In the Bajo Aguán valley of Honduras, a 15-year-old boy named Orlean* heard gunshots, watched his uncle and two cousins die, and ran home through a palm oil farm. He was one of only three survivors of a massacre on 21 May that killed 20 people. "We have seen a lot of violence in the Aguán, but never a massacre like this," says his father, Malcolm*.

The valley is a lush paradise for palm oil - that ubiquitous ingredient in everything from shampoo to instant noodles - and a living hell for the campesinos who have fought for their land for three decades. The conflict began with a 1992 land reform law that let big palm oil companies snap up smallholdings, allegedly through fraud. Farmers have sued and occupied land to reclaim it, while companies deny wrongdoing and allegedly use private security and paramilitaries to kill and intimidate.

International eyebrows raised when the World Bank's private lending arm, the International Finance Corporation, funded Dinant, the palm oil company at the center of abuses. Dinant denies involvement in murders and human rights violations. Then came drug traffickers, turning the valley into a cocaine corridor from Colombia, which the US duly noted by calling Honduras a major trafficking hotspot. The traffickers, attracted by logistics and money-laundering opportunities, added to the killing and displacement.

More than 200 people have died, mostly campesinos, according to the Honduran Commission for Human Rights (Conadeh). Global Witness ranks Honduras as one of the world's most dangerous places for land defenders. May was the deadliest month in the region since 2018, per Acled. A campesino leader was killed weeks later.

Now, the new rightwing government of Nasry "Tito" Asfura, backed by Donald Trump, has passed laws that make things worse. A penal code reform allows criminal groups to be designated as terrorist organizations, with an open-ended definition. "Any group exercising their democratic right to peaceful protest can be labelled terrorist," says Lucía Vigil of the Centre for the Study of Democracy (Cespad). Yoni Rivas, spokesperson of the Plataforma Agraria, lives in an armored car due to death threats; he says, "danger no longer only comes from the hitmen who follow me around, it comes directly from the state."

Two weeks later, the government passed a law prioritizing agribusiness in land disputes, allowing immediate police or legal intervention against protesting communities. Lucas Mantelli, a lawyer at the pan-American Centre for Justice and International Law, sees the laws as interlinked: "This legal language is shaped out of a partnership between business groups, elites and the Honduran state to benefit agribusiness at any cost."

This echoes the previous National party era, under Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted drug trafficker pardoned by Trump, who invested nearly $72m in palm oil despite abuse allegations. The military and police often ignored or participated in abuses. Under leftist Xiomara Castro, from 2022 until this year, there were fewer violent evictions, though violence persisted. Now, Vigil says, "we are returning to a period of state repression towards any civic dissent."

In Rigores, few trust the government. Conadeh estimates nine out of 10 killings and abuses are never investigated. After the massacre, families retrieved bodies before police arrived, to avoid paying an alleged $300 release fee. When investigators exhumed bodies for autopsies, families watched. "And for what?" asks Santiago, who lost three daughters. "It is not as if they are going to find who was really responsible for the killings."

*Names have been changed to protect identities.