Washington, DC — A decade ago today, hit men murdered Honduras’s most prominent environmental and Indigenous rights activist, Berta Cáceres, in her home in La Esperanza. Throughout her short adult life, Cáceres played a critical role in many popular struggles in her country and the hemisphere. In spite of constant threats and intimidation, she led national and international campaigns against militarization, pro-corporate trade agreements, destructive extractive projects, and against the 2009 US-backed coup in Honduras. Today the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) honors the memory of a true luchadora whose example continues to inspire movements advocating environmental, economic and social justice around the world.

CEPR supports the ongoing efforts of Cáceres’s family and the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), which Cáceres cofounded, to seek full justice for the killing of Cáceres, as well as reparatory measures. In particular, CEPR urges Honduran authorities and Honduran, regional, and international financial institutions to follow the recommendations of a recent investigative report on the assassination of Cáceres by an Independent Group of International Experts (GIEI) in order to ensure that all the perpetrators ― including the intellectual authors of the crime ― are brought to justice and that environmental and human rights defenders in Honduras are better protected going forward.

“As this independent investigation confirms, Berta’s tragic murder was perpetrated by elite business interests with the complicity of various Honduran authorities at the time,” CEPR Director of International Policy Alexander Main said. “Ten years later, Berta’s family and community are still waiting for all of those responsible to be held to account, despite the considerable body of evidence that reveals who ultimately was behind Berta’s murder.” 

Evidence gathered by the GIEI shows that executives at Desarrollos Energéticos SA (DESA), a Honduran energy company, had hired the killers. Owned by the powerful and wealthy Atala Zablah family, DESA was developing the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam project, which posed a direct threat to the Gualcarque River and surrounding environment and the land rights of Cáceres’s Indigenous Lenca community. For years, Cáceres and other COPINH activists worked with community leaders to oppose Agua Zarca. 

The January report from the GIEI, an investigative body established jointly by COPINH, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), and the Honduran government in 2024, determined that Cáceres’s murder must be understood as “part of a broader pattern of structural violence that disproportionately punishes Indigenous and Afro-Honduran women who defend land, territory, and the environment in Honduras.” Such violence has historically gone unpunished, the report notes, stating that impunity has been the “central feature” of the state’s response to human rights violations. 

Other COPINH activists and opponents of the Agua Zarca dam project were murdered, including Tomás García and Nelson García, and others attacked and wounded, by security forces in the years just before and after Cáceres’s assassination.

In Cáceres’s case, “a core of impunity remains—particularly with respect to the possible involvement of other DESA directors and shareholders, as well as the full scope of State complicity and acquiescence,” the GIEI report states.  

Cáceres, who was already one of Honduras’s most well-known environmental activists and Indigenous rights defenders, became internationally known when she was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015, the year before her murder. Immediately after her murder, CEPR joined COPINH and other organizations in calling for the establishment of an independent group of experts to investigate her killing. An international advisory group of experts conducted a preliminary investigation in 2017 but it was only following the election of Xiomara Castro to the presidency that the Honduran government requested the assistance of the IACHR in setting up what became the GIEI.  

Berta Cáceres was involved in many more struggles beyond Agua Zarca and environmental issues. She played a key role in the National Front of Popular Resistance in opposition to the 2009 US-backed military coup. She founded COPINH as an “anticapitalist, anticolonial, antiracist, and antipatriarchical” organization that takes an intersectional and internationalist approach to activism. She organized across several social movements, building coalitions among Indigenous groups, student groups, trade unions, peasant organizations, feminist groups, and community outlets.

Although eight people were arrested and convicted for Cáceres’s murder in 2022 — including the head of DESA, a US-trained former Honduran intelligence officer; and two other DESA employees — her family and supporters maintained that the state had not done enough to investigate and prosecute the intellectual authors behind her assassination. 

The GIEI report uncovered several key findings, notably that Cáceres’s murder was carried out with “networks of support” within the Honduran state; that DESA diverted most of the funds it received from international development banks to fund Cáceres’s murder and other illegal activities; that authorities had prior knowledge of the plot and could have prevented her assassination; and that the Agua Zarca project was imposed on the Lenca community through systemic repression. 

It is highly uncertain that Honduras’s new National Party government will implement the recommendations of the GIEI report. It’s worth noting that Cáceres’s murder occurred during the presidency of National Party leader Juan Orlando Hernández (2014–2022), who was sentenced in 2024 by a US court to 45 years on drug-trafficking charges. His administration was marked by widespread corruption, serious human rights abuses, and high levels of impunity. Late last year, National Party candidate Nasry Asfura won the presidency in elections marked by significant US interference, including threats of cuts to economic assistance to Honduras if Asfura were to lose. President Trump also pardoned Hernández, who remains an influential figure within the party.

“In light of these developments — and the near-total silence from Honduran media regarding the GIEI report, which identifies specific outlets as having accepted bribes from DESA for favorable coverage — the 10th anniversary of Berta’s murder represents a renewed opportunity to demand justice by engaging with the GIEI’s findings and recommendations,” Main said.

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