INSIDE THE PLOT TO MURDER HONDURAN ACTIVIST BERTA CÁCERES

IT HAS BEEN more than three years since Berta Cáceres was murdered in her home in Honduras. Cáceres was a 44-year-old activist, mother of four, and an international celebrity — she won the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for leading a grassroots campaign to prevent a private energy company, Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima, from building a hydroelectric dam on Indigenous land. Near midnight on March 2, 2016, hired assassins broke into her home, shot her, and escaped. She died minutes later in the arms of a friend.

In preparation for the trial of the assassins, the Honduras Public Prosecutor’s Office extracted thousands of private call logs, SMS, and WhatsApp messages from their phones. The call log evidence was examined by an independent expert, and it showed that the assassins had communicated through a compartmentalized chain that reached the highest ranks of leadership of the company whose dam she had been protesting. Those messages, analyzed below, provide a striking window into the plot to kill Cáceres.

Chief financial officer Daniel Atala Midence spoke frequently with the company’s president, Roberto David Castillo Mejía. Castillo then communicated with DESA’s former director of security, who coordinated with the head hitman. Keeping the assassins away from direct contact with company leaders was no accident: All of the highest-ranking executives were members of the powerful Honduran Atala Zablah family, which has ties to the government and the international financial industry.

The executives had become angry when Cáceres’s protests disrupted their investment, judges on Honduras’s Supreme Court declared when delivering a guilty verdict in the trial. The executives began surveilling Cáceres and paid informants to infiltrate the organization she led. Then, “DESA executives proceeded to plot the death of Ms. Cáceres,” the court concluded, without naming specific suspects. The plan was carried out with the “knowledge and consent” of other DESA executives, the court stated, again without identifying them by name.

Before and after Cáceres was murdered, in one corporate chat group called “Seguridad PHAZ,” or in unabbreviated English, “Agua Zarca Hydroelectric Project Security,” company leaders discussed using their connections to peddle influence with national authorities, state security forces, and the media. Hundreds more messages, published by DESA’s lawyers, indicate that the company’s president, Castillo, simultaneously maintained regular contact with Cáceres prior to her murder. Although they are a matter of public record, many of the group chats and private messages have never been published.

None of the leaders have yet paid for their involvement. Only a group of seven hitmen, including two previous employees at DESA, were convicted in November 2018. On December 2, 2019, the seven hitmen received sentences ranging from 30 to 50 years in prison.

Castillo was arrested on March 2, 2018, for allegedly masterminding the murder, yet the Public Ministry has repeatedly postponed his preliminary hearing. The most recent such delay was on October 10, 2019. Meanwhile, no one from DESA’s board of directors — and no one from the Atala Zablah family — has been charged with a crime or compelled to testify.

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