Honduras Police Arrest Executive in Killing of Berta Cáceres, Indigenous Activist
By THE NEW YORK TIMESMARCH 3, 2018
The Honduran police have arrested a high-ranking executive with a hydroelectric company in connection with the 2016 killing
of an activist who led a decade-long fight against a dam project, saying that he had helped to plan the crime.
The executive, Roberto David Castillo Mejia, was executive president of the Honduran company
that is building the dam, Desarrollos Energéticos S.A., or Desa, at the time the activist, Berta Cáceres, was shot and killed.
One of the suspects arrested, Sergio Rodríguez Orellana, was a manager for social
and environmental issues for Desa, and a second, Douglas Geovanny Bustillo, had worked in the past for a security company hired by the dam project.
It accused the authorities of "unjust detention" resulting from "international pressure and campaigns by diverse NGOs to discredit the company." Desa also questioned the fact
that the arrest came two years to the day after Ms. Cáceres’s killing, according to Reuters.
The report, based on an outside review conducted at the request of Copinh and the slain woman’s family, suggested
that the dam company’s leadership had ordered her assassination and concluded that it was "not an isolated incident." A Mexican activist, Gustavo Castro Soto, was wounded in the attack that killed Ms. Cáceres.
Members of Copinh, an activist group that Ms. Cáceres founded, gathered on Friday in front of prosecutors’ offices in Tegucigalpa,
the capital, to demand the arrest of more prominent local businessmen who they accuse of being connected to her killing.