Honduras Police Arrest Executive in Killing of Berta Cáceres, Indigenous Activist<br />By THE NEW YORK TIMESMARCH 3, 2018<br />The Honduran police have arrested a high-ranking executive with a hydroelectric company in connection with the 2016 killing<br />of an activist who led a decade-long fight against a dam project, saying that he had helped to plan the crime.<br />The executive, Roberto David Castillo Mejia, was executive president of the Honduran company<br />that is building the dam, Desarrollos Energéticos S.A., or Desa, at the time the activist, Berta Cáceres, was shot and killed.<br />One of the suspects arrested, Sergio Rodríguez Orellana, was a manager for social<br />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.<br />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<br />that the arrest came two years to the day after Ms. Cáceres’s killing, according to Reuters.<br />The report, based on an outside review conducted at the request of Copinh and the slain woman’s family, suggested<br />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.<br />Members of Copinh, an activist group that Ms. Cáceres founded, gathered on Friday in front of prosecutors’ offices in Tegucigalpa,<br />the capital, to demand the arrest of more prominent local businessmen who they accuse of being connected to her killing.
