A Honduran LGBT rights advocate says he was nearly kidnapped last month near his home in the Central American country’s capital.

Nelson Arambú, co-founder of the Violet Collective and Kulkulcán Associations, told the Washington Blade during a recent Skype interview he was walking near a bridge in the Tegucigalpa neighborhood in which he lives on the afternoon of Sept. 15 when he noticed a large unmarked vehicle with tinted windows was following him.

“I began to walk faster because it seemed unusual to me,” said Arambú. “The streets were empty.”

Arambú told the Blade he then felt someone grab his shirt from behind. He said a second man came out of the vehicle and struck him in the back.

“I realized that another person had gotten out, so I had the foresight to try to escape,” said Arambú. “He ripped my shirt before I got away and I began running towards the bridge.”

The attempted kidnapping took place on the country’s Independence Day.

Arambú told the Blade the incident took place as he was returning home from a march during which he and other human rights advocates protested the Honduran government’s response to rampant violence and poverty in the country, among other issues.

He said he “has no idea” why the men tried to kidnap him, but he said people from “social movements” may have been responsible. Arambú told the Blade he had received insults and threats from “fake” Facebook profiles in the weeks leading up to the incident.

He said he did not file a formal complaint with the police.

“I know well what has happened before in Honduras when some people have filed complaints (with the police,)” Arambú told the Blade. “They are later harassed by the same police and they are later killed or disappear.”

Anti-LGBT violence in the impoverished Central American country has skyrocketed since a coup toppled then-President Manuel Zelaya in 2009.

Arambú told the Blade in June during a separate interview in New York that 176 LGBT Hondurans have been reported killed between the coup and May. These include Walter Tróchez, a prominent LGBT rights advocate who was shot to death in Tegucigalpa in 2009, and Erick Martínez, a journalist and activist who was strangled to death in 2012 after leaving a gay bar in the Honduran capital.

Arambú said Tegucigalpa police officers killed 10 trans people in the three months after the 2009 coup. An Amnesty International report notes a group of armed men kidnapped a trans sex worker in San Pedro Sula and killed her before placing her body into a plastic bag and dumping it alongside a road.

Arambú told the Blade that four LGBT Hondurans have been killed since the end of June. He said one of these victims was a trans woman in her 50s.

“She was severely beaten in her own neighborhood by several teenagers who left bruises on her face and body,” he said.

Arambú told the Blade earlier this year in New York that his home was broken into three time last December.

“These are very difficult things,” he said. “They are very ugly things.”

Activist ‘does not feel very safe’ in Honduras

A report from the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crimes indicates Honduras in 2012 had the world’s highest murder rate — Arambú told the Blade in June that 25,000 Hondurans have been killed in the country since the 2009 coup due largely to drug-fueled gang violence.

The violence in Honduras and neighboring Central American countries has prompted tens of thousands of undocumented children to cross into the U.S.

Arambú told the Blade he does not have any immediate plans to leave the country, even though he “does not feel very safe.”

“I do not want to leave the country,” he said. “If I were to face a similar situation again, I think that I would have to think about what I should do, but I am not interested in leaving Honduras.”

The State Department in 2009 expressed concern over Tróchez’s murder and urged Honduran officials to thoroughly investigate it.

Arambú in June blasted U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Lisa Kubiske’s statements earlier that year that included praise of the government’s efforts to investigate the high number of murders among what one newspaper described as “the most vulnerable members of society” in Bajo Aguán, an agricultural area near the country’s Caribbean coastline.

“I would hope that the U.S. government would have a more clear position that is not so ambiguous towards the situation in Honduras, of the situation with the government,” Arambú told the Blade while he was in New York.

Arambú acknowledged American officials remain focused on the influx of Central American immigrants into the U.S. He said he wishes Washington would do more to highlight anti-LGBT violence and discrimination in his country.

“There is a huge international outcry if a gay or lesbian person in Russia is killed,” said Arambú. “But here trans people are systematically killed and I have not seen any forceful response from the U.S. government about these cases.”