Who Killed Berta Cceres: Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defenders Battle for the Planet

(Hardback)

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The very first time Honduran environmental activist Berta Cceres met the writer Nina Lakhani, Cceres 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, Cceres won the Goldman Prize, the worlds most prestigous environmental award, for her leadership of indigenous organisations against illegal logging and the construction of four giant dams. The next year she was murdered. Lakhani tracked Cceress remarkable career in the face of years of threatstwo fellow environmental campaigners were killed before herand the journalist also endured threats and harassment herself. She was the only foreign journalist to attend the 2018 trial of Cceress killers, where security officials of the dam builders were found guilty of orchestrating her murder. Many questions about who ordered the killing remain. Drawing on years of familiarity with Cceres, her family, and her movement, as well as interviews with company and government officials, Lakhani paints an intimate portrait of a remarkable woman as well as a state beholden to both corporate control and US power.

Reviews

Lakhani's book meticulously unpicks a Gordian knot of corruption, impunity, and violence, to show how the struggle against the dam is deeply-rooted in historical power dynamics in Honduras. -- Julia Zulver * openDemocracy *
Nina Lakhani is a brave reporter. She had to be. Since the coup in Honduras, 83 journalists have been killed; 21 were thrown in prison during the period when Lakhani was writing her book. She poses the question "would we ever know who killed Berta Cceres" and sets out to answer it. -- John Perry * Council on Hemispheric Affairs *
Who Killed Berta Cceres offers the inside track on a case that is not only emblematic of the struggle for rights and representation in Honduras, but of the global battle for rights and the environment in the face of corrupt governments and irresponsible business. -- Ben Leather * Global Witness *
Without a doubt, the most comprehensive account of the events which led up to and followed Cceres murder... It lays bare the facts of the Berta Cceres case and demands they are faced. In the long struggle against colonial extraction and systematic violence, Who Killed Berta Cceres points to the rough road ahead. -- Harry Holmes * Bright Green *
A powerful indictment of the Honduran justice system and peeling back the mask on how power operates in the country. -- Alice Stevens * Dublin Review of Books *
Important reporting not just on Cceres but on the current state of Honduras, a cosseted US ally presided over by a kleptocratic elite, where nearly a third of the population lives on less than $3 a day. -- Jennie Erin Smith * Times Literary Supplement *

Author Bio

Nina Lakhani reports on Central America for the Guardian, BBC, Al Jazeera, Global Post, the Daily Beast, and elsewhere. She previously worked for the Independent. She is based Mexico City.