Donatilo Jiménez Euceda dedicated 22 years of his life to the promotion and defence of the rights of the working class; During those 22 years he worked as a maintenance worker at the Regional University Center of the Atlantic Coast (CURLA). His leadership led him to work for two consecutive periods (2008-2010 and 2010-2012) as president of section 3 of SITRAUNAH.
Donatilo was kidnapped between 11 a.m. and 12 a.m. on April 8, 2015, while carrying out his work activities within the CURLA facilities, when heavily armed criminals took him from his assigned tractor for work, captured him and disappeared him. His trade union colleagues, relatives and human rights organisations, denounced the silence of the university authorities and their work colleagues.
Although the University Center operates a whole security system, where people and / or vehicles can not enter and leave without being identified, the University Authorities have not been able to explain how the kidnapping took place in the middle of the morning and on campus. However, it is known that the security company hired by the authorities of the National Autonomous University of Honduras -UNAH- is directed by a former member of Battalion 3-16, (a death squad blamed for hundreds of extra judicial executions in the 1980’s) whose speciality was the torture and disappearance of people.
Donatilo, constantly denounced acts of corruption, abuses of power, violation of labour rights and systematic violations of human rights by the authorities of the UNAH, against university personnel. After his disappearance, on May 1, 2015, the Committee of Families of the Detained-Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH), requested precautionary measures from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Precautionary Measures (CIDH).
Two years after his disappearance, family members of Donatilo have publicly accused the university authorities, of being directly involved in his kidnapping and disappearance, along with the complicity of the government. As a result the family members have received several death threats.. On September 6, 2016, the IACHR extended precautionary measures for Donatilo’s family.
In November 2017, the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Crimes against Life (FEDCV) demanded a sentence of 35 years imprisonment for José Augusto Turcios Salinas aka “Mayimbu” and Roberto Javier Alemán Castellón aka “El Flaco or El Largo” for the kidnapping of Donatilo. While the body has not been found intercepted phone calls indicated that the body was burned.