Journalist Killed In Drive-By Shooting After Denouncing Attacks On LGBTQI People
Image: Luis Almendares
A 35-year-old journalist in Honduras in Central American has been killed in a drive-by shooting on Sunday. It comes after the victim, Luis Almendares, had publicly denounced a spate of violent attacks against LGBTQI people.
Almendares, whom was shot multiple times by two men on a motorbike, was at the time of the attack, in Comayagua, a city less than two hours northwest of Tegucigalpa, the Central American country’s capital. Following the shooting, Almendares was transferred to Tegucigalpa hospital where he died the following day.
Since 2009, there have been 367 reported murders of LGBTQI people in Honduras, while Almendares is now the 86th journalist to be killed in the country since 2001. In July 2019, a trans woman who hosted a program on a television station in Puerto Cortés, a city on Honduras’ Caribbean coast was similarly shot to death.
One source said Almendares condemned an attack against a transgender woman that took place in Comayagua on Sep 6. More recently, Almendares had also written about a gay man who was attacked inside a Comayagua bar with a machete in a Facebook post he titled, To be Gay in a Country of Machos.
Various other sources have confirmed that after receiving death threats related to his work, Almendares had repeatedly complained to police and the country’s National Protection System, which was established in 2015 due to concerns expressed by the Organization Of American States and the UN over the high number of killings involving lawyers, rights defenders and journalists in the country.
In response to Almendares murder, a spokesperson for the Honduran government said in a statement: “We condemn the crime that took the life of journalist Luis Almendares.
“The Honduras National Police’s Special Unit immediately launched an investigation… Those responsible will feel the full weight of the law. Our solidarity is with the family.”
However, this remains unlikely, considering that 90% of the 86 journalist murders carried out in Honduras since 2001 have gone unpunished.
The way you have written this article makes it sound like Luis Almendares is an awful person. Did he truly denounce the attacks on the lgbt community?