Honduran Prosecutors Withhold Evidence in Berta Cceres Murder Case

Honduran Prosecutors Withhold Evidence in Berta Cáceres Murder Case



Honduran activist Berta Cáceres addresses thousands of protesters in the Honduran capital following the country's 2009 coup d'état.
SANDRA CUFFE

BY
Sandra Cuffe Truthout
PUBLISHED
August 21, 2018

The trial of eight men charged with the murder of Honduran activist Berta Cáceres is right around the corner, but prosecutors may be heading to trial without important evidence. More than two dozen electronic devices seized in related raids as far back as 2016 were never subjected to analysis, according to an official response to Cáceres’s relatives from the Office of the Prosecutor for Crimes Against Life, a document that has not yet been made public.

Cáceres’s daughter Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres does not believe it was an oversight or lack of professionalism. Now serving as the general coordinator of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), the organization her mother co-founded and led at the time of her murder, Zúñiga Cáceres views the revelations about the gaps in evidence as part of a strategy.

“It’s a form of denial, of refusing to determine what is really behind the murder,” she told Truthout.

Berta Cáceres was shot to death on March 2, 2016, in her home in La Esperanza, a town in western Honduras. Her longtime friend and colleague, Mexican activist Gustavo Castro, was wounded during the attack. As a prominent Indigenous and social movement leader, Cáceres had been receiving death threats related to her involvement with the COPINH-affiliated community struggle against the proposed Agua Zarca hydroeletric dam, currently on hold, and against Desarrollos Energéticos, S.A. (DESA), the company behind it.



“I will return, and I will be millions,” reads a flag with Berta Cáceres’s image outside the Siguatepeque courthouse during an April court case related to the authorization of the Agua Zarca dam.
SANDRA CUFFE

More:
https://truthout.org/articles/honduran-prosecutors-withhold-evidence-in-berta-caceres-murder-case/