Honduran authorities on Tuesday arrested three people, including former mayor Adán Fúnez, accusing them of being behind the 2024 killing of environmental defender Juan López, an anti-corruption figure whose death drew international calls for justice. Prosecutors said the case underscores the dangers facing people who oppose environmentally destructive projects in parts of Latin America, and it highlighted what activists call a pattern of impunity in Honduras.
Public Prosecutor’s Office spokesperson Yuri Mora told The Associated Press that the detainees are believed to be the “intellectual authors” of López’s death. Authorities arrested Fúnez at his home, and they detained businessman Héctor Eduardo Méndez and Juan Ángel Ramos Gallegos as well.
The arrest follows a dispute in the northwestern Colon region involving an iron oxide mining project. López had led community efforts against the project, which activists said threatened dense jungle areas and waterways, including protected reserve zones. The reporting said López had been a fierce critic of then-mayor Fúnez, who supported the mining and was described as a close ally of Honduras’s former President Xiomara Castro.
In September 2024, López publicly called on Fúnez to step down amid what the reporting described as a corruption scandal. Days later, a masked gunman shot López—described as six times in the chest and once in the head—sparking a wave of international attention, including demands for justice from the Biden administration, Pope Francis and the United Nations, according to the report.
The killing also revived comparisons to the 2016 murder of Honduran environmentalist Berta Cáceres, which had similarly drawn global outcry. More than a year after López’s death, Fúnez was among the first names long pointed to by local environmental and religious leaders, with activists alleging that he spearheaded the assassination.
The arrests come after other detentions earlier in the investigation, though the reporting said Fúnez had been singled out for some time as a central figure. The trial of the three detainees is set to begin next June, according to the report.
In statements after López’s death, Dalila Santiago, a close friend and leader in López’s movement, said the detention of Fúnez came as a shock amid what she described as widespread impunity. She told AP that the arrests were a sign that the push for justice and for protection of surrounding lands was worth pursuing, while urging authorities to keep going after other people she said were responsible, including business leaders behind the mining project.
The mining conflict is tied to companies that prosecutors have moved against after López’s killing, including Inversiones Los Pinares and Inversiones Ecotek, along with their parent company, according to the report. Those companies have defended the jobs they say the mine created and their contributions to the region, AP reported, as prosecutors pursued cases linked to environmental destruction.
Global Witness has said protecting the environment is a high-risk profession in Honduras, and its data show 117 defender killings documented in 2024, with 82% in Latin America and five in Honduras, the report said. In López’s home city of Tocoa, activists and lawyers said environmental defenders fighting the mining project had been targeted for years, and that eight activists had been imprisoned for more than two years, which lawyers described as retaliation for their work.
Honduran authorities did not immediately detail additional steps beyond the arrests, but the case points to an ongoing effort to connect violence against environmental defenders to alleged networks of power linked to local resource disputes. For activists, the detentions also represent a test of whether accountability efforts can extend beyond initial arrests and into the broader mining and political structures they say enabled the killing.
And Santiago said, “We’ve been calling for justice for so long,” while adding: “And we need the masterminds behind this to be caught and punished.”