Honduran environment activist assassinated

[outsider]

Honduran human rights and environment activist assassinated:

Berta Cáceres, Honduran human rights and environment activist, murdered:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/03/honduras-berta-caceres-mu rder-enivronment-activist-human-rights

'Berta Cáceres, the Honduran indigenous and environmental rights campaigner, has been murdered, barely a week after she was threatened for opposing a hydroelectric project.

Her death prompted international outrage at the murderous treatment of campaigners in Honduras, as well as a flood of tributes to a prominent and courageous defender of the natural world.

The co-founder of the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (Copinh) was shot dead by gunmen who entered her home in La Esperanza at around 1am on Thursday. Some reports say there were two killers; others suggest 11. They escaped without being identified, after also wounding the Mexican activist Gustavo Castro Soto.

Police told local media the killings occurred during an attempted robbery, but the family said they had no doubt it was an assassination prompted by Cáceres’s high-profile campaigns against dams, illegal loggers and plantation owners.

“I have no doubt that she has been killed because of her struggle and that soldiers and people from the dam are responsible, I am sure of that. I hold the government responsible,” her 84-year-old mother said on radio Globo at 6.

Karen Spring, a friend of Cáceres’, said it was unclear how many assailants had participated in the attack, but that Cáceres was hit by at least four bullets.

Members of Copinh escorted the body as it left the house on the way to the morgue in the provincial capital. About a hundred of them also marched from the public prosecutor’s office to the police station, where they demanded an independent international investigation. Others headed to La Esperanza to take part in the wake.

“People here are still in shock that Berta is dead,” Spring told the Guardian. “But they are very clear that they will continue their struggle to honour Berta.”

Last year, Cáceres – who is a member of the Lenca indigenous group, the largest in Honduras – was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for her opposition to one of Central America’s biggest hydropower projects, the Agua Zarca cascade of four giant dams in the Gualcarque river basin.

The campaign has held up the project, which is being built by local firm DESA with the backing of international engineering and finance companies, and prompted the withdrawal of China’s Sinohydro and the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation.

Cáceres had called for other foreign partners, including the Dutch Development Bank, the Finnish Fund for Industrial Cooperation and German companies Siemens and Voith, to pull out......'


The Yankee-inspired death squads continue their grisly work, just as they did all over Latin America, Indonesia, Iraq .....