In Memoriam: Homero Gómez González and Raúl Hernández Romero
The Mexican environmental activists Homero Gómez González and Raúl Hernández Romero were brutally murdered at the end of January 2020 for their work devoted to saving Monarch butterflies. The Manager of El Rosario Monarch Butterfly Preserve, part of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the Mayor of El Rosario, Michoacán, Mr. González had created the 370-acre reserve from land his family had formerly logged, transforming it into a refuge for the millions of Monarch butterflies that yearly survive the trek from Canada to Mexico. “Come and see this marvel of nature!” he exclaims in one of the last videos he posted to Twitter before his murder. “[The butterflies] are lovers of the sun, the souls of the dead,” a reference to indigenous legends about the butterflies. (See David Agren, The Guardian, Thursday, January 30, 2020). On January 29, his body was found floating in a well not far from his reserve. Three days later, the body of his colleague Raúl Hernández Romero, a tour guide at El Campanario Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary, was discovered not far away.
