San Pedro Sula.
On Sunday evening, an indigenous Lenca leader was riddled with bullets in the municipality of San Antonio in the Cortés department of northern Honduras.
Is about Juan Carlos Cerros Escalante, 41, a defender of the human and social rights of the indigenous peoples of Honduras.
Juan Carlos Cerros, who was also president of United communities, of the Defenders of Mother Earth group, was murdered in front of his children in the village New Granada
According to friends of the victim, the native leader came from a visit to his mother when he joined the Catholic Church of New Granada He was intercepted by three test subjects, who opened fire on him without a word.
At least 40 shell casings of different calibres were counted at the scene of the crime.
Jorge Vásquez, of the National Platform of Indigenous Peoples, said Juan Carlos Cerros was being watched and persecuted for his struggle to protect the Lenca people and their land.
“We talked to him constantly, he told me the (protection) mechanism was not doing anything for him,” Vásquez said, adding that while the Lenca leader enjoyed precautions granted by human rights, “it was never effective.”
Vásquez remembered Cerros as an active person and concerned about the protection of the land, for which he made several reports of exploitation and logging; likewise, he ruled out that the crime was due to enmity, but rather “because of the work we do.”
In this sense, he concluded, “we demand that the authorities do the whereabouts of the killers, as well as the material and intellectual authors ”.