Homero Gomez Gonzalez was a Mexican environmental activist, agricultural engineer, and politician in Ocampo, Michoacan, Mexico, who managed El Rosario Butterfly Reserve. Gomez had grown up in El Rosario, on the eastern side of Michoacan. He came from a logging family and was a logger before becoming an environmentalist and anti-logger, although he was skeptical of conservation efforts and feared ending the logging activities that would lead them to poverty.

He studied at the Chapingo Autonomous University, later becoming an agriculture engineer. He had seen how forests and monarchs were being raided by climate change, illegal logging activities, and avocado farmers. Even though Gomez had worked in his family logging business and was afraid of being in poverty, he had convinced others to stop and abandon logging to create and protect butterfly habitats instead. He soon figured that tourism to the sanctuary for butterflies would make up for the loss of income from logging. The sanctuary is now a Unesco World Heritage Site, and federal laws outlaw logging on the site.

Gomez had always posted mesmerizing videos of monarch butterflies fluttering on social media as a way to make people realize the beauty of monarchs and how they help our environment as pollinators. In one of his last videos on Twitter , he posted, standing among a cloud of butterflies, “Come and see this marvel of nature! [The butterflies] are lovers of the sun, the souls of the dead,” as he referred to ancient indigenous legends of the beautiful migratory butterflies. Two weeks after he posted on Twitter, his body was found floating in a well. The motive for erratic behavior caused some tension and raised questions about who would cause harm to Gomez if all he wanted to do was help and preserve the monarch butterflies. His murder remains unknown, but some activists speculating that it could be caused by the dispute over illegal logging. His passing made many grieve and mourn.

Gomez had fought immensely and tirelessly to preserve his beloved Butterfly Sanctuary. In his honor, TikTok started to spin and spread his work and sanctuary worldwide to spread word of his sanctuary, which is now being run by one of his close colleagues. Later on, Netflix made a documentary and released it just this year on May 9, sparking an immense amount of interest in the devastating case. This Netflix film is called “The Guardian of the Monarchs.” Many people over social media would care and make small spacings to help raise caterpillars and soon realize them once they have hatched out of their chrysalis state into an adult butterfly. Many people say that during his passing to heaven, his monarch butterflies would lead him with their wings because of the love and care he had for them. Romero Gomez Gonzales was named and known as the Defender and Guardian of the Monarch Butterflies.