10 Years After Berta Cáceres’ Murder, Why Is Honduras Still So Dangerous for Environmental Activists?

Hello and welcome back to Drilled. I am Amy Westervelt. We have a new season coming up for you in April, and in the meantime we'll be bringing you a few. Bonus episodes. Today I'm joined by our new senior Global Climate Justice reporter, Nina Lakhani, who has special insight into the story of Bertha Cáceres.

This week marks the 10 year anniversary of Bertha's assassination. She was an indigenous leader in Honduras. And it's been proven that the dam company, building the dam, she was protesting, orchestrated a hit on her with the help of various hitmen, government officials, police, et cetera. It was a horrific ordeal for Bertha's family, for the whole movement in Honduras, and it also raised the profile of just how dangerous it was to be an environmental activist in Honduras. Unfortunately, in those 10 years since her death, it has not gotten any better, and Nina did a deep dive on what's been going on in those 10 years, what it looks like now, and what the lasting impact of Bertha's work was.

Nina also wrote an entire book on Bertha's story, it's called Who Killed Berta Cáceres? It's really, really excellent and has all of the receipts on this whole wild story. So Nina's gonna walk us through that story and what's been going on in the decade since all of that happened in this episode today. That's coming up after this quick break.

 So Nina, you wrote a whole book about Berta and I know knew of her and her work before you started working on that book as well.

What was she like as a person and a leader and what was so charismatic about her that she posed such a threat to these industries?

 Berta Cáceres was a unique leader. She had this really incredible capacity to explain local struggles in regional and global economic and political sort of terms. And she could communicate with people from all different sort of walks of life, so, she was as comfortable in a in a sort of rural community as she was talking to members of Congress in the U.S.

She wasn't a person that had any formal education. She had four kids, very young. But she was, you know, a real sponge. She, she traveled internationally. She spent a lot of time with Indigenous communities in land and environmental struggles around the world. And she was, just really, really smart.

She was a political strategist and she had this ability to unite communities, which is really unusual in a social movement. People sort of have their little fiefdoms in a way.

 with students. She she could bring together feminists with unionists, and I think this ability to bring people together, as well as her really sort of very charismatic communication style. She had this ability to convince, to really explain things to people that the elites, the political and economic elites found really threatening.

And, she could do this intellectually. She was very good with words, but she was a person that loved action. She you know loved nothing more than being at protests, organizing civil disobedience. She was a pacifist. Her organization was a non-violent grassroots organization. But I think just this ability to be comfortable and powerful. And convincing, you know, really in so many different spaces among so many different sort of movements really was a threat to the status quo in Honduras.

 Yeah. How did her work first come on your radar? You were reporting in Central America, when she was active, what did you first kind of see her do?

 I met her in 2013 during my first trip to Honduras. I went for what were meant to be the first legal elections after the 2009 coup. And so I went on a reporting trip and I met her in Tegucigalpa in the capital where she was participating in a press conference to international observers who'd come for the election. And she was warning them with such clarity that these were not gonna be free and fair elections, but the social movement was being repressed. That there was literally a hit list circulating with the names of,

 Social leaders, including her, around the country who were being targeted.

I mean, and when I got to Tegucigalpa mean, it was, I, I was living in Mexico at the time and I'd been to other Central American countries, but the level of militarization was, like nothing I'd seen before. It looked like a war zone. I, so I met her there and I asked her for an interview.

At that time she was on the lam. There was an arrest warrant out for her on

 charges related to her leadership in this opposition of this internationally funded dam called Agua Zarca. And, and at the time, her and two colleagues were, had arrest warrants against them.

And so she was sleeping in different places every night.

 Amnesty International at that point had said that if, if they were arrested, they would consider them prisoners of conscience because it would be completely arbitrary and politically motivated. But she invited me to go to La Esperanza, which is the town in Western Honduras where she, she lived and she died.

