Five years ago, Honduran activist Edwin Espinal sat in a supermax prison facing trumped up charges of arson, property damage, and use of homemade explosive material.
Espinal was arrested and faced possibly decades of jail time due to his participation in the mass protests in Honduras against the electoral fraud carried out by Juan Orlando Hernández in the November 2017 elections. The blatant fraud had sparked a mass reaction and from the end of November 2017 well into February 2018, the streets and highways across the country were sites of road blockades, marches, rallies, and cultural actions demanding “Out JOH!”
The fraud was just one more incident of subversion of democratic order in the country which had been under what Honduran activists term a “narco-dictatorship” since the June 28, 2009 coup against democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya.
Espinal was actively involved in resisting the coup, the successive governments installed after it and their policies. As such, he had been a target of state repression since 2009. “Finally,” he told Peoples Dispatch, they arrested and put him in prison on January 19, 2018.
However, prison became another front of struggle for the activist. While behind bars, Espinal fought not only for his own freedom, but also the dignity of the hundreds of socially and economically marginalized people also held at the La Tolva Supermax Prison with him. Through a coordinated effort with Honduran and international human rights organizations, Edwin and his co-accused Raúl Álvarez not only won their freedom on August 9, 2019 but on September 17, 2021 were also absolved of all charges. A couple of months later, on November 28, 2021, Xiomara Castro defeated the far-right National Party candidate Nasry Asfura in the presidential elections, effectively bringing an end to the 12-year dictatorial rule of the National Party that began with the June 28, 2009 military coup.
This is his story.
