Demonstrators protest the murder of Berta Cáceres last week in La Esperanza, Honduras. Photograph by STR / epa / Corbis

The Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was at home last week, in a town called La Esperanza, when gunmen stormed in and shot her dead. Cáceres, who was forty-four, had known she was in danger. Late last month, while leading a march in a nearby village, she had an altercation with soldiers, police officers, and employees of a Honduran company, Desarrollos Energéticos S.A., or DESA, that she had been fighting for years. In 2010, the Honduran Congress passed a law that awarded contracts to a group of private companies, including DESA, to build dozens of hydroelectric dams throughout the country. Four of the approved dams, which are known collectively as the Agua Zarca Dam, were along the Gualcarque River, in western Honduras, on territory inhabited by the indigenous Lenca people.

The Lenca voiced their opposition as soon as the plans became public, around 2011—first with formal votes and entreaties, and, after those were ignored, with road blockages and demonstrations. In the spring of 2013, these turned to violent confrontations with police, who arrested Lenca protesters en masse. That summer, soldiers based out of DESA’s local headquarters opened fire on a crowd of residents, killing one indigenous leader and seriously injuring several others. Cáceres was on the front lines from the start, having founded the group that has organized much of the opposition, the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH).

At one point, in 2013, Cáceres was briefly forced into hiding. At least three of her colleagues had been murdered for opposing the Agua Zarca Dam, and DESA had launched a criminal case against her, first for possession of an unlicensed gun and later for incitement. “They follow me. They threaten to kill me, to kidnap me; they threaten my family. That is what we face,” she said afterward. Later that year, two of the dam’s main backers—the Chinese engineering and construction company Sinohydro and an arm of the World Bank­—withdrew their support because of the public opposition and increasingly bloody state crackdown. (Last year, Cáceres won the Goldman Environmental Prize for her role in persuading them to abandon the project.) The threats against Cáceres increased. This past October, and again in December, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (I.A.C.H.R.) called on the Honduran government to take “precautionary measures” for her security. COPINH complained of a fresh wave of threats just days before she was murdered.

Between 2010 and 2014, a hundred and one environmental activists were killed in Honduras, which is one of the most dangerous countries in the world, and the most perilous for environmental activists, according to a report from Global Witness. Ninety-eight per cent of violent crimes in Honduras go unsolved. A week after Cáceres’s assassination, there is little clarity on how it happened. Were there two killers or as many as ten, as some rumors have suggested? Did they fire just the four shots that killed her, or were there more? The police at first claimed Cáceres was killed in a robbery, and also insinuated that her killing might have been a “crime of passion.” President Juan Orlando Hernández was more diplomatic in his statements, calling Cáceres’s murder “a crime against Honduras” and “a blow for the people.” At present, the only two people who are said to have been in police custody in connection to the murder are a fellow activist and a Mexican colleague who was with Cáceres when she died and was shot twice himself. As the sole witness to the crime, he has been ordered not to leave the country, and his life remains in danger; in an open letter to a local newspaper, he insisted that the investigating authorities tampered with the crime scene and that Cáceres’s killers would likely return for him. Two other members of COPINH are reportedly under investigation. (A spokesperson for the Honduran government said it was working with American law enforcement, including the F.B.I., to investigate the killing.)

On Tuesday, I called a longtime friend of Cáceres and a fellow human-rights advocate, a Jesuit priest named Ismael Moreno Coto, better known as Padre Melo, who runs the Jesuit-sponsored community radio station Radio Progreso. The station is openly critical of the government, and its employees work in a climate of extreme danger. In 2014, its marketing manager was stabbed to death, even after the I.A.C.H.R. spent three years petitioning the government to protect him. Cáceres had been scheduled to appear on Melo’s show the day we spoke. “I always had a certain fear of Berta Cáceres,” Melo said, in a wry, melancholy voice. They met when Cáceres was a twenty-year-old schoolteacher obsessed with social justice. “She had a special way of making us uncomfortable,” he said. “She wouldn’t leave us in peace until we were all part of the fight.”

Cáceres was born into the Lenca community, and grew up in western Honduras in the nineteen-eighties, when violence was sweeping through neighboring El Salvador. Her mother, who was a midwife and social activist, cared for the refugees who streamed across the border. Cáceres became a student leader, gaining prominence in the community for fighting logging operations on Lenca land. She was also a mother of four—a son and three daughters—who eventually received threats as well. As the pressure on Cáceres mounted, in the winter of 2013, her son and two of her daughters fled the country.

For the past three years, Melo told me, the threats against Cáceres and COPINH were constant—“dozens of them, and getting stronger each time,” he said. “All of them were documented. They came from people working for, or with, DESA.” For Melo, the fact that the government hasn’t followed those leads, focussing instead on a group of fellow activists, was typical. “Anyone who questions the government winds up penalized as being opponents of the public order,” he said. “We are portrayed in the media as bad people. We are persecuted, subjected to repression or worse, death, like what happened to Berta Cáceres.” He called for a serious investigation conducted under the direction of international monitors. (The Honduran government denies ever having “made negative public comments about the activities” of COPINH and says it is pursuing all open leads in its investigation.)

When I asked Padre Melo if speaking out might put his own life at even greater risk, he was unflinching. “I want it to be absolutely clear. The government of Juan Orlando Hernández is responsible for the death of Berta Cáceres.” He was suggesting, as so many others in Honduras have, that the government knew about the escalating clashes between the local community and DESA but did nothing to stop them. The thugs who beat up, intimidated, and even evicted Lenca residents were given cover by federal troops, who often broke up peaceable demonstrations themselves.

Just days before Cáceres’s murder, President Hernández was in the U.S. to meet with American leaders and reassure them of his continued commitment to tamping down violence in Honduras. The U.S. continues to treat Hernández as a partner in fighting corruption and swelling gang violence in the region. But as Dana Frank, a historian and Honduras expert at the University of California, Santa Cruz, pointed out last year in Foreign Policy, the current government “is perpetuating an ongoing human rights crisis while countenancing a cesspool of corruption and organized crime.” Before becoming President, Hernández, a member of the conservative National Party, was in Congress, where, in 2009, he endorsed the military coup that toppled then-President Manuel Zelaya and plunged the country into a period of unprecedented violence and lawlessness. (The U.S. government all but endorsed the coup and in many ways remains responsible for the chaos that ensued.) It was in the aftermath of the coup that Congress awarded DESA its dam contracts, even while the principal financiers of the company were roundly denounced as key supporters of the 2009 uprising.