And so I went there a couple of days later and I did my only interview with her. That was the only time I got to interview her.

 You know, and she just laid out very, very clearly. I mean, I, the situation was in like in Honduras for her personally, for her family. I mean, the threats that they faced.

At that point, three of her children were studying outside of the country because of the threats, that the whole family faced. And, she described to me, with a real sort of sadness how, what it was like to not be able to, to, to go to the river that that the Lenca people consider sacred because of the because of the arrest warrant, because of the militarization in the community. And I remember really clearly she said to me, look, I'm taking all the measures that I can to protect my life. But when they want to kill me, they will kill me.

 and I just remember that hour I spent with her, it was like one of those sort of moments you have as a journalist that are quite life changing, she was so impressive. She had such like, moral and political and ethical clarity,

 and she knew she had been told to leave the country to safeguard her own life, but she was absolutely determined to stay

 to continue fighting for a better future, for people of Honduras.

 There's this line in your piece where you said that when you heard about her assassination, you thought to yourself, Jesus, if they can kill Berta Cáceres, they can kill anyone. So yeah, just kind of what was it like hearing that news and how did you dig into investigating what happened there?

 Yeah, I was on vacation at the time when I woke up to various missed calls from my editor at the time saying, they've killed Berta. They've killed Berta. And, at the time she was absolutely the most well known environmental and sort of social leader in the Americas. She'd been awarded the prestigious Goldman prize the year previously. She'd only a few months earlier had an audience with the Pope in Rome. And so, she was really well known, you know, a member of the U.S. Congress had taken up sort of her case, as had all of the major sort of human rights organizations.

 To give you a sense of Berta, here's a short clip of the speech that she gave when she accepted the Goldman Prize in 2015.

 Despertemos, despertemos, humanidad. Ya no hay tiempo. Nuestras conciencias.

Nuestras conciencias serán sacudidas por el hecho de estar solo contemplando la autodestrucción basada en la depredación capitalista racista y patriarcal.

 She says, wake up. Wake up humanity. We're out of time. We must shake our consciences free of the rapacious capitalism, racism, and patriarchy that will only assure our own self-destruction.

 And I think it was just so clear to me then that the sense of entitlement and impunity that those who ordered her murder must have felt to carry out that assassination because there's no way that you could kill someone who was so well known internationally without there being at least a tacit sort of, you know, agreement from people very high up.

I arrived in Honduras, in Esperanza I think about a month after her assassination, where I met her three daughters for the first time. Her mother, who was such a huge inspiration to her sort of social and political work. Who's 93 by the way now,

 and still in La Esperanza. and the first piece I wrote then was I interviewed and spoke to many of her colleagues who were with her in those last days and weeks. I went to Rio Blanco, where the dam had been destined and sanctioned to be sort of constructed. And what became really clear to me was that she knew that time was running out. There were, she was under surveillance. She there were, there was, there were informants everywhere. And she had been making, she'd been making plans, you know, she'd shared the ability to sign checks, for example, with other people in the organization. She'd said goodbye to one of her daughters a couple of days earlier who was on her way back to Argentina and the goodbye felt like something more than just a normal See you soon,

 she knew had time was running out. And so that was the first piece that I wrote. And then I just started digging and like, I was able to get hold of documents that showed that some of the intermediaries who had been paid by the dam company were former Army officials who had received training by the US at different points in their career

 And also a young soldier from one of the special forces who went AWOL a few weeks after her murder

 because he had been in a unit that had been passed around this hit list in which there was the name and personal details of multiple social and community leaders.

Some of them had an ex through them who had already been neutralized, and Berta's

 name was on that list. And so he went AWOL and ended up coming to me, and talked to me about this hit list. He at the time remembered, a lot of the training, like awful training that, that he had as a young soldier how there'd been military trainers from Israel, from Columbia, from other countries there, and was just really frightened.

And he had to leave the country. He's never been able to go back to the country since.

