Despite pressure from protesters and the world community, the Honduran government refuses to allow an independent, international investigation into the murder of the activist Berta Cáceres.

When the activist Berta Cáceres was assassinated in Honduras, in March, the news was devastating but not exactly surprising. Honduras has one of the world’s highest murder rates, and social activists are frequently targets—more than a hundred have been killed in the country since 2010. Cáceres, though, was someone with a significant international reputation. Ever since she won the Goldman Prize, a high-profile environmental award, in 2015, many had assumed that her prominence gave her a degree of protection. The fact that it didn’t—that her killers didn’t care about any potential fallout from her murder—was a reminder of the staggering impunity afforded to criminals in a country where ninety-eight per cent of crimes go unsolved. In the five months since Cáceres’s murder, two more members of the group that she led, the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), have been killed.

The relentlessness of the killings in Honduras has raised questions about how deeply the Honduran state is involved in, and responsible for, the violence. For U.S. policymakers, the death toll has also spurred a debate about whether the U.S. should cut off military aid to the regime of President Juan Orlando Hernández. Since 2009, when a military coup brought the key players in Honduras’s right-wing government to power, the U.S. has given the country two hundred million dollars in police and military aid. The money was intended to help Honduran officials combat organized crime, which—it was hoped—would lower the number of Honduran migrants heading to the United States to escape violence. But, instead, the money has served to prop up a government that has increasingly used state security forces to repress dissent.

In May, when the Honduran government arrested five men suspected of committing Cáceres’s murder, questions about the state’s involvement only became more pointed. Two of the alleged culprits worked for a development company called Desarrollos Energéticos S.A., popularly known as DESA, which is one of several companies currently building hydroelectric dams across Honduras. These projects, while supported at the highest levels of the Honduran government, have faced fierce resistance from residents. At the time of her death, Cáceres was working on behalf of an indigenous community known as the Lenca, which is fighting a DESA dam in the western part of the country. (DESA has professed “surprise” at the arrest of its employees, and has said it trusted “that all employees’ actions are within the law.”) Two of the other three men arrested for her murder were with the Honduran Army—one was an active major, the other a retired captain. Although these four men were accused of carrying out the assassination, many suspect that they were acting under orders. “It begs credulity that these individuals acted on their own,” Tim Rieser, a longtime foreign-policy aide to Senator Patrick Leahy, told me recently.

So who gave the order to kill Cáceres? In June, a report in the Guardian suggested further ties between Cáceres’s death and the military. The newspaper spoke to a recent deserter from the Honduran Army, a twenty-year-old former sergeant who had fled the country rather than comply with what he said was an order to kill activists. According to him, a hit list had been distributed to two élite units of the Honduran armed forces, each containing the names and photographs of dozens of activists targeted for execution. The Honduran government has denied the existence of these lists, but the soldier told the Guardian that he was “100% certain that Berta Cáceres was killed by the army.” One of the units the soldier claimed had received the hit list was a military-police hybrid force known as FUSINA, which has received training from the U.S. Marine Corps and the F.B.I.

Cáceres, who spent the last three years of her life in and out of hiding, said repeatedly that the military was after her. In 2013, she told Al Jazeera, “The army has an assassination list of 18 wanted human rights fighters with my name at the top.” In the months before her death, she reported dozens of threats to state authorities. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (I.A.C.H.R.) had urged the Honduran government to take “precautionary measures” for her security. The danger she was in was no secret.

Earlier this summer, as allegations swirled about who was behind Cáceres’s murder, I spoke with Maria Luisa Borjas, the former inspector general of the Honduran National Police. Borjas spent twenty-six years working in Honduran law enforcement, and was forced out of her post in 2003, after investigating a number of police officers suspected of running death squads. She has been on the receiving end of death threats herself, and when we spoke she told me she was certain her phone was tapped.

“Berta Cáceres was a victim of the government in association with a private company,” she told me. “In this case, military officers, the material authors of the murder, were used to eliminate the obstacle that Berta Cáceres posed to the company DESA.” The Honduran government has denied any involvement in Cáceres’s murder, and pledged a thoroughgoing investigation. But Borjas told me that it has become standard practice for the police and military to be involved in the “repression and killing” of opposition leaders, union organizers, and activists. “The victims tend to be people from diverse social and economic strata. The principal characteristic they have in common is that they represent a threat or an obstacle to governmental or business interests,” she said.

Members of the Honduran government aren’t simply friendly to the development agenda of companies like DESA. DESA’s main backers were key supporters of the 2009 coup, and in its aftermath the government awarded the company its dam contract as part of a law that granted dozens of similar concessions to other development companies throughout the country. Several national politicians have financial stakes in some of these companies.

This might be one reason the government has resisted repeated calls by the U.S., Cáceres’s family, and regional human-rights bodies to allow for an independent, international investigation into Cáceres’s murder. According to Tim Rieser, the government’s intractability will be an “obstacle” to future aid. The arrests in May did little to assuage his concerns. “It is very unlikely that anyone would have been arrested in her case without international pressure,” Rieser told me.

Last month, a group of Democratic congressmen introduced the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act. In a Guardian op-ed laying out their rationale, the bill’s sponsors said, “As long as the United States funds Honduran security forces without demanding justice for those threatened, tortured, and killed, we have blood on our hands. It’s time to suspend all police and military aid to Honduras.” This wasn’t the first time that members of Congress expressed concern about supporting Honduras’s newly militarized and expanded police force. Last summer, months before Cáceres’s death, twenty-one congressmen wrote a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry to register their unease over complaints of human-rights violations committed by government forces that the U.S. was helping to fund. The U.S. allocated about eighteen million dollars in aid to the Honduran police and military in 2015; Honduras is also included in the Alliance for Prosperity, a seven-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar aid package for the northern triangle of Central America.

Last week, the journalist Sonia Nazario wrote an Op-Ed in the Times criticizing American efforts to cut off aid money. She pointed to a number of programs in Honduras that have benefitted from aid, and that have had an undeniable impact at a local level, offering relief to communities beleaguered by gang violence and police corruption. But her arguments, which center on non-military aid, didn’t address the government’s systematic abuses. “There’s a great deal of evidence that the U.S. is funding violence creation by the government on a grand scale,” Dana Frank, a Honduras expert at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told me. “Members of the Honduran élite and the government officials they work with know quite well that the corrupt criminal-justice system largely guarantees them impunity, and they continue to test what they can get away with, including widespread violence by state security forces. They have a long history of all kinds of astonishingly open criminal behavior.”

The Berta Cáceres bill hasn’t generated enough support in Congress to have a real chance of becoming law. But it may not matter: the State Department has to be able to certify that the governments receiving American aid are making progress on issues like human rights and corruption. If they’re not, the outgoing aid can be frozen. Rieser told me that, for the moment, the State Department hasn’t approved the release of the next tranche of aid money. Senator Leahy, meanwhile, has threatened to oppose further aid unless the Honduran government agrees to launch an independent investigation into Cáceres’s death. The Honduran government has still not responded to these stirrings in the U.S., but it will need to. Berta Cáceres, as ever, looms large.