PBI-Honduras visits National Union of Rural Workers (CNTC) community of 17 de Junio whose members are being criminalized for land “usurpation”

Published by Brent Patterson on October 24, 2025 October 24, 2025

The Peace Brigades International-Honduras Project has posted on social media:

“Yesterday [October 23, 2025], we made a visit to the peasant base June 17 of the National Central of Field Workers – CNTC Progreso. On the same day, the judiciary in Villanueva (Cortés) canceled for the third time the initial hearing in the criminalization case against 23 people from the base accused of the crime of usurpation, two of them women. From PBI, we remind you that delays in court proceedings have a strong economic and emotional impact on peasant communities that face such criminalization processes. CNTC Tegucigalpa.”

The CNTC refers to the National Union of Rural Workers. Peace Brigades International has accompanied the union since May 2018.

The CNTC is affiliated with the Unified Confederation of Honduran Workers (CUTH) which in turn is affiliated with the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), along with 150+ labour organizations including the Canadian Labour Congress.

In their Global Rights Index 2024, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) documented that 22 trade unionists and workers died because of violence or were killed in six countries including four union representatives in Honduras.

Reuters has reported: “Less than 5% of Honduras’ landowners, government figures show, control 60% of the fertile terrain, including many monocultures of palm and other export crops.” And anthropologist Andrés León has noted: “The Aguán is a region of rampant poverty and misery surrounded by a crop that makes millions in profits.”

“Usurpation” can be understood as a criminal charge that enables evictions of peasant-farmers by landowners.

Usurpation criminalizes the occupation/presence of campesinas on land in the context of land ownership inequalities and through the political prism of the prioritization of private property rights and the rights of large landowners and agribusiness.

We continue to follow this situation.

Further reading:

PBI-Honduras accompanies the CNTC rural workers union and 17 de junio community at trial date on land “usurpation” (PBI-Canada, April 1, 2025)

PBI-Honduras accompanies the National Union of Rural Workers (CNTC) as it helps reclaim land and food sovereignty (PBI-Canada, March 14, 2023).

Photo: PBI-Honduras with Franklin Almendares, General Secretary, National Union of Rural Workers (CNTC).