EARLY IN THE MORNING on March 3, in La Esperanza, Honduras, unidentified men broke into the home of the environmental activist Berta Cáceres and murdered her. Cáceres was the cofounder of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Movements of Honduras (COPINH) and the 2015 winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, and her murder has prompted an international outcry as well as investigations supported by the United Nations and the FBI. The Mexican environmental activist Gustavo Castro, who was staying in Cáceres’s home in hopes of deterring violence against her, witnessed the murder and was subsequently detained by Honduran authorities. Amnesty International has warned that Castro, who was shot twice in the attack, is in “grave danger.”

Cáceres’s activism spanned several issues, including indigenous rights, feminism, LGBT rights, and environmentalism, but recently, “more than anything,” her sister Agustina Flores told me, “it was Agua Zarca,” a proposed hydroelectric dam project, which was to be built on the territory of the indigenous Lenca people. Flores, a retired teacher, says that Cáceres had received repeated death threats related to her work. The threats were so serious in recent months that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights repeatedly called on the Honduran government to provide her with protection. Her sister said that protection was never provided. “We have feared for her life for a long time,” Flores said in a telephone interview, adding that in November, Cáceres told her she was being “seriously harassed” by three local politicians who she believed were acting at the behest of Desarrollos Energéticos, SA (DESA), the private energy company behind the Agua Zarca dam.

DESA is partially controlled by the controversial Honduran Atala family, whose members are involved in a variety of business ventures and suspected by many of having backed the 2009 coup. Best known among them is billionaire Camilo Atala, president of Banco Ficohsa, a regional bank that in 2014 acquired most of Citibank’s assets in the region, making it the largest bank in Honduras.

The Intercept requested comment from DESA, Agua Zarca, and the Atala family. DESA provided the following statement:

The board of directors of the company that is carrying out the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project 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 that ended the life of the indigenous leader Berta Cáceres. This, as is logical, is in order to not provoke any more speculation than what already exists and which is spreading among public opinion around what happened.

Agua Zarca also received financing from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration. The original contractor hired to build the dam, supported in part by the World Bank, was one of the largest hydropower engineering companies in the world, Sinohydro Group. For more than a year, in 2012 and 2013, community members formed a human barricade to block construction of the dam, while COPINH led a national and international advocacy campaign to highlight the environmental and cultural destruction the dam would cause. DESA’s private security guards and the Honduran military responded with a campaign of violence and intimidation.

“The army has an assassination list of 18 wanted human rights fighters with my name at the top,” Cáceres told Al Jazeera in December 2013. “I take lots of care but in the end, in this country where there is total impunity I am vulnerable,” she continued. “When they want to kill me, they will do it.”

Eventually, both Sinohydro and the World Bank pulled out of the dam project and it is currently on hold.

Cáceres’s family strongly believes that someone involved with Agua Zarca ordered her execution. Her children have circulated a press release in which they name DESA, the various Agua Zarca funders, and the Honduran government for its failure to protect their mother. On March 3, Agua Zarca felt compelled to issue a statement denying that it was involved in the murder. “Agua Zarca roundly affirms that there is no direct nor indirect connection between the project and the regrettable event that ended the life of the indigenous leader.”

Last year, the group Global Witness named Honduras as the world’s deadliest country for environmental activists. “There is a straight line between environmentalist activism and assassination in Honduras,” said Dr. David Wrathall, a San Jose State University geographer who studies Honduras. Over the last decade, Central America has become awash in drug money, Wrathall says, which frequently ends up entangled in large-scale agriculture and development projects such as dams.

“Big public infrastructure works are the most corrupt sector in the global economy, even more than oil or the arms trade,” said Peter Bosshard, an expert in dams and corruption at International Rivers. Although Honduras does have laws on the books that require environmental impact analyses (EIA) to be performed before a dam project can go forward, practically speaking, these reports never recommend against a project. “You will never see an EIA that says, well, the impacts of this project are so severe that we recommend not going forward,” said Bosshard. “Even though that’s the point of the EIA.”

Marco Tulio Carrillo, a spokesperson for the Honduran Ministry of the Environment, which awards dam permits, said that he had “no knowledge with respect to the subject” and that “it should be under investigation.”

“Whereas powerful landowners, businesses, and politicians have resorted to violence against activists in the past, now these actors have more illicit enterprises and transactions to hide, coupled with unrestrained capital and a reserve army of hit men,” Wrathall said. “So it’s anti-environmentalism (literally) on drugs.”