A deeply affecting-and infuriating-portrait of the life and death
of a courageous indigenous leader
The first time Honduran indigenous leader Berta Cáceres met the
journalist Nina Lakhani, Cáceres said, 'The army has an
assassination list with my name at the top. I want to live, but in
this country there is total impunity. When they want to kill me, they
will do it.' In 2015, Cáceres won the Goldman Prize, the world's
most prestigious environmental award, for leading a campaign to stop
construction of an internationally funded hydroelectric dam on a
river sacred to her Lenca people. Less than a year later she was
dead.
Lakhani tracked Cáceres remarkable career, in which the defender
doggedly pursued her work in the face of years of threats and while
friends and colleagues in Honduras were exiled and killed defending
basic rights. Lakhani herself endured intimidation and harassment as
she investigated the murder. She was the only foreign journalist to
attend the 2018 trial of Cáceres's killers, where state security
officials, employees of the dam company and hired hitmen were found
guilty of murder. Many questions about who ordered and paid for the
killing remain unanswered.
Drawing on more than a hundred interviews, confidential legal
filings, and corporate documents unearthed after years of reporting
in Honduras, Lakhani paints an intimate portrait of an extraordinary
woman in a state beholden to corporate powers, organised crime, and
the United States.