Berta Caceres Wiki
Berta Caceres Biography
Who is Berta Caceres?
David Castillo, a former top business executive convicted for his role in the murder of Honduran indigenous leader Berta Cáceres, has been sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison by a Honduran court.
Castillo, a US-trained former Honduran army intelligence officer and business executive, was the president of Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima (DESA), which was building the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam on Lenca indigenous territory in northwestern Honduras.
Cáceres, as president of the Council of Organized Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (COPINH), had been the most visible and vocal member of the resistance to the construction of the dam.
But after years of threats, she was murdered by a hit squad at her home in the town of La Esperanza on March 2, 2016.
Castillo was accused by Honduran prosecutors of being one of the main links in a complex chain of command that organized and directed the death squad, which included former and active-duty members of the Honduran armed forces, as well as hit men or hired killers.
A Honduran court found Castillo guilty of being a co-collaborator in her murder on July 5 last year. In December 2019, seven people, including another DESA executive, were jailed for between 30 and 50 years for their role in Cáceres’ murder.
Castillo’s sentencing is the culmination of a six-year effort for justice in what was one of the most high-profile murders to rock the Central American country. But many Hondurans allege that the complicity in the murder is greater and that the entire network that killed Cáceres is still at large.
“The sentence reaffirms the importance of the need to search for the intellectual authors of the murder,” “Bertita” Zúñiga Cáceres, daughter of the murdered environmentalist and current head of COPINH, told Al Jazeera. “But 22 years is nothing compared to the loss of a great companion, my mother.”
