The award-winning founder of the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (COPINH) was shot dead by two gunmen who entered her home in La Esperanza at around 1am Thursday. The killers, who escaped without being identified, also wounded her brother.
Police told local media the killings occurred during an attempted robbery, but the family said they had no doubt it was an assassination prompted by Cáceres’s high-profile campaigns against dams, illegal loggers and plantation owners.
Last year, she was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for her opposition to one of Central America’s biggest hydropower projects, the Agua Zarca cascade of four giant dams in the Gualcarque river basin.
She has also won plaudits from international NGOs for standing up to powerful landowners, a US-funded police force, and a mercenary army of private security guards in the most murderous country in the world for environmental campaigners.
In an interview with the Guardian at the time of her award, Cáceres was realistic about the risks she faced, but said she felt obliged to fight on and urged others to do so.
“We must undertake the struggle in all parts of the world, wherever we may be, because we have no other spare or replacement planet. We have only this one, and we have to take action,” she said.
The dangers appear to have increased in recent weeks. After a Copinh march in Rio Blanco on 20 February, she and other participants were confronted by the army, police, local mayor and employees of the dam company. Several were detained and some threatened, the council said in a statement.
It was not the first time. Cáceres previously said she had received warnings that she would be raped or murdered if she continued her campaigns. There have also been past reports that hitmen were hired to assassinate her.
Cáceres’s fellow Copinh leader Tomas Garcia was shot dead in a protest in 2013. Several others have been killed this year, according to the council.
Between 2010 and 2014, 101 campaigners were killed in Honduras, a higher death toll relative to population than anywhere else, according to the study How Many More? by NGO Global Witness. It said a disproportionately high number of them were from indigenous communities who resisted development projects or the encroachment of farms on their territory.
The group said Honduras was at the forefront of a disturbing rise in murders worldwide. Last year, it documented 116 killings of activists across the globe, 20% higher than in 2013. Four in 10 of the victims were from indigenous communities who resisted development projects or the encroachment of farms on their territory.
Billy Kyte, a campaigner at Global Witness, paid tribute to Cáceres for her “incredible courage” and said the government – which is behind many of the controversial projects – must reverse the alarmingly murderous trend in Honduras.
By: Jonathan Watts.
Photo: The Guardian.
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