Police officers found guilty of killing Honduran environmentalists escape

[subsuelo]

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras: Honduran authorities are searching for two police officers who escaped after they were found guilty of killing anti-logging activists.

Human rights prosecutor Sandra Ponce told a local radio station on Tuesday that the two men "mysteriously" escaped from an army post a day before.

The slayings generated an international outcry from human rights groups. Many now are pressuring the Honduran government to do more to stop logging along the Nicaraguan border.

Intl Herald Tribune - read more

[Judi Lynn]

1. Yeah, they just slipped away. You bet. Cops. Second jobs as hired assassins for land owners who are

interested in expanding their reach into land which must be preserved in the interest of the whole world.

It must be embarrassing for a government to prepare to try two law officers who moonlight as hired murderers, like the scum we saw tried not so long ago in Brazil who killed that sweet tiny nun from Ohio, Dorothy Strang, who spent the last years of her life struggling to help keep the poor people and the trees safe from ranchers in Brazil, and lost her life doing it. Or Chico Mendes, also in Brazil, similarly murdered.



"At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon" rainforest. Now I realise I am fighting for humanity.

Chico Mendes



Dorothy Stang

Here's an account of how these "noble" policeman worked to protect the lives of the environmentalists whom they they had been charged to guard:

On July 1 four policemen were found guilty of the December 2006 murders of Heraldo Zúniga and Róger Murillo, two environmentalists working to protect the forest in Olancha Province. The policemen, Linton Omar Cáceres Rodríguez, Rolando Antonio Tejeda Padilla, Juan José Talavera Zavala and José Arcadio Gonzáles face likely sentences of 20 to 30 years at a sentencing hearing on Aug. 15. Logging companies have devastated Olancho Province for the last 50 years with no state regulation whatsoever. In May 2006, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission warned the Honduran government that Zúniga, Murillo and other activists had had their lives threatened, and asked that they be put under police protection. The same policemen assigned to protect the environmentalists turned out to be their assassins. The men were shot in the back as they were raising their hands in a sign of surrender. “He was killed for the forest,” said Victorino Meza, Murillo’s father, making it clear his suspicion of the killers’ motives.

http://community.icontact.com/p/misfmedia/newsletters/hnr/posts/honduras-news-in-review-july-1-14-2008

[Judi Lynn]

2. I want to keep an eye out to see if they ever catch them. (That's so doubtful, isn't it?)

It would be so good if they somehow brought them back to stand trial for their murders.

Thanks for posting the information.