They came for her late one evening last March, as Berta Cáceres prepared for bed. A heavy boot broke the back door of the safe house she had just moved into. Her colleague and family friend, Gustavo Castro, heard her shout, “Who’s there?” Then came a series of shots. He survived. But the most famous and fearless social and environmental activist in Honduras died instantly. She was 44 years old. It was a cold-blooded political assassination.
Berta Cáceres knew she was likely to be killed. Everybody knew. She had told her daughter Laura to prepare for life without her. The citation for her prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, awarded in the United States less than a year before, noted the continued death threats, before adding: “Her murder would not surprise her colleagues, who keep a eulogy – but hope to never have to use it.”
“I knew she was afraid,” said Maria Santos Dominguez, who lives in the remote indigenous village of Rio Blanco in the country’s mountainous west, where Cáceres was the national face of a campaign against a dam on a river sacred to the Lenca people. “It was too much for her. I could tell.”
Most believe it was that campaign, against the Agua Zarca dam on the Gualcarque River, that provided the motive for her murder, one of a rash of recent killings of environmental and social activists in Honduras.
Honduras, says the international human rights group Global Witness, is “the deadliest country in the world to defend the natural world.” At least 109 people have been killed for taking a stand against dams, mines, logging, and agricultural projects in Honduras since a military coup there in 2009 installed a government that was quickly supported by the U.S. State Department. Global Witness catalogues the killings of environmental and human rights campaigners around the world, and its latest report revealed that 2015 was the most dangerous year on record to be an environmental activist.
Cáceres was only the most high-profile victim of a worldwide epidemic that saw nearly 200 deaths during the past year. “The environment is emerging as a new battleground for human rights,” Global Witness found. With demand for products like timber, minerals, and palm oil on the rise, companies are exploiting land with little regard for the people who live on it, according to the report, which noted that increasingly, “communities that take a stand are finding themselves in the firing line of companies’ private security, state forces and a thriving market for contract killers.”
And 2017 has already seen more. Another former Goldman Prize winner, Mexican indigenous leader and opponent of illegal logging Isidro Baldenegro was shot dead in January.
Yale Environment 360 has investigated the circumstances surrounding the killings of environmental activists on three continents — probing cases in Honduras, Malaysia, and South Africa. Two things emerge strongly: First, the frequent characterization of the activists as environmentalists only tells part of the story. Their campaigns run much deeper and are often rooted in the social identity of minority groups — in Cáceres’s case, the indigenous Lenca people of Honduras.
And second, while lone thugs and gangsters often end up in court, there is frequently a conspiracy of actors engaged in silencing the activists. As Global Witness’s chief campaigner on the issue, Billy Kyte, puts it: “These are not isolated incidents — they are symptomatic of a systematic assault on remote and indigenous communities by state and corporate actors.”
According to Honduran prosecutors, of the eight people so far arrested in connection with the death of Cáceres, six have links to government security services, including an elite military squad trained by U.S. Special Forces. And two of those charged have alleged links to the Honduran company behind the dam project, Desarrollos Energeticas SA, including a security chief and the man in charge of its environmental policies. Yale Environment 360 has learned that the cases against those charged are being built based on records of mobile phone calls made around the time of the crime.
In a statement, the company said it “has not given any declaration, nor does it plan to do so, until the authorities in charge of the investigation determine the causes and perpetrators of this regrettable incident.”
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