By Gwyneth K. Shaw
When Honduran Indigenous leader and human rights defender Berta Cáceres was assassinated in 2016, the killing sent shockwaves through human rights and environmental movements around the world. Cáceres had been leading opposition to the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam, a major development project that threatened Lenca territory and water sources in Western Honduras.
Nearly a decade later, an international panel has uncovered new information about how her murder was planned, financed, and enabled.
Berkeley Law Clinical Professor and Human Rights Clinic Director Roxanna Altholz ’99 was one-third of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), a special investigatory panel created to examine the killing and broader structures behind it. When she accepted the appointment, she knew from the outset that the work would be grueling — and risky, given the powerful corporate, banking, and government forces suspected to be involved.
“The GIEI’s investigation reconstructed how the plan to kill Berta was orchestrated by corporate and state actors and enabled in part by an international financing structure,” Altholz explains. “In just 11 months, a small, independent team found what authorities didn’t uncover in 10 years: the truth about who planned and financed Berta’s murder.”
The panel found that a criminal network diverted 67% of the more than $18.5 million provided by development banks for the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project — the very dam Cáceres was trying to stop — to fund illegal surveillance operations and other illegal activities, including the activist’s murder. The report traces funds disbursed by international banks through corporate accounts offshore and in Honduras to three checks signed by the company’s president, cashed by employees, and used to pay the hitmen.
The investigators implicate the powerful Honduran family that managed the dam project and say shell companies helped mask the illegal payments. The clinic created a website collecting the report, additional information, and media coverage of the report.
Altholz, who worked with clinic Supervising Attorney Helen Kerwin and multiple students on the investigation, says the law school’s support — particularly the backing of Dean Erwin Chemerinsky — made it possible for her to participate and has been crucial in ways that are both practical and deeply meaningful.
For example, the investigators relied heavily on the law school’s IT team to develop the capacity to securely compile and analyze a massive amount of information. The clinical students’ “commitment, judgment, and stamina” made the report achievable, Altholz adds.
“At a deeper level, the clinic exists because the institution believes this work matters and belongs in legal education,” she says. “The law school’s sustained commitment to clinical teaching gave us the support to take on an ambitious project and the confidence to tell the truth we found.”
Worldwide implications
The GIEI found that Cáceres’ assassination was not an isolated crime but a coordinated operation involving gunmen, military-trained intermediaries, corporate personnel and directors, and networks of support within the Honduran government.
As part of her work, Altholz and the team traveled to Holland, Honduras, and New York City multiple times, connecting the dots between the companies, the banks moving the money, and the Honduran government.
Partial truth, Altholz says, can be its own form of injustice.
“Getting to the bottom of the murder is of global significance because Berta’s leadership was part of the global effort to protect land, water, and biodiversity in a climate emergency,” Altholz says. “Truth is a first step toward dismantling the structures responsible for violence and impunity, and toward what communities have demanded all along: accountability, reparations, and guarantees of non-repetition.”
A critical part of the team’s report was a set of recommendations for reparations to the communities that bore the harms of the dam project and the killing, Altholz says — an element that was particularly important to her.
“Standing up for the rule of law right now isn’t enough if what we’re really doing is hoping to return to a ‘normal’ that has meant exclusion, exploitation, and impunity for many,” she says. “This moment calls on us to reimagine, to reform, and even to transform the law so it offers stronger protections, deeper commitments to justice, and greater accountability.”
The GIEI was established in February 2024 through an agreement between the Honduran government, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras and their legal representatives, the Center for Justice and International Law. Altholz had two colleagues on the panel: Ricardo Aníbal Guzmán Loyo, an experienced criminal prosecutor and former Guatemalan government official, and Pedro Martín Biscay, an Argentinian lawyer and an expert in financial investigations.
Behind all three was the support of Kerwin and 2L clinic students Alejandra de Maar, Kevin De Leon, and Sam Klein-Markman. They took the lead on the reparations piece of the report, documenting collective harms and crafting recommendations that go beyond economic payments to ensure a similar situation never happens again.
“This investigation was ambitious and the outcome reflects the hard work of experts in financial investigation, criminology, psychology, data analysis, and human rights, among other fields,” Kerwin says. “For students, the breadth of the investigation represented a challenge, but also an opportunity to learn from different areas of expertise, and to understand the unique contribution of human rights law and close work with victims of human rights violations to this kind of project.”
An unparalleled student experience
The clinic is the most impactful thing de Maar says she’s done so far in law school, largely thanks to Altholz and Kerwin. Working with them has helped her see the room — and need — for passion and creativity in the legal field.
One of the most useful things de Maar has learned is that a legal career doesn’t have to be linear, nor be traditional law firm work. She is interested in international environmental law, and in particular the intersection of human rights and environmental law. Her conversations with Altholz and Kerwin, she says, “opened my eyes to the many opportunities there are to do exactly the kind of work that made me interested in a legal career.”
Working on the GIEI team was the peak of an amazing clinical experience, de Maar says.
“I still remember where I was when I learned about the death of Berta Cáceres in 2016. Her murder was a huge loss to environmental defenders, Indigenous communities, and women’s rights activists worldwide,” she says. “It was an honor to be part of the team working towards justice for her and her community. It was especially meaningful to work on the final report and write sections of it myself.”
De Leon found the experience similarly transformative, saying his experience on the GIEI team “taught me something about the kind of lawyer I want to be.”
“More than anything, I walked away feeling the privilege of even being allowed to participate in this work,” he says. “I am someone who gets to study law in safety. The people whose experiences I was reading about do not get to take breaks from this reality. They do not get to put their fear on hold. The fact that I was trusted to help tell these stories, and to support a process that may someday contribute to some form of accountability or recognition, was not something I took for granted.”
He’s grateful to have had the experience so early in his legal career.
“It reminded me to slow down and to recognize that the emotional weight of these stories is not something to ignore. It is part of the work,” De Leon says. “And carrying that weight responsibly is what will make me a better advocate.”
Klein-Markman says Altholz’s deep familiarity with the Cáceres case helped the clinic team understand the impact and stakes of the GIEI investigation and its findings.
“Learning this history was incredibly motivating as we worked on our more focused legal project,” he says. “At one point, when our supervisors told us GIEI was able to trace the payments that went to Berta’s killers, Professor Altholz made sure to emphasize that this was an unusual moment in a human rights case, and we shouldn’t get the idea that practicing human rights law is always this dramatic.
“That said, being involved in this project as the GIEI was making these findings gives us a powerful experience of a human rights investigation making an impact.”
After so many years, unveiling the truth about Cáceres’ murder “represents hope and promise,” Altholz says. Professionally, the report is heartening proof that even a decade after a killing, it’s still possible to advance truth in concrete ways.
Personally, she adds, it feels like fulfilling a yearslong vow.
“I never met Berta Cáceres. But I was profoundly moved by her vision and her moral clarity,” Altholz says. “Like many working in human rights in Latin America, I could not accept that the story would stop at the gunmen while the masterminds and networks behind the crime stayed protected.”
Working with the clinic, de Maar says, helped her fight the urge to lose faith in the international system and institutions at home.
“The clinic was a balm to that hopelessness for me,” she says. “More than that, the clinic gave me the opportunity to do something with my frustration.
“Lawyers have a lot of power. If you can channel your dissatisfaction with the world into your work, there are so many opportunities to make positive change.”