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Members of the Indigenous movement of murdered Honduran environmental leader Berta Caceres have warned that there are death squads operating in the territories that the slain activist long fought to defend that are akin to the brutal Cold War-era and CIA-trained secret army unit in Honduras known as Battalion 316.
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“We believe that what was the 316 in the 1980s has moved into our territories,” Tomas Gomez, leader of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Movements of Honduras, or COPINH, told the publication Pasos de Animal Grande on Monday.
He added that that the apparent death squads operate with a hit list that was formerly topped by Berta Caceres in the years leading up to her murder.
Gomez recently told teleSUR that the harassment and threats against COPINH and the Lenca community in Rio Blanco, the site of the contested Agua Zarca dam that Caceres resisted, have increased since she was assassinated on March 3.
The forms of intimidation have also intensified with new strategies to pressure local residents to give up resistance to Agua Zarca, a project by the private Honduran energy company Desarrollos Energeticos SA, better known as DESA.
“One of them (the intimidation tactics) is burning houses,” Gomez told Pasos de Animal Grande. “Recently we have received calls in the face of this threat and the people are worried about this action by DESA employees.”
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Other attacks on the Lenca people have included the murder of COPINH member Nelson Garcia less than two weeks after gunmen shot Caceres dead in her home, attacks on peaceful protesters, and death threats. Gomez has also been targeted with intimidation – including shots being fired outside of his home in the night – weeks after Caceres was gunned down.
The long-standing and intensifying campaign to eliminate opposition to Agua Zarca and neutralize COPINH recalls Cold War-era counterinsurgency strategies in the region that targeted political dissidents with forced disappearances and death.
Prominent Honduran human rights defender Bertha Oliva has also likened the conditions surrounding Caceres’ assassination to the 1980s death squads and Battalion 316, according to The Intercept.
According to the Honduran human rights organization COFADEH, formed in the 1980’s by Oliva and other family members of the disappeared, Battalion 316 was responsible over for 180 forced disappearances between 1980 and 1988, while they murdered and tortured many more.
Targeted assassinations of Indigenous and campesino leaders, journalists, human rights defenders, and other political activists have spiked once again in the wake of the 2009 U.S.-backed military coup against President Manuel Zelaya. In the immediate aftermath of the coup, Zelaya told Democracy Now! that Battalion 316 was “already operating" in Honduras under a different name and using “torture to create fear.”
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Caceres is one of many Honduran leaders to be killed since the 2009 coup as a result of their resistance to the country’s neoliberal policies, extractive model, and dismal human rights situation. But the fact that her international recognition did not dissuade her killers has sent a chilling message of just how unscrupulous are the political and economic powers employing death squads in the Central American country.
COPINH has called for an international day of action at Honduran embassies around the world on June 15 to demand justice for Caceres and cancellation of the Agua Zarca project to “put a stop to death, impunity, and injustice” in Honduras.
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