A Place of Refuge
While the temperature outside is cold, the inside of the Basoa Defenders' house in the Basque Country offers human warmth to the activists who find refuge within its walls. April 2, 2022. Photo by María Ángeles Fernández
Dalila Argueta was forced to leave Honduras because of her opposition to a U.S.-backed mine. She now lives in exile in the Basque Country, in a home for those who fight for human rights
Editor’s Note: Click here to read this story in Spanish.
Words by J. Marcos, @desplazados_org. Words by Mª Ángeles Fernández. Translated by Patricia Guadalupe.
Dalila Argueta doesn’t stop moving from one side to another. She acts as the perfect hostess, although she has only been in her new home for a short time: the Basoa Defenders' House, a community and self-managed space built a few months ago some 25 miles from Bilbao, in northern Spain.
The house serves as a meeting space and has four floors, fifty beds, and a large kitchen with its many pots and pans. It has bathrooms and showers, a fireplace, library, bright windows and a large garden with trees. More than 40 ecofeminist activists from different countries in Latin America, Spain, and Senegal are gathered to weave transnational alliances "against corporate power." This is the mission of the organization, Peace with Dignity, who started the house.
A defender of human rights, the community’s land, and the Guapinol River (Honduras), Dalila, restless and petite, is one of the first residents of Basoa. "Not only do they welcome (me), but Basoa also acts as a speaker for my struggle," she explains. Dalila’s struggle is the resistance against the iron mine that has polluted her homeland for five years, after the Honduran company Inversiones Los Pinares obtained the permit to mine the Botaderos Mountain.
Dalila Argueta in the Basoa library. March 28, 2022 Photo by J. Marcos
Botaderos is located in the Mesoamerican biological corridor of the Honduran Caribbean. Thirty-four water sources come from the mountain which has been part of a protected national park since 2012. The Honduran government's 2013-2024 management plan established an area of more than 24,000 acres where no agricultural, pastoral, or harvesting activity was allowed. This included mining, construction of dams, or installation of antennas.
This was short-lived due to a decree in late 2013 that reduced the protected area despite opposition from various Honduran institutions. Following this change, Inversiones Los Pinares, owned by Honduran businessman Lenir Pérez, obtained the permit to build the mine.
Muddy water, "gringo" money
As soon as construction work began around the mine, Dalila threw herself into the fight that would change her life and ultimately force her to leave her country. In her community, the water turned into “pure mud” and stopped working to quench thirst. “Neither the pigs nor the cows drank the muddy water. People started buying large (water) bottles,” she recalls. Nucor, the leading U.S. steelmaker, was planning to buy the ore that was mined. Communities were quick to oppose the project.
A journalistic investigation conducted by the Honduran outlet Contracorriente, the Latin American Center for Journalistic Investigation, and Univisión Investiga, found that Nucor was associated with Inversiones Los Pinares in a rather opaque way through a subsidiary in Panama. “It is not easy to know that all these layers of companies exist,” says Jennifer Ávila, director and co-founder of Contracorriente. The people of the communities said that "gringos arrived," but to verify this connection, a leak and several months of journalistic work were required, in which, among other things, the business relationship between Nucor and Lenir Pérez was soon unearthed, a relationship that began back in 2015. Nucor said it left the project in 2019 because of protests.
‘A high price is paid there for the demonstration.’
After the first protests, a camp was organized to prevent machinery access to the area assigned for the project. It lasted three months, until the end of October 2018 when the protest was violently evicted, as documented by organizations such as Amnesty International. "That's where they began to prosecute our colleagues," says Dalila. "A high price is paid there for the demonstration.” Eight activists were imprisoned in August 2019 on a preventive basis, and during the following two years there were statements and requests for the release of the so-called "Eight of Guapinol" by the United Nations, the European Parliament, and members of Congress.
A few months before her arrest, Dalila managed to leave Honduras. She thought of going with her children to the United States, but she quickly ruled out entering the country illegally. “It made me dizzy that something would happen to me on that road, because it’s one thing for me to put up with what I have to put up with, but it’s another thing for something to happen to my children because of me,” she explains. Groups such as the National Network of Human Rights Defenders of Honduras and the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Defenders showed up and took her safely and legally to Spain on April 4, 2019.
Participants in an ecofeminist meeting held in Basoa on April 2, 2022. Photo by María Ángeles Fernández
Asylum for few, a house for all
To stay in Spain, Dalila had to prove that her life was in danger in Honduras. The asylum application process is complicated for those, like her, who leave countries where there is no outright armed conflict or natural disaster. Both in the case of Spain and the United States, people from Honduras are in third place among asylum seekers, despite the fact that the percentage of application approvals during 2021 in Spain was 10%, and in the U.S. was 8%.
Victims of social repression are not usually recognized as candidates for asylum. Ironically, the countries that deny asylum are frequently the same ones that caused the conflicts which forced activists to leave their homeland in the first place. Nucor, based in North Carolina, is a good example. The company financed the campaigns of Donald Trump, and its directors have served as advisers to former president Trump and the current Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in the Biden administration.
The Basoa House, located in the Arratia Valley of the Basque Country (Spain). March 28, 2022. Photo by J. Marcos
“You just need to look at where we come from. The towns are being decimated,” Dalila stresses. The latest Global Witness report shows that in 2020, Honduras registered 17 murders of these defenders of the land and the environment. Three years earlier, the organization had already warned, in a document specifically mentioning Lenir Pérez, that Honduras is the most dangerous place to defend the Earth, pointing out that "companies are responsible." Dalila is clear: “No mining company means development for the land from which it is extracting; it is development for those who loot, but not for those who suffer the consequences”.
Dalila’s story is vivid and full of thoughts and reflections. She does not know the business network in detail, but she knows firsthand what criticism of extractive projects implies. She also embraces the solidarity of her community. Three hundred people donated some $31,000 to undertake part of the necessary works in Basoa, a project that started from the Artea Network, which welcomes migrants.
Dalila Argueta (left) prepares vegan pasta with a colleague in Basoa. April 2, 2022. Photo María Ángeles Fernández
The Basque activist and lawyer Olatz Talavera also lives in Basoa and is one of its supporters. "We realized that we need a place to reflect and think, and we began to dream of that space for social transformation." A dream come true that, in addition to Dalila, Olatz, and others, has a room for when the exiled environmental defender Lolita Chávez, a native of Guatemala, visits the Basque Country.
And while activities continue inside the house, the mining works in Botaderos do not stop. Lenir Pérez has expanded his business in new sectors such as the airport; Nucor reports record profits during the first six months of 2022, and Dalila, who cannot return to her land, nor see her mountains, nor bathe in her river, has been reunited with her daughter and son, whom she has managed to take to Spain.
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J. Marcos. Precariousness. Philosophy. Journalism. Freelance questions from those three vital areas.
María Ángeles Fernández. Freelance journalist and part of the editing team at Pikara Magazine.