- New York 03/19/2016 by Mitchel Cohen (WBAI News)

Earlier this month, 45 year old environmentalist, Berta Cáceres was assassinated in Honduras. She was a Lenca Indian, a member of the Indian Council of People's Organizations of Honduras who fought to recover and protect native land, one of 400,000 Lencas in Honduras and neighboring El Salvador.

Cáceres was the winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for her role in fighting a dam project on a river the Lencas consider sacred.  Her efforts along with the Lenca community successfully kept construction equipment out of the proposed dam site. But Cáceres said her group was harassed and intimidated. She had long complained of death threats from police, the army and landowners’ groups.

On March 3rd she was murdered. Then on March 15th one of her colleagues, Nelson Garcia, was shot to death. He was gunned down after he returned home from helping people who were evicted move their belonging from where they were squatting, near Tegucigalpa.  

WBAI's Mitchel Cohen has more.