Two years after the murder of Honduran green and indigenous rights campaigner Berta Caceres, two dozen Latin American and Caribbean nations have signed on to a pact that sets legal protections for land defenders.

The legally-biding environmental rights treaty (.pdf link) requires signatory nations to "guarantee a safe and enabling environment for persons, groups and organisations that promote and defend human rights in environmental matters".

Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solis says the pact is a "turning point" in the fight against poverty, inequality, and hate.  He added, "It is also crucial for the very survival of our species," because, "The right to a healthy environment is a human right."

In 2017, almost 200 nature protectors were killed across the world, 60 percent of them in Latin America.

Berta Caceres was a prominent environmental activist in Honduran who was gunned down in her own home in 2016 over her opposition to a hydro-electric dam project that would have destroyed a valley important to her Lenca indigenous group.  Her work earned her the Goldman Environmental prize, which brought her work to international prominence. 

Two days before nations signed the new pact, Honduran authorities arrested a former military intelligence officer who headed the dam project for masterminding Caceres's killing.