THE CASH BEFORE THE KILLING

[Judi Lynn]

FILE - In this June 15, 2016, file photo, a picture of Berta Caceres sits on an altar in her honor during a demonstration outside Honduras' embassy in Mexico City. Activists demanded justice after the murder of Caceres, a Lenca Indian activist who won the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for her role in fighting a dam project. She was shot dead by two men on March 3. Global Witness said Tuesday, July 24, 2018 that at least 207 people who were protecting land and resources from business interests were slain last year. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

Newly Released Documents Reveal International Funding Trail Preceding the Murder of Berta Cáceres

Jared OlsonJared Olson
June 23 2022, 4:00 a.m.

TWO DAYS BEFORE Berta Cáceres was killed in Honduras, a bank in the Netherlands released just over $1.7 million to a concrete company through an offshore account.

Two years earlier, the Dutch-state-owned bank FMO had signed on to finance the controversial Honduran Agua Zarca dam project. Led by a company called Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima, or DESA, the dam was the joint effort of David Castillo and Daniel Atala Midence, the company’s respective CEO and CFO. Cáceres, a renowned environmental activist and leader in the Indigenous Lenca community, was the driving force behind the protests against it.

A trove of Dutch and U.S. legal and financial documents shared with The Intercept reveal, for the first time, the flow of international funding in the days leading up to March 2, 2016, when a hit squad broke into Cáceres’s house and killed her. The bank provided the documents to two Dutch human rights lawyers, Wout Albers and Ron Rosenhart Rodriguez, who have spent the past two years representing Cáceres’s family and COPINH, the organization she co-founded, in a civil lawsuit that seeks to hold FMO accountable for its role in the Agua Zarca project. (The suit was first filed in the Netherlands in 2018; Albers and Rosenhart came on in 2020.) On June 28, the family and the lawyers filed a petition with Dutch prosecutors seeking a criminal probe of FMO.

In at least four instances, according to the records, the bank released funding to a company affiliated with Castillo and Atala that did not match the stated payee, routing the money through an offshore account with Deutsche Bank in New York City.

. . .

Before Castillo, seven out of the eight men tried for carrying out the hit were convicted of murder in 2018 and later sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison. But more than six years after Cáceres’s death, family members and human rights workers allege that the killing’s most powerful authors are still at large.

More:
https://theintercept.com/2022/06/23/honduras-berta-caceres-murder-money-trail

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Berta's daughters, and her mother