BERTA CÁCERES

During the writing of the second draft of this chapter in July of 2021, it was announced that Roberto David Castillo had been found guilty of the murder of Berta Cáceres. Cáceres was an Indigenous leader in Honduras, who organised a campaign to stop construction of the internationally funded Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam on the Gualcarque River, regarded as sacred by the Lenca people. She was murdered on 2 March 2016, and in July 2021 Castillo was found guilty of being a co-collaborator in ordering her murder. He was a US-trained former army intelligence officer and president of the hydroelectric company behind the proposed dam. Cáceres was shot dead by hired assassins two days before her forty-fifth birthday. The court decided that Castillo used paid informants and military contacts to keep track of Cáceres, and coordinated, planned and paid for the assassination. The seven men who carried out the murder were convicted in December 2018.

The story of Berta Cáceres is told by Nina Lakhani in her book Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet (Lakhani 2020). I wrote the first draft of this chapter in June 2021, and when I saw the headline on 6 July I remembered that I had mentioned Cáceres in the section on ‘Violence in the Borderlands’. She was one of the many named in a report published in 2018 by Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, where she identifies a global crisis of Indigenous and community leaders being increasingly targeted for violent attack and murder as they try to oppose development projects that expel their people from their lands (Tauli-Corpuz 2018). In that report she identifies 313 human rights defenders murdered in 2017, most of whom were defending Indigenous land rights, and most murders taking place in the context of development projects. Front Line Defenders, which publishes an annual report on the murder of human rights defenders each year, found that at least 331 were murdered in 2020, again mostly in relation to land rights (Front Line Defenders 2020).