Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres was in all the fights before she was shot and killed in cold blood at the age of 44, at her home, on the night of March 2 to 3, 2016. Her disappearance bearing the signature of the death squads occurred in the the day after the end of the hearings in the trial against a businessman accused of having ordered his assassination. The book Who killed Berta Cáceres? by journalist Nina Lakhani looks back on this incredible legal saga whose underside reveals a Central American country plagued by elite corruption and drug cartels.
Despite its disastrous title, the book is not just the story of the death of Berta Cáceres. It is above all a true tribute to the career of the defender of human rights and the environment. An emblematic figure of environmental and social activism in Honduras, Berta Cáceres was a member of the indigenous community of Lenca, in the west of the country. She was known for her fierce fight against the controversial construction project of a hydroelectric dam by the Desa company on indigenous territory. At the head of the Civic Council COPINH, an organization in support of indigenous peoples, she had even tried to paralyze the site by organizing protests. She would later be honored with the Goldman Prize for the Environment, a year before her assassination.
From the first pages, the reader is literally carried away by the power of an intrigue in the form of an investigation with a thousand ramifications which is held from beginning to end. It must be said that the British Nina Lakhani is an experienced field journalist specializing in issues relating to human rights in Mexico and Central America. She is also the only foreigner to have attended the entire trial of the assassins of Berta Cáceres.
International notoriety
Using a multitude of in-depth interviews and precise testimonies, the investigator manages to trace the thread of events. We learn that the environmental activist – inhabited by the indigenous movements of the 1990s such as the Zapatista revolt in Chiapas – constantly feared for her life while she enjoyed notoriety beyond the borders of her country. However, she continued her relentless struggle, taking her to the four corners of the world, all the way to Quebec City in 2001, where she had no hesitation in taking part in a popular demonstration in front of the National Assembly during the Summit of the Americas.
The disappearance of Berta Cáceres adds to an endless list of murders of democratic and leftist voices from South American civil and indigenous society, and has been going on for decades. “Latin America remains the most dangerous region in the world to defend lands and rivers against megaprojects such as mines, dams, logging and agribusiness”, writes the journalist, who advances the figure of the NGO Global Witness of at least 633 environmental activists murdered since March 2016. In Honduras alone, 48 people have disappeared during the same period. Like Berta Cáceres, they were all committed against the grabbing of resources and territories that still plague indigenous populations and rural workers.