An activist’s murder rocked Honduras. Now her daughter is in the hot seat

By Hira Humayun, Karen Esquivel, CNN

(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 hydropower station 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 Global Witness 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 violent attacks.

“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 not an isolated incident, but the result of a larger plot. To date, eight people have been sentenced in connection with her death, including former senior employees 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 Roberto David Castillo Mejía, who was sentenced to over 22 years, and DESA’s former environmental manager Sergio Rodríguez, 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 2009 coup that ousted then-president José Manuel Zelaya.

Just days after Cáceres’ death, COPINH member Nelson García was fatally shot. In January 2023, Aly Magdaleno Domínguez Ramos and Jairo Bonilla Ayala, outspoken activists against an iron ore mine, were found dead in northern Honduras. And last year, Juan López, 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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CNN’s Isa Cardona contributed to this report.