A group of international legal experts has launched an independent inquiry into the murder of Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres amid widespread concerns over the official investigation.



Five lawyers from the US, Guatemala and Colombia are in Honduras to try to uncover the intellectual authors behind the assassination of Cáceres and the attempted murder of her colleague the Mexican environmentalist Gustavo Castro.

The International Advisory Group of Experts (Gaipe, by its Spanish acronym) has been convened at the behest of Cáceres’s family, whose calls for an independent international investigation have been rejected by the government.

Cáceres was killed in March at her home in La Esperanza, western Honduras, after receiving more than 30 death threats linked to her campaign to stop the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam being built on indigenous Lenca territory.

Her murder triggered widespread international condemnation, including unsuccessful efforts by US lawmakers to withhold American aid until the government approved an international team of investigators.

In June, criticism intensified after the Guardian reported that Cáceres’s name had appeared on a military hit-list along with those of dozens of other activists.

But the outrage has failed to halt the violence or force the government to comply with international standards in the investigation.

A killing spree triggered by government-sanctioned land grabs following the 2009 coup d’état has made Honduras the world’s most dangerous country for environmental activists. At least five campaigners have been killed since Cáceres’s death, bringing the death toll to 120 since 2010, according to the NGO Global Witness.

Last month, two members of Cáceres’s Civic Council of Popular Organizations and Civic Organizations of Honduras (Copinh), including the group’s new leader, Tomás Gómez Membreño, survived assassination attempts.

Offers by the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights to dispatch a team of experts – similar to the one sent to Mexico to investigate the forced disappearance of 43 trainee teachers – have been rejected by authorities.

Five men have been arrested over Cáceres’s murder – including an active major in the armed forces and the head of security of the dam company Desa.

The expert group will investigate the state’s response to the crime, as well as the role played by corporations and international banks that backed the Agua Zarca dam.

The lawyers are Roxanna Marie Altholz from the University of California, Berkeley; Daniel R Saxon from Leiden University; Miguel Ángel Urbina Martínez, an expert in Latin American criminal law; and Colombians Jorge E Molano Rodríguez and Liliana María Uribe Tirado.