence in the Post-Coup Era
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, campesinos and Indigenous people resisting the seizures of their lands were criminalized, imprisoned, and assassinated. Members of the nascent Unified Campesino Movement of Aguan (MUCA) were particular targets. Private security forces employed by palm oil companies operated with impunity, while state security forces frequently sided with corporate interests. Human rights organizations documented a pattern of threats, forced evictions, and extrajudicial killings, though investigations rarely led to prosecutions.
These violent clashes reached a dramatic turning point in the immediate aftermath of the U.S.-backed coup against leftist President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. Zelaya had begun to challenge the power of Honduras’s oligarchy and expressed support for agrarian reform, making him a target of both domestic and international elites. His overthrow ushered in a period of extreme violence against social movements, with land defenders bearing the brunt of repression. The country became a “narco-state” under the National Party and Honduras soon became the murder capital of the world in 2011, when the rate peaked at about 93 per 100,000 inhabitants.
This violent context provided cover for the targeting of land and environmental defenders. More than 120 activists were murdered in the country between 2010 and 2017 for protecting rivers, forests, and land. Honduras remains one of the poorest and most unequal countries in the region, with general poverty still above 60 percent and one in four children suffering from chronic malnutrition.
This violent context provided cover for the targeting of land and environmental defenders.
The Bajo Aguán region became one of the most dangerous places in the country, particularly for social leaders and their allies. Between 2011 and 2014, 92 people—mostly cooperative members—were killed; dozens of journalists and community lawyers were also killed, including Antonio Trejo, a lawyer who had helped an Aguán cooperative win a court victory. The vast majority of these crimes went unpunished.
Today, the Bajo Aguán remains one of the most dangerous places for land defenders, despite—or perhaps because of—the hypermilitarization of the area. Campesinos and their organizations remain vulnerable to violence and harassment, particularly from organized crime. The administrative department of Bajo Aguán accounts for about 45 percent of all attacks against land defenders. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has also repeatedly issued reports condemning persecution and murders against land defenders and demanding investigations. As of 2025, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported nine murders of campesinos and their family members in the first four months of the year.
The extent of private-sector involvement in this violence is noteworthy. Dinant—the largest landowner in the valley, having acquired about 22,000 acres—is accused of multiple, recurring human rights violations. Its expansion into the valley was financed by regional and international loans, including those from the World Bank, despite its violent track record.
Dinant’s and other companies’ private security forces have often worked alongside state police and military units to carry out forced evictions, destroy crops, and intimidate community members. Dinant—allied with the country’s elites who also own most of the country’s media companies—frames the campesinos as invaders and criminals usurping private property. The power of this narrative is such that in the wake of the Rigores massacre, the state sought to criminalize campesinos by associating them with drug-trafficking elements and advancing legal reforms aimed at criminalizing land recuperations, instead of seeking justice for the families of the victims.
The recently passed “Ley para el Fortalecimiento y Protección del Sector Agroindustrial,” seeks to “halt invasions, usurpations, blockades, and shutdowns of productive lands.” Concurrently, Decree 84-2026, passed the day after the massacre, is also widely condemned by grassroots organizations. The law amends the legal code to impose harsher penalties for gang-related crimes such as extortion and is widely seen by these organizations as another mechanism enabling the state to criminalize and incarcerate social leaders. The Campesino, Indigenous, and Popular Alliance of Honduras (ACAINP) has recently organized large protests in the capital to challenge this law and seek a court ruling declaring it unconstitutional.
Demanding Accountability
Less than a month after the massacre, campesino leader Oscar Amilcar Alvarado Velásquez was assassinated. At the time of his killing, he was the secretary of the Campesino Cooperative Suyapa del Aguán, located in the Dos Bocas community in Santa Rosa de Aguán, Colón.
The violence extends beyond the Aguán. On the other side of the country, in the Garífuna community of San Juan, the police recently arrested four Garífuna leaders and attempted to illegally evict the Garifuna inhabitants from the community. This violence occurred despite a 2023 IACHR ruling mandating that the state of Honduras respect and demarcate the Garífuna territories and halt any further usurpation of their lands.
The violence extends beyond the Aguán.
“They speak of what we do as ‘invasions’… that is the concept that foreigners use… especially the businessmen,” claims Miriam Miranda, the head coordinator of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), which spearheads the Garífuna communities’ land struggles in the country. “But what we are doing is reclaiming what historically belongs to us.” The Garífuna communities of Honduras, an Afro-Indigenous community whose ancestral territories lie on the country’s Caribbean coast, share a common grievance with campesinos in the Aguán who face displacement.
For both, there is little hope that their communities will receive justice.
Yoni Rivas, the campesino leader, noted that despite lacking “certainty that a credible investigation is underway,” they are demanding that, at the very least, the Technical Agency for Criminal Investigation (ATIC) handle the case because the victims had already accused members of the state security forces of violence.
The Plataforma Agraria, COPA, and all the major campesino organizations are asking for a special commission composed of state, third-party, and international advisors to investigate the massacre and any politicians and government officials tied to it. More broadly, the campesinos also reject the new Legislative Decree 84-2026, and all others which purport to strengthen security but in fact are designed to defend powerful landowners and dispossess campesinos.
Grassroots leaders in Honduras are clear about the facts and the stakes for the country and the region amid this new political conjuncture. This dangerous political shift has emboldened those who profit from land dispossession and silenced those who resist. The question now is whether Honduras and the international actors that have financed this violence will finally listen.
The initial signs are not positive in this regard. Indeed, the timing and nature of the Rigores massacre serves as an emblematic and predictive indicator of the broadly understood reality among grassroots campesino and Indigenous organizations: their struggles against private usurpation and violence over the last several decades are once again intensifying to levels reminiscent of the post-coup period.
Cristian J. Padilla Romero is a Honduran-born historian and educator whose work brings the histories of Central America, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora into wider public conversation. He studies how Garífuna, Afro-Caribbean, and Black communities in Honduras confronted racism, foreign power, and exclusion while building their own political visions, movements, and futures.