In the pre-dawn hours of 3 March, assassins burst into the home of Berta Cáceres in La Esperanza, Honduras, and shot dead the indigenous Lenca leader. A founder of the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations (COPINH) of Honduras, Berta was the 2015 winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, the world’s leading environmental award, for her work organizing opposition to a hydro-electric dam project on the sacred Gualcarque River.
The Agua Zarca dam project is located on land that the Honduran de facto government conceded to foreign interests in the months after the 2009 military coup that deposed reformist President Manuel Zelaya. FMO, the Dutch development bank financing the project, expressed its regret first for the ‘passing away’ of Cáceres in a carefully worded online statement, a term which it later amended to ‘violent death’. It maintained that the dam project was necessary for guaranteeing electricity to Hondurans, while promising to compensate local communities and even ‘train a group of farmers to improve their farming techniques’. However, on 16 March it was forced to suspend its funding following the murder of another COPINH member, Nelson García.1
