Environmental Human Rights: News & Updates

The killing of Indigenous environmental defender Berta Cáceres on March 2, 2016 was not unique.  More than 1,000 people were killed for political reasons during the 12 years of the narco-dictatorship. The people of Honduras know that when communities organize in defense of their territories, they too often face militarization, repression, criminalization, and violence. But Berta’s assassination does remain as one of the most visible symbols of the risks borne by land and environmental defenders.  The behind-the-scenes plotting of her brutal assassination is slightly complicated but the  reasons very straight forward.  The narco-dictatorship that “opened up Honduras for business” tried to kill the organized resistance to their mega-projects (like the privatization of the Gualcarque River for foreign investors' hydro-electric project) that illegally dispossess Indigenous and campesino communities of land, water, and self-determination. 

How can we honor Berta?

For one, we can affirm the demand of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organization of Honduras (COPINH) that the intellectual authors of the assassination be brought to justice. Moreover, we can do what Berta would do. Live, organize, educate, work and struggle together. Reach out and support the too many victims of this violent, unjust and unequal global human order. Name, denounce and hold accountable the responsible actors—countries,  companies, wealthy elites, banks, investors and more. Organize, educate, work and struggle against all injustice, inequality and discrimination. Live with the knowledge that another world is indeed necessary and act as though we believe it is indeed possible.

To support IRTF’s accompaniment work with human rights and environmental defenders in Honduras, click here.

This Equal exchange article examines how Fair Trade profits are reinvested into bio-fertilizers to tackle disease and climate change conditions on co-op run farms in peru.

This article by Consortium News examines the Zones for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDEs) in Honduras and how tech billionaires like Peter Thiel profit of neocolonialist enclaves, allowed to have their own government, police force, courts, laws and any taxes collected, while indigenous people that have been dependent on that very land are subjected to exploitation, persecution and displacement.  

This aricle published in The Guardian gives insight on what consequences the pardoning of convicted drug smuggler and former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez might have on enviromental defenders in Honduras.  Impunity for violent crimes committed against environmental defenders gives a green light to would-be assassins. In February 2025, an environmental defender in the central department of Comayagua, Juan Bautista, and his son were ambushed and killed, with their bodies dismembered and discarded in a canyon. These were just two of at least 155 murders of land and environmental defenders in Honduras documented by Global Witness between 2012 and 2024, the vast majority unresolved.

In response to Trump's pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, one environmental defender noted: “There is a sense that the brakes are off again. People feel exposed.”

This article by InSight Crime reviews the conspiratorial nature of the Berta Cáceres murder ten years ago. In February 2025, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights announced the creation of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes – GIEI) responsible for producing this report. ary 2025 The report’s investigators tied one deposit in the amount of $2.6 million that development banks made to the account of CONCASA (a shell company) in December 2015 directly to Cáceres’ murderers.

Protests rarely incite policy or cultural changes overnight. Often, their rates of impact are much more gradual. For that reason, looking at them through a historical lens – when movements can be digested in terms of years, or even decades – is a helpful way to appreciate the tangible effect of taking to the streets.