Berta Cáceres spent her life building a movement to protect the environment and indigenous peoples' rights. Her enemies tried to silence that movement by killing her, only to find out they can put out the spark, but never the fire.
"They are afraid of us because we are not afraid of them"
When she won the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize, Berta Cáceres had spent decades building a movement to protect and defend the land of the indigenous Lenca people of Honduras. She had founded the Civil Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations (COPINH) and taken on powerful hydroelectric and mining corporations in her work to preserve the environment. In her Goldman prize acceptance speech she dedicated her award “to the martyrs who gave their lives in the struggle to defend our natural resources”. Little did she know that less than one year later she would join long list of activists who have paid the ultimate price for defending the environment.
Born in La Esperanza, in western Honduras, Cáceres grew up in the 1970s – a time of civil unrest and violence in Central America. Her mother, Bertha, was a mayor and governor, as well as a midwife, and taught Berta and her siblings to believe in justice. As a student in 1993, Cáceres co-founded COPINH and helped to harness the strength of the indigenous community at a time when being indigenous in Honduras was neither a source of pride or power. COPINH is now made up of 200 Lenca communities in western Honduras and fights for the rights of the Lenca people to defend their land and way of life against mining, damming and other environmentally harmful projects.
In 2006, Cáceres began what would become a long-standing campaign against the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project for the construction of four dams on the Gualcarque river. Local Lenca activists in Río Blanco were worried that the dams would reduce their access to water and damage the surrounding environment, and because they had not been consulted in earlier stages of the project’s planning, contravening an International Labour Organization convention ratified by Honduras. For their work, the Río Blanco community and COPINH have received numerous threats over the years.
When President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a military coup in June 2009, activists and local leaders who had run campaigns for change were once again under threat. Before the coup, Honduran activists had been successful in getting Zelaya to make decisions that improved the lives of Hondurans, such as lowering school fees, raising the minimum wage, and blocking many hydroelectric projects.
On 28 June 2009, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) put Cáceres on a list of people who were at risk during the coup, including other popular leaders, state authorities and people related to the ousted president. The following day, Cáceres was granted precautionary protection measures by the IACHR, which asked the Honduran government to guarantee her “life and personal integrity”. At the time, the IACHR had received reports that military forces had surrounded her home.
According to a report by Global Witness, 101 environmental activists were killed in Honduras between 2010 and 2014. Despite the threats and extreme violence that skyrocketed in the fallout of the coup, Cáceres and COPINH continued their activism, including campaigning against the Agua Zarca project. In 2013 Tomás Garcia, a Lenca Indigenous Council representative, was killed by members of the Honduran army during a peaceful protest. Following the murder, Sinohydro, a Chinese investor, pulled out of the Agua Zarca project.
In 2014, Cáceres was a finalist for the 2014 Front Line Defenders Award and in 2015 she received the Goldman Environmental Prize, which honours “grassroots environmental heroes” and their efforts to protect and enhance the environment, often at the expense of personal safety. Máxima Acuña, a Peruvian activist who won the 2016 Goldman prize for the Americas, has also faced repeated threats, physical attacks, and police harassment for her efforts to defend her land.
In a statement the day after Cáceres was murdered, the IACHR noted that only months earlier it had met with a delegation from Honduras and spoken about the risk that continued to face Cáceres, as well as “the shortcomings in the implementation of protective measures” that the state was supposed to have supplied to her.
Unfortunately, Cáceres had no protection when she was shot dead in her home on the night of 2 March 2016. The one witness to her murder, fellow Mexican activist Gustavo Castro Soto, was also shot in the attack, but pretended to be dead until the assailants left. He was later detained by authorities when trying to leave Honduras.
On 15 March 2016, another of Cáceres’s fellow activists, Nelson García, was shot and killed, while Lenca community members nearby were being forcefully evicted from the land. Following García’s murder, FMO, a Dutch development financier, and Finnfund, another investor, suspended their financial backing for the Agua Zarca project, leaving the project stalled, but not cancelled.
Those behind Berta Cáceres’s murder tried to send a message that if the best-known activist in Honduras could be brazenly killed for her work, then the same could happen to anyone else. It was a crime that shocked many, but her murderers have not succeeded in killing her message or her movement. Demonstrations following her murder were full of posters reading “Berta Vive” (Berta lives) – and it’s true. Not only is COPINH continuing their work, her family and supporters continue to demand justice in her case, and her daughter, Bertha, continues to fight for the rights of indigenous peoples in Honduras. As Castro Soto wrote in an open letter after her death, “I saw Berta die in my arms, but I also saw her heart planted in every struggle that COPINH has undertaken.”
Significant international attention to Cáceres’s case led to trials and convictions. On 29 November 2018, seven men were convicted for Berta’s murder. More than a year later, in December 2019, they were sentenced to 30 to 50 years, although these sentences are yet to be served. The group had been formed by former employees of Desarrollos Energéticos S. A. (DESA), the company behind the Agua Zarca project, and former military. The verdict confirmed that the accused gunmen were working under the orders and coordination of a DESA executive, identified as the company’s president, David Castillo. In 2022, Castillo was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in the assassination; he was accused by Honduran prosecutors of being one of the top links in a complex chain of command that organised and directed the hit squad. For many defenders, however, the sentencing is by no means the end of the story; they allege that complicity in the killing goes higher, and the full extent of those responsible for the killing are still at large with impunity.
Caceres’s family and friends have affirmed that they want to see the masterminds behind the crime also held accountable. It was evident from the investigation that Berta suffered attempts to defame and criminalize her, in addition to direct threats, aimed at harassing her to give up her struggle against development projects in Lenca lands and across Honduras. The proceedings also affirmed that Berta’s assassination took place with the knowledge and assent of other executives of DESA.
In December 2019, a special report by The Intercept looked into the communication logs, SMS and WhatsApp messages extracted by the Honduran Public Prosecutor’s Office during investigations. According to the news outlet, “[t]he call log evidence was examined by an independent expert, and it showed that the assassins had communicated through a compartmentalized chain that reached the highest ranks of leadership of the company whose dam she had been protesting”. This included members of the Atala Zablah family, a powerful Honduran family with “ties to the government and the international financial industry”.
In February 2020, weeks before the fourth anniversary of Berta’s murder, a group of international expert observers composed of 17 international and regional organizations (Misión de Observación Calificada – Causa Berta Cáceres) released a report in which they documented several irregularities in the case.
COPINH’s webpage continues to follow the case and denounces the impunity that surrounds it. Marcia Aguiluz, from CEJIL, affirms that covering up for the masterminds behind the crime, may have consequences that extend far beyond Berta’s case, in a country known as one of the most lethal to environmentalists.
The Misión de Observación highlights in its report that “the murder of Berta Cáceres affected both the victims directly impacted and the whole society and, for that reason, the search for integral truth and justice is crucial.”
The face of Berta Cáceres is today on the 200 lempira bill, thus becoming the first woman in Honduran history to ever appear on a banknote. While indigenous communities and environmentalists in Honduras acknowledge and celebrate this historic milestone, they emphasise the need to confirm the sentences of those involved in her murder and seek justice for those materially responsible for her assassination.
Illustration by Florian Nicolle
