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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
An activist’s murder rocked Honduras. Now her daughter is in the hot
seat
By Hira Humayun, Karen Esquivel, CNN
Updated:
12:26 PM EDT, Sat September 20, 2025
Source: CNN
Bertha Zúñiga is no stranger to threats. She remembers the day years
ago when she and her colleagues were chased by machete-wielding
attackers in western Honduras.
A vehicle blocked their car, and its passengers stepped out with their
weapons, trying to attack the group. They managed to escape, but the
incident was not the first – nor would it be the last time Zúñiga
would face a violent threat.
That encounter came just over a year after Zúñiga’s mother, Berta
Cáceres, a prominent indigenous rights activist in Honduras, was
killed in her home in March 2016, leading to Zúñiga taking the
leadership of her group, the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous
Organizations of Honduras (COPINH).
Zúñiga was a toddler when her mother started the group to defend
indigenous Lenca land from commercial interests that local communities
say harm and exploit it.
Zúñiga’s group has been fighting against controversial projects
such as the since-paused Agua Zarca dam in northwest Honduras that
activists say would cost the Lenca people their livelihood. The local
community fears the on the Gualcarque River would destroy its unique
ecosystems and the community’s agricultural production areas and
sources of food and natural medicine. But Cáceres’ moves against the
project faced powerful pushback.
Environmental and human rights investigative group said that in 2023
Honduras ranked the third deadliest – tying with Mexico, behind
Colombia and Brazil – for environmental defenders and had the
world’s highest number of killings of environment defenders per
capita.
In April 2013 Cáceres organized a road blockade in the Río Blanco
region to stop the power company that owned and operated the Agua Zarca
project, Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima (DESA), from
accessing the dam site. The blockade lasted over a year despite
eviction attempts and
“I began to see that it was a much more aggressive fight than we ever
had in COPINH’s history,” Zúñiga told CNN. “My mom always took
me to the communities, made me see what was happening and learn there
in person, but she held back a lot. She didn’t want me to go to Río
Blanco.”
When Zúñiga insisted on going to the region, her mother instructed
her to use her middle name and not reveal whose daughter she was.
Cáceres knew her work was dangerous and, from a young age, Zúñiga
learned to take her safety seriously amid fears of kidnapping. Someone
always had to accompany her to school and pick her up, even after she
got older. She didn’t have the freedom most other children did.
The year before her murder, Cáceres sat her adult children down for a
talk. “She told us that anything could happen in this country and
that we should not be afraid,” Zúñiga said.
A team of international legal experts who investigated Cáceres’
murder found it was , but the result of a larger plot. To date, eight
people have been in connection with her death, including former of
DESA. The company could not be reached for comment but had previously
maintained its employees’ innocence and has long denied any
connection to the killing. The high-profile convictions included former
executive who was sentenced to over and DESA’s former environmental
manager who was sentenced to 30 years. Both claimed they were innocent.
A large portion of water resources in Honduras are on indigenous
territory, and the government often grants access to those resources to
business groups without adequately consulting local indigenous
communities. Corporate interests in the region often aim to quickly
extract natural resources in a way that maximizes economic benefits
without considering the effects on the environment and local
populations, says Laura Furones, a senior adviser at Global Witness.
“These local populations normally benefit little or nothing,” she
told CNN.
Over the years, government policies favoring the private sector and
companies aiming to profit from the country’s natural resources were
put in place to boost the economy after it was devastated by events
like Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and the that ousted then-president José
Manuel Zelaya.
Just days after Cáceres’ death, COPINH member was fatally shot. In
January 2023, , outspoken activists against an iron ore mine, were
found dead in northern Honduras. And last year, , who protested mining
and hydro-electric projects, was shot dead on his way home from church.
Prior to her death, Cáceres herself had her car pelted with stones,
and faced shots fired into the air as a warning, Zúñiga recalls.
Earlier this year, sensitive information about the security detail the
Honduran government granted Zúñiga’s family after her mother’s
death was leaked, signaling that nearly a decade after her mother’s
high-profile killing, her family was still at risk.
Screenshots of a document spread on social media, with details such as
the make, model, plate number, and vehicle identification number of the
car her grandmother traveled in and where it was registered.
The Honduran Special Prosecutor’s Office acknowledged the leak was an
“extremely serious” breach of confidentiality, telling CNN an
investigation into the leak was underway, and that the protection
measures for Zúñiga and her family needed to be adapted and
strengthened.
“Feeling like the target of an attack isn’t easy,” Zúñiga says.
“It’s not that I haven’t lived through it before, but of course
I’m a bit concerned about what it might mean,” she says of the
leak.
Just days before the information leak, doctored photos of Zúñiga’s
face with bruises and bloodstains circulated on social media –
recalling the time when Zúñiga says touched-up images of her mother
with devil horns spread on social media in what COPINH called a smear
campaign aimed at discrediting the group’s work.
Yet Zúñiga isn’t deterred. She sees her fight for indigenous
people’s right to their land as a cause bigger than herself or her
family, and one that she feels her mother is still helping her with.
“Her spirit accompanies and protects me,” Zúñiga says. “I know
she’s with me.”
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