Honduras taps armed forces to eliminate deforestation by 2029. Will it work?

Honduras this year launched a plan to eliminate deforestation by 2029, with a special focus on recovering land used by criminal groups for timber trafficking. Officials have already carried out hundreds of operations and arrested dozens of people tied to organized crime. But some experts worry that the plan doesn’t go far enough.

The “Zero Deforestation by 2029” plan, launched by the National Defense and Security Council in May, declared a state of emergency for the country’s forests and greenlit funds to retake control of protected areas where agriculture, livestock, mining and other illegal activities have been thriving, often with the involvement of powerful criminal groups.

“It’s time to take decisive action and enforce the law against the devastation of our forests, to restore security in these vital areas and forge a new development paradigm that guarantees the protection of natural resources and human survival, especially for Indigenous people,” the country’s National Defense and Security Council said in the resolution outlining the plan. The council is headed by President Xiomara Castro and makes national security, defense and intelligence policy.

The plan aims to evict groups living and working in protected areas and to “neutralize and establish control” of roads where timber is trafficked. It also asked the Public Ministry to investigate the logging industry and the land titling process, as titles are often granted illegally within protected and Indigenous territories.

Over $766 million has been allocated to the plan through 2028, with the goal of building up an “environmental protection battalion” of 8,000 troops. The plan calls for the Forest Conservation Institute (ICF) — part of the Special Prosecutor’s Office for the Environment — to coordinate with the Armed Forces, National Defense Secretariat and Public Ministry.

Officials said they carried out 349 operations between May and August, intervening in the nucleus and buffer zones of twenty protected areas across the country, with priority given to the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, Sierra de Agalta National Park and La Muralla Wildlife Refuge, among others.

For years, the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve has been plagued with logging and the construction of roads and clandestine airstrips used by drug trafficking groups, often resulting in violent confrontations with Indigenous communities. More than 100,000 Miskitu, Tawahka, Pech and Garífuna people live in or around the area but don’t have the ability to defend themselves, the National Defense and Security Council said.

“Combating deforestation, crime and insecurity also means fighting for the dignity and sustainable progress of Indigenous peoples and communities, as well as strengthening resilience to climate change,” the council said.

Last month, officials removed 34 homes, 200 heads of cattle, 10 stables and two roads in the La Muralla Wildlife Refuge in Olancho, in northern Honduras, according to the ICF. They’ve also set up five checkpoints between the Olancho and Francisco Morazán departments, where timber is often transported.

Important seizures of logging equipment were also made in Puerto Lempira, Wampusirpi and Guaimaca, the ICF said in August.

Historically, around 97% of environmental crimes have gone unpunished in Honduras, the National Defense and Security Council said. In 2022 and 2023, the first two years of Castro’s government but before the zero-deforestation plan was created, officials arrested 153 people for environmental crimes but only three of them were convicted and sentenced.

“[Environmental crimes are] destroying forests and destabilizing the region, putting at risk our physical, cultural, food and water security, a vital liquid for human survival,” the council said.

Some experts expressed concern about the design of the new plan because it involves many different arms of governments that don’t normally have a legal mandate to combat deforestation. The Public Ministry generally handles such cases, and roping in the Armed Forces and other agencies could muddle the effort, they said.

A similar problem played out back in 2011, when the Armed Forces were given some control of the country’s reforestation and forest fire prevention programs, resulting in the weakening of forestry agencies designed to address those tasks, an ICF report said.

“They give one institution powers that are the responsibility of another body, and for which a certain legal procedure must be followed. So there are some contradictions,” said Fausto Mejía Zelaya, head of Independent Forest Monitoring, an NGO tracking the timber industry in Honduras.

An even bigger challenge will be managing conflicting regulations at different levels of government. In some cases, local officials have issued permits to mine in forested areas and dredge rivers despite the fact that these activities violate federal law. The plan doesn’t account for those complexities, Mejía said.

It also reveals a lack of transparency and information-sharing between different levels of government, he pointed out. If local and federal officials worked together from the start, they could have avoided granting permits that led to deforestation.

“There’s a problem with managing information, with sharing information between institutions, which is what’s causing this problem of deforestation in the country,” he said.

Banner image: Officials inspect a lumber truck in Honduras. Photo courtesy of Poder Judicial. 

See related from this reporter:

Honduran environmental defenders hit hard by human rights crisis, report says

FEEDBACK: Use this form to send a message to the author of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.