Eight men accused of involvement in Honduran activist’s death prepare to stand trial but family calls for broader inquiry

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The criminal trial of eight men accused over the murder of environmental activist Berta Cáceres will begin in Honduras on Monday amid accusations of a political cover-up.

Cáceres was shot dead just before midnight on 2 March 2016 at her home in La Esperanza in western Honduras, after a long battle against a hydroelectric dam project on sacred Lenca territory.

The murder sparked international condemnation and confirmed Honduras’ ranking as the most dangerous country in the world for environment and land rights defenders.

Gustavo Castro, a Mexican environmentalist, was also shot in the attack but survived by pretending to be dead. The eight defendants are also accused of his attempted murder. All eight deny the charges.

Cáceres, who was coordinator of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisations of Honduras (Copinh), led opposition to the internationally financed Agua Zarca dam on the Gualcarque river, which triggered a wave of repression including violent evictions, surveillance, sexual harassment, false criminal charges, multiple death threats and, ultimately, her murder.

The dam was licensed to the company Desarrollos Energéticos SA (Desa).

Cáceres’ family have urged the authorities to conduct a broad investigation to find the culprits for the campaign of terror against Cáceres and Copinh, rather than focusing on the murder purely as an isolated attack. A cache of phone data uncovered by public prosecutors suggests an operation to kill Cáceres a month earlier was aborted because she was not at home alone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Berta Cáceres speaks to people near the Gualcarque river in January 2015. Photograph: Tim Russo/AP

An investigation published by an international group of lawyers last year suggested a pattern of infiltration, surveillance, criminal conspiracy, illicit association and corruption targeting Cáceres and Copinh dating back months before the murder.

The report concluded that a network of Honduran state agents and senior Desa executives were involved in the events leading to Cáceres’ death. Desa denies any wrongdoing and rejects the report as biased.

At pre-trial public hearings in Tegucigalpa last week, the court rejected petitions by the family’s lawyers to allow expert witness testimony about the roles, responsibilities and connections between the accused as part of an alleged criminal structure.

The court also rejected requests to call Desa’s financial manager, Daniel Atala, and members of the board as witnesses.

Bertita Zuniga Cáceres, the murdered leader’s daughter and current Copinh coordinator, condemned the court’s actions as “grossly negligent” and said the decision was part of a wider effort to conceal the full truth.

In August, the attorney general was forced to admit that investigators had failed to review numerous mobile phones, tablets, computers, hard drives, USBs and documents confiscated during the arrests and raids more than two years earlier. The admission came after 35 requests by the family’s lawyers for access to the evidence had been stonewalled.

Analysis is now underway but “it’s a race against time with no guarantee it will be ready or admitted by the judges”, said a person with close knowledge of the case.

Cáceres, who was killed two days before her 45th birthday, was awarded the prestigious Goldman prize in 2015 for leading the campaign to stop construction of the dam. Her death was the most high-profile since the 2009 military-backed coup in Honduras, which unleashed a wave of targeted violence against community leaders, lawyers, journalists and human rights defenders.

Two of the defendants are directly linked to Desa: Sergio Rodríguez Orellana, Desa’s communities and environmental manager, and US-trained former army lieutenant Douglas Bustillo, the company security chief between 2013 and 2015. Cáceres accused both men of threatening her and Copinh colleagues, which they deny.

Two others have military links. Mariano Díaz Chávez is an active US-trained special forces major who previously served in Iraq with coalition forces and as a UN peacekeeper. Diazhad served as the special forces intelligence chief. He trained with Bustillo, and the pair remained close.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Gualcarque River, sacred to local indigenous communities and the site of the controversial Agua Zarca dam. Photograph: Giles Clarke/Global Witness

Henry Javier Hernández Rodríguez, a former special forces soldier who worked under the command of Diaz, is the only suspect who admits being at Cáceres’ house on the night of the murder. Hernández, who was arrested in Mexico in January, denies killing Cáceres. The former soldier was working in private security with Bustillo at the time of the murder.

A Guardian investigation into the murder found that Cáceres appeared on a military hitlist given to US-backed elite forces just months before she was murdered. The murder was carried out like a “well-planned operation designed by military intelligence”, a legal source told the Guardian. The defence minister dismissed the allegations as a smear campaign against the country’s armed forces.

In March, Desa’s executive president David Castillo Mejia, was detained and will face trial separately. Castillo, a US-trained former intelligence office, is accused of masterminding the crime. Testifying after his arrest, Castillo strongly denied any link to the murder and said he and Cáceres were in fact friends.

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Desa insists the company has been wrongly targeted by prosecutors due to pressure from international human rights groups, the media and Copinh.

“There’s been a fraudulent campaign to link innocent people to a capital crime with absolutely no evidence … This is an economic attack against entrepreneurs trying to bring jobs to Central America,” said Desa’s lawyer Robert Amsterdam. “The failure of the government to share information should ring alarm bells with anyone who cares about justice.”

At the time of her death, Cáceres was involved in numerous political and social struggles.

A spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office said disclosure rules had been followed. “We are confident about the evidence against the nine men charged as a result of our multidisciplinary team investigation supported by American investigators.

“The investigation to find the remaining intellectual authors [masterminds] continues but the case is practically resolved.”

The trial is expected to run until 19 October.