When the activist Berta Cáceres was gunned down in her home, last month, the Honduran government, which for years had been warned about mounting threats against her, professed shock and outrage; then it promised an investigation. In Honduras, which has the highest murder rate in the world, these investigations rarely end well: ninety-eight per cent of crimes go unsolved. So President Juan Orlando Hernández, an American ally, quickly claimed to be working with the F.B.I. to get answers about Cáceres’s murder. His government also sought the help of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

But there was a catch. The F.B.I. isn’t involved in the investigation. (A retired New York detective is helping with the case, but he isn’t affiliated with any American law-enforcement agency.) And, as Cáceres’s family has pointed out, the U.N. High Commissioner’s office isn’t the right group to call, because its work is observational, not investigative. The ideal candidate, as American officials like Senator Patrick Leahy have argued, is the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (I.A.C.H.R.), whose help the Hernández government has largely avoided. The organization has a troubled history with the Honduran government: it repeatedly warned Honduras to take action to protect Cáceres. The government’s latest move was to propose that its newly formed anti-corruption group, the Support Mission Against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras, should lead the investigation, although it’s not yet fully staffed or operational. (The Support Mission was created, earlier this year, by Honduras and the Organization of American States after the Hernández government tried, and failed, to create a credible national body to deal with state corruption.)

Cáceres was involved in a three-year fight with a Honduran company, Desarrollos Energéticos S.A., or DESA, over a dam it was trying to build along the Gualcarque River, in western Honduras. The local indigenous community, the Lenca people, has long opposed the project, but construction has continued with the support of the Honduran government, which contracted with the company to build the dam in 2010 and has lent its security forces to help police protests. In 2013, Cáceres and the group she led, the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), made international news after persuading two of the project’s prominent foreign backers to withdraw. Around that time, DESA brought criminal charges against Cáceres, and she was forced into hiding by a new burst of threats.

Two weeks after Cáceres’ murder, I met with her daughter, also named Berta, who was in New York with other members of COPINH to speak at the U.N. and spread word among N.G.O.s about what, exactly, has been happening in Honduras. Two days earlier, another COPINH activist, Nelson García, had been murdered as he left a town called Rio Chiquito, where he and a group of indigenous activists were fighting an eviction order from the town’s mayor. Cáceres was upset but unsurprised by García’s death. Three of her mother’s colleagues at COPINH had been killed before her for resisting DESA’s dam project. “This is what happens when the government demonizes us,” she said about the Lenca community, which has fought a raft of government-backed development projects in western Honduras.

DESA was an obvious place for authorities to start their investigation, but it took eleven days for state investigators to visit the company’s headquarters. Instead, the authorities pursued a theory that Cáceres’s murder was perpetrated by a fellow-activist, either as a “crime of passion” or as part of a power struggle within the organization. It interrogated eight of the group’s local organizers—in some cases, for up to twelve hours at a time, according to the Guardian—and detained one for two days before releasing him without charges. The sole witness to the murder, a Mexican activist named Gustavo Castro Soto, who was with Cáceres in her home when the gunmen broke in, was treated like a suspect for the two days he was kept in custody. He had been shot twice in the attack, and was covered in his and Cáceres’s blood. Yet as he wrote in an e-mail to his colleagues the next day, “All yesterday morning and well into the night, I could not change my bloody clothing.” Later, he was ordered to identify Cáceres’s killers from a collection of photos and videos of COPINH members. Now back in Mexico, he maintains not only that he was intimidated and mistreated while in custody but that the crime scene, in Cáceres’s house, had been “modified and altered.” “Now, this is just basic,” Cáceres’s daughter told me. “If you can’t get this stuff right, then what hope is there for a real investigation?”

By Honduran law, the family of a murder victim can have a role in the investigation, with access to the case file and a chance to consult with experts of its own choosing. The meaningfulness of that role, though, is a function of what the investigating authorities allow, and the state prosecutor’s office has repeatedly thwarted the Cáceres family. When the family asked to have a forensic specialist be present at the autopsy, it was ignored; when it asked to see the claims made by Gustavo Castro Soto, the request was denied.

Late last month, Cáceres's daughter, her lawyer, and two other activists met with the Attorney General and the lead public prosecutor at the Public Ministry, in the capital city, Tegucigalpa. The activists had written up their concerns in the form of an open letter to the Attorney General and President. The Attorney General, Berta Cáceres told me, promised to look into each grievance. “He said he, personally, had no problem with involving the I.A.C.H.R.,” she said. “But he told us that it wasn’t his call to make, and that it was up to the President.” He told them he would write up an order and accompanying statement that very night to expedite the family’s other requests for more information about the investigation. (On Monday afternoon, the Honduran government invited a representative of the I.A.C.H.R. to visit Honduras and assess the investigation, according to a statement released by the Honduran Embassy. That invitation is well short of what the I.A.C.H.R. secretary-general has publicly recommended—a panel of reputable foreign investigators.)

A strange thing happened next. Cáceres’s lawyer began reading from the group’s letter, and the tone of the government representatives, until then politely detached, became explosively confrontational. For weeks, the Cáceres family has been trying to get the lead public prosecutor removed from the case on the grounds that he faces a clear conflict of interest. He once worked closely with DESA's current attorney, and the two have apparently remained friends.

When Cáceres’s lawyer read out a question about his connection to DESA, the prosecutor jumped out of his seat, according to Cáceres, and, in a raised voice, addressed the Attorney General. “It’s not true, but fine,” Cáceres recalled him saying, his eyes still locked on the other official. The prosecutor said he’d write up an order formalizing his removal from the case and abruptly left the room. Cáceres still doesn’t know whether he has stepped down; she has not seen any formal declaration to that effect, and has heard nothing from the government. (The Honduran Attorney General’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) “The government speaks to the foreign embassies. It writes public statements. It appears at press conferences. But it doesn’t speak to us,” Cáceres told me.