5/16/2023 0 Comments Pemsa hondurasThey reveal an important $1.2 million USD transfer made by Daniel Atala Medince on behalf of Concretos del Sur (CONCASA) to Potencia y Energía de Mesoamérica S.A (PEMSA), a company registered in Panama and controlled by Castillo. On the second day of hearings, April 7, during a phase of the trial when new evidence can be proposed, the family’s lawyers presented bank documents seized in a search of the DESA offices after the murder. In the press conference days before the trial, she assured that Castillo had generated “a pattern of permanent persecution against COPINH and particularly against Berta Cáceres, a woman of territorial resistance.”Īlthough Castillo was the president of DESA at the time of the assassination, the private prosecution argues that the communications evidence shows that he played a subordinate role to the rest of the company’s executives, members of the Atala Zablahs, in planning and executing the assassination plan. Zúniga is Berta Cáceres’ second daughter who now heads the Civic Council of Indigenous and Popular Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), a movement co-founded 28 years ago by her mother to fight for better living conditions for women and Indigenous communities and to protect the cultural and territorial rights of the Lenca people. Bustillo in turn coordinated with active military officer Mariano Díaz (also convicted in 2018), to hire the hitmen responsible for carrying out the assassination. Evidence points to years of harassment, explicit racism and violence against Cáceres and COPINH, but shows how this intensified in the months leading up to the murder. Much of this evidence will be used again in the trial against Castillo, and demonstrates how he coordinated with convicted murderer and former DESA security manager Douglas Bustillo to monitor and control Cáceres’ movements. The evidence collected by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and used in the first trial includes cell phone extractions, information from telecommunications antennas and wiretaps. The attorneys representing Cáceres’ family allege that Castillo acted as an intermediary, coordinating with the already convicted assassins, and in particular with the former head of security Douglas Bustillo, in addition to unindicted senior company executives to kill Cáceres and stop the organized resistance to the “Agua Zarca” hydroelectric project on the Gualcarque River in the ancestral Lenca territory. In 2018, seven men were convicted of Cáceres’ murder, including an active military officer, the former head of security for DESA and the socio-environmental manager of the company, along with four hitmen. “He’s a key piece between the material perpetrators and the intellectual authors who continue in impunity,” said Bertha Zúniga in a virtual press conference on March 30. Castillo is being tried for the murder of Indigenous Lenca defender and organizer Berta Cáceres five years ago, but the daughter of the Lenca Indigenous activist warns that the political and economic actors behind the assassination are still protected by a criminal structure. On April 6, a Honduran court opened the trial of Castillo, a former military intelligence officer and executive of the hydroelectric company commonly known as DESA. Bertha Zúniga, daughter of Berta Cáceres, does not underestimate the importance of what may be revealed in the trial against Roberto David Castillo Mejía, Director of the Desarrollos Energéticos SA (DESA), a hydroelectric company backed by the millionaire Atala Zablah family, and how this may point to the masterminds behind her mother’s murder.
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