The US government is investigating allegations that a hitlist of activists was circulated to special forces units of the Honduran military with instructions to eliminate the targets, including Berta Cáceres, the celebrated environmental campaigner who was later gunned down in her home.

US officials have been in contact with counterparts in the Honduran government, as well as individuals and groups that monitor human rights in the country, to look into the allegations of a hitlist that were first reported in the Guardian.

The US ambassador to Honduras, James Nealon, told the Guardian: “We take allegations of human rights abuses with the utmost seriousness. We always take immediate action to ensure the security and safety of people where there is a credible threat.”

The state department review of the Guardian allegations comes as a group of prominent Congress members renew their call for the Obama administration to suspend all US aid to Honduran police and military units. Writing in the Guardian, the representatives, led by Hank Johnson of Georgia and John Conyers of Michigan, argue that the human rights record of the Honduran government is so woeful that there should be no funding by any US agency.

“As long as the US funds Honduran security forces without demanding justice for those threatened, tortured, and killed, we have blood on our hands. It’s time to suspend all police and military aid to Honduras,” they write. The authors are prominent sponsors of the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, which was introduced to the House of Representatives last month, calling for the suspension of aid pending a full investigation into the campaigner’s death and other abuses.

Cáceres’ murder on 2 March prompted international outrage. Last month, the Guardian reported that a former member of an elite Honduran special forces unit alleged he had seen the names and photographs of dozens of people – including Cáceres and other well-known activists – on a hitlist circulated within his unit. The source asked to be identified by a pseudonym, Rodrigo Cruz, for fear of reprisals.

Cruz’s allegations tallied with warnings given by Cáceres herself long before her murder. In 2013, she told al-Jazeera: “The army has an assassination list of 18 wanted human rights fighters with my name at the top.”

Honduras is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for activists. Earlier this week, the body of Lesbia Janeth Urquia – a fellow member of Cáceres’s Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (Copinh) – was discovered on a rubbish dump.

But US officials say high-level contacts with the Honduran government and human rights groups have not yielded any evidence of a hitlist. They added that they were continuing to follow the issue closely.



A woman places flowers on an altar set up in honor of Berta Cáceres outside Honduras’ embassy in Mexico City on 15 June 2016. Photograph: Eduardo Verdugo/AP

The state department insists that it sticks closely to the letter and the spirit of the Leahy law, the legislation first implemented in 1997 that bans US state department and department of defense support to foreign military units charged with human rights violations. The US embassy in Tegucigalpa employs staff under the Leahy law who vet all individuals or units earmarked for possible training, weeding out officials accused of gross abuses.

“We are not trainers and enablers of ‘hit squads’,” Nealon said. “We’re just the opposite – we are working hard to strengthen the systems in Honduras that protect human rights defenders.”

But the US government continues to come under fire for maintaining too close a relationship with Honduran military units implicated in human rights abuses. In their Guardian article, the five Congress members point out that the US has allocated at least $18m this year for Honduran police and military, supplemented by a $60m loan to the police from the Inter-American Development Bank backed by the US. That figure does not include additional funding from the US department of defense, which is estimated to bring the total to $200m since 2010.

“Despite this dangerous track record, the US continues to pour money into Honduran security forces,” the authors say.



One of the most sensitive areas relates to Fusina (Fuerza de Seguridad Interinstitucional Nacional), an interagency coordinating body that operates across Honduran military and civilian agencies, including judges and the attorney general’s office. A military police unit that falls under the Fusina cloak was identified by the Cruz as one of two Honduran entities that had been given the alleged hitlist of activists to take out.

Honduran press reports from May 2015 gave details of a joint crisis-response exercise coordinated between the US embassy in Tegucigalpa and the Honduran defence ministry. The country’s defence minister, Samuel Reyes, and Julie de Torres, the deputy chief of mission at the US embassy, appeared together at the start of the two-week exercise, which involved 300 US personnel from a variety of agencies, alongside a number of Honduran government entities that included Fusina.

That prompted complaints from 21 members of Congress to the US secretary of state, John Kerry, that 500 Fusina agents had been allowed to use “US helicopters and planes, despite allegations regarding the agency’s repeated involvement in human-rights violations”.

US officials denied that the exercise had involved training, adding that the US had provided no funding or training to Fusina or to the military police for public order (PMOP) under a policy to avoid supporting units that blurred the line between policing and military functions.

Rumours of a hitlist first emerged in Honduras after the 2009 military-backed coup as the murder of opposition and environmental activists began to surge, according to the campesino leader Vitalino Alvarez. “The more leaders that died, the more obvious it became that this was a national strategy which required military intelligence to be implemented,” he said.

The Guardian has not seen the alleged hitlist but was told by Cruz of names that he said he had seen on it. Those individuals have been informed by the Guardian that their lives might be in danger.



One of them was Alvarez. “Now Berta has been murdered I am apparently at the top of the list. Of course I am worried. No one from the US or Honduran authorities has approached me or tried to speak with me,” he said.

Karen Spring, coordinator of the Honduras Solidarity Network, based in Tegucigalpa, said: “This is not the first time that hitlists have emerged and circulated amongst Honduran humans rights organizations. Hondurans take these lists very seriously and they serve to create fear amongst those that see their names on the list.”

The Guardian interviewed Cruz several times by telephone and video call in the course of pulling together the story on the hitlist. Information he provided was compared with a detailed chronology and facts documented by a separate trusted contact. Cruz’s story, including details about his army career, was corroborated with people who know him and his family.