June 1 will be remembered as a dark day for journalism in Honduras.
In the early morning hours, reporter Javier Antonio Hércules Salinas was killed while driving a taxi home in the western municipality of Santa Rosa de Copán. Hércules, 51, a native of El Salvador, had lived in Honduras for more than a decade, where he split his time between driving a taxi and reporting for the channel A Todo Noticias.
He covered local issues and, according to reports, had measures in place from the country’s official journalist protection program after being kidnapped in November 2023. But that did not stop two individuals on a motorcycle from shooting him. Hércules Salinas died inside the taxi.
That same morning, about 280 miles away in the eastern municipality of Juticalpa, sports journalist Carlos Gilberto Aguirre was also killed. According to local media, he was run over and shanked.
Aguirre, 68, and known as “The Big Cheese,” called soccer matches for the local station Radio Oro Estéreo. The perpetrators and motive for the killing remain unknown, according to local media.
The murders of Hércules and Aguirre have heightened concern among press freedom organizations that see Honduras as a country marked by threats, harassment and government inaction, worsened by the tension surrounding this election year. Honduras will hold general elections on November 30, and experts interviewed by LatAm Journalism Review (LJR) say critical reporting has been met with increasingly harsh responses.
“There’s growing tension,” Artur Romeu, Latin America director for Reporters Without Borders (RSF), said in an interview with LJR. “It affects different players in civic space, but certainly the press and journalists are among the most affected.”
According to Romeu, the tense relationship between the press and the government of President Xiomara Castro, who took office in January 2022, has taken shape through stigmatizing rhetoric in which journalists are accused of working against the government.
In recent months, legal complaints against journalists have escalated, Romeu said.
Dina Meza, director of the Association for Democracy and Human Rights in Honduras (Asopodehu), agrees. Investigative reporting during this election season—when “everything becomes more tense,” she said—is often considered inconvenient.
For Fernando Silva, editor-in-chief at the independent outlet Contracorriente, the press is living through what may be one of the most “delicate” stages of the current administration. “There’s an escalation of threats coming from various institutions,” Silva told LJR, citing legal actions using crimes against honor, which are still on the books in Honduras.
According to Silva, the current administration has shown an interest in “controlling the narrative” by framing journalists as enemies.
“Journalists right now are, in many cases, turning to self-censorship,” Silva said. “It’s clear the government and the state apparatus will take legal action against journalists.”
On June 9, the press organizations RSF, Asopodehu, Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Artículo 19, Free Press Unlimited, PEN Honduras and PEN International issued a joint statement expressing their “deep concern” about the attacks on journalists and a climate of growing harassment, threats, criminalization and stigmatization by government officials.
One case that prompted RSF to visit Honduras in March was the lawsuit filed by the Armed Forces against 12 media outlets for alleged defamation and libel. The suit came after stories that reportedly damaged the image of the military.
Although officials publicly announced the lawsuits would be dropped, Meza said that has not happened.
The Armed Forces also published an article titled “Assassins of the truth,” accusing journalists Rodrigo Wong Arévalo, Dagoberto Rodríguez and Juan Carlos Sierra of being enemies of the state. “The article included their photographs to stigmatize, intimidate and criminalize their reporting,” said a report prepared by the same organizations for Honduras’ Universal Periodic Review before the United Nations.
LJR requested comment from the Armed Forces, but had received no response at the time of publication.
Dagoberto Rodríguez, director of Radio Cadena Voces, also received a criminal complaint from the Minister of Finance after publishing a report about alleged irregularities in the management of public funds. On March 26, a Honduran court dismissed the complaint.
“The idea behind a lawsuit launched from a position of public power against a journalist is that, whether they win or not, it sends a signal that the government is willing to use legal tools as a form of pressure,” said Romeu. “That’s the most concerning thing about these complaints: the use of the judicial system to intimidate journalists covering national security, public forces or corruption.”
According to Silva, the main threat to journalism—especially outside the major cities of Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula—is physical violence.
A day after the killings of Hércules and Aguirre, reporter Gustavo Bustillos and a cameraman from Televicentro were followed and harassed by a man on a motorcycle. In the department of Colón, land disputes and the presence of criminal groups also affect journalists, the joint statement said.
One such case involves journalist Héctor Madrid of TN5 in Tocoa, along with other reporters accused by the Rural Development Platform, a business association, of covering community groups that oppose land grabs by the organization, according to the report submitted to the United Nations.
“The violence these journalists [in rural areas] face is intense, because they investigate or report on corruption in their communities,” Silva said. “And it’s very easy for someone powerful to have them killed and make it look like a random crime.”
Precarious working conditions also mean many journalists must supplement their income with other jobs, such as driving taxis or running small businesses from home. Because of this, murder investigations often take alternate routes.
“Investigative bodies aren’t pursuing the cases,” Silva said. “So there’s always some uncertainty about whether it was related to their journalism or general violence.”
According to a report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, the impunity rate for journalist killings in Honduras exceeds 90 percent.
For Meza, a major concern is the lack of clear protocols for investigating crimes against journalists. The recent wave of violence has renewed debate over the weaknesses of the official journalist protection mechanism, which have been flagged by the organizations that submitted the U.N. report.
A larger budget and more autonomy are among the most pressing needs, Meza said. Without them, the mechanism cannot properly assess risk for journalists seeking protection—either because staff lack proper training or because the volume of cases exceeds institutional capacity. It also doesn’t help, Meza said, that the police have so much influence over decisions over protection measures, despite allegations of ties to criminal gangs.
Meza, who is also a journalist and has herself been the subject of smear campaigns, accompanies some of the journalists who request protection and has witnessed the system’s flaws.
In Hércules’s case, for example, she said the government failed to follow recommendations like sending a high-level commission to Santa Rosa to meet with local authorities and launch a protection plan for journalists. “Publishing an early alert would have made journalists feel less alone,” Meza said.
LJR requested comment from the Human Rights Ministry, which oversees the protection mechanism, but had received no response by the time of the publication.
Romeu stressed that it is important for the international community to continue paying attention to Honduras.
Despite its long history of violence and human rights violations, Honduras often flies under the radar, he said. But given the situations in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, Honduras must draw the necessary attention for the potential regional impact.
“There is a lot of fear and apprehension, fueled especially by rhetoric, lawsuits and vague threats,” Romeu said. “We need to pay attention to what happens during the electoral period in terms of threats to the press and journalism, because that also serves as a barometer to gauge the health of democracy in Honduras.”
