After the hearing on the human rights situation in Bajo Aguán held at the IACHR on April 5, 2016 , a vigil was held at the gates of the OAS by Berta Caceres , killed on March 3, 2016 in Honduras. Photo by Flickr user Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos. CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 This post by Victoria Molina was originally published on Ensia.com, a magazine that highlights international environmental solutions in action, and is republished here as part of a content-sharing agreement. When Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres was gunned down in her home last spring the international community and even activists in the notoriously violent country were shocked. Her death followed threats related to her support for indigenous people fighting the construction of the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam along the Gualcarque River. A few days after her death, Nelson García, another leader of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (known as COPINH), which Cáceres founded in 1993 to advocate for the native Lenca peoples’ rights, was also murdered. Have these recent deaths made a difference in indigenous efforts to protect the environment? Though change is slow, there is some indication that they are not going unheeded. “Berta had such an amazing support network and she had done so much great work in reaching out to other organizations both domestically and internationally that there’s this enormous outrage when she was assassinated,” says Danielle DeLuca, project manager for the US-based nonprofit Cultural Survival, which advocates for indigenous groups around the world. Honduras has one of the highest homicide rates in the world, and it is notoriously unsafe for environmental activists. According to the not-for-profit justice organization Global Witness, at least 109 people were killed in the country between 2010 and 2015 for taking stands against dams, mining, logging or agricultural projects. Scholars and activists blame a combination of organized crime and a deficient judicial system that has led to corruption — all born of a history of poverty, inequality, political instability and the protection of corporate interests over indigenous rights. Rosana Resende, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Florida, says the economic culture of entrepreneurialism and lack of restrictions that gained momentum in Latin America in the 1980s set the framework for increased privatization of global resources. Also during the 1980s, much of Latin America was crippled by a debt crisis. The International Monetary Fund and other institutions implemented a number of policies, known as the Washington Consensus, to reform the region’s economy. These policies privatized government industries, opening them up to foreign direct investment and liberalizing trade. Transnational companies entered indigenous territories historically cared for by local people to extract resources. “It was the privatizing and foreign direct investment pieces that really led these countries to becoming vulnerable to large extractive corporations,” Resende says. Since 2009, DeLuca says, Honduras and the United States increased the call for investment into the country in response to high poverty levels. But the investment and job creation has been a double-edged sword: “Along with that investment comes often a disrespect from corporate entities for human rights and indigenous people’s rights,” she says. The Lenca began opposing the Agua Zarca Dam project in 2006; the Gualcarque is sacred to them, and they are concerned about the dam’s environmental impact on the river and its life. Cáceres organized peaceful protests to voice the community’s discontent. She helped push the largest dam builder in the world, China’s Sinohydro, to withdraw from the project. In 2015 she was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in recognition of her activism. Death threats against her increased. On March 3 of this year, her killers made good on them. This time, though, the violence has brought unprecedented backlash. Less than two weeks after Cáceres was killed, the Dutch development bank FMO suspended all activities in Honduras. Finnfund, a Finnish development finance company, suspended its payments to the Agua Zarca project a few days later. FMO sent a letter to the president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, expressing concerns and urging his administration to take immediate action to stop the violence against activists. “The right of speech for those who stand for their rights and livelihoods of people are of very high value to FMO,” the letter read. “Every individual should be able to feel safe when defending their position.