 As I wrote those pieces, I became a target myself. The Honduran ambassador in UK wrote complaints asking for stories to be sort of retracted. The U.S. ambassador in Honduras at the time launched a a campaign to discredit me, giving background chats to all sorts of people in Honduras claiming that I was just this woman who didn't really understand how the armed forces worked. They were forced to at least say they were gonna launch an inquiry because the army units that had had this hit list circulated were U.S. trained army units. But, they carried out no investigation, didn't speak to any of the people that were in my piece. But I became a target from that point really. There was like these online campaigns calling me a media terrorist.

And really since then, that's 2016, I've never gone into Honduras by air.

I've always gone in overland, which is very difficult. Like it can take a long time because I was warned, you know that I could be stopped coming in. And then, I kept investigating the links and then I was the only journalist, national or international, to attend every day of the first trial, which was for eight people, one who had nothing to do with it, but seven who between them were the hit men, the hired assassins, and the intermediaries. And at the start of that trial I had some really serious threats come my way. some press releases from these fake groups in the Bajo Aguán region, which is a really conflicted, dangerous part of Honduras, declaring me persona non grata, linking me to Mexican drug cartels, calling me a terrorist.

All sorts of things. And so, yeah, the deeper I dug the more threats I got, which, and it is that sort of classic case of, knowing that you are hitting the right things because you are really upsetting people. When I was reporting from the trial, the threats came to me from the Aguán, which is this rural sort of region where there's been longstanding land conflicts between African palm magnates and 

, which really on the surface have nothing to do with Berta's case. But I think it really showed that this network of economic, political, military, religious elites-- the oligarchy that rules Honduras and many, many other sort of countries in Latin America and, control the media, control the banking sector, control, so much of the power in the country are connected, you know?

 And so a journalist that was sort of digging into the modus operandi and the structures and systems behind Berta's death posed a threat to all of them.

 Yeah. Okay. So walk us through what we know or what's been made public so far, about exactly what happened here, who orchestrated this and how did the government play into it too?

 Well, we know that Berta was assassinated specifically because of her campaign to stop the construction of this internationally financed dam on this river considered sacred by the Lenca people and that her organizing and her leadership had stalled the project, which was impacting the profits of the dam company.

We know now from investigations that have happened and from the court cases that have happened so far that the dam company was part of an organized criminal enterprise, which included dam executives. It included the hired hitmen, it included military trained intermediaries, but it also included state officials and armed forces both by acts and by omissions. And by that I mean, the sort of counterinsurgency campaign to neutralize her that lasted for many years. It included, the bogus criminal charges, it included intimidation, it included, arming community members against each other.

It included attempted bribes, all of those things that were classic counterinsurgency manuals, from the Cold War area. They tried with Berta and when they couldn't silence her, they killed her. Right. And this criminal enterprise was involved in all of that, in all sorts of ways from the surveillance to we know from the evidence that I've seen that the dam company would learn through informants that they were paying in the community when, for example, protests were being planned, or when a roadblock was being planned, they would simply have to ask the government to send troops, to send police there to repress the community's peaceful protests. We know that the investigation into her murder, at that time the dam company was continuing to pay police, investigators, journalists to present, the information that served them. They were receiving images from the crime scene themselves, right in, in group chats. and we also know that there was a coordinated plan to blame the murder on Gustavo Castro, who was Berta's friend who happened to be there and who they thought they had killed, but who survived by feigning death. And so he became the only eye witness to blame the murder on him, to blame the murder on her colleagues from her her organization to blame the murder on a on a romantic part partner. All of this was coordinated. And, the dam company could not have done that themselves. They didn't do themselves right. There were sort of elected officials and, state employees at every level from the police, to the prosecutor's office, the attorney general's office to the military to, everywhere that were involved, either by acts or omissions this. Right. But this was an organized criminal enterprise that orchestrated the violence against Berta, Lenca community and then attempted to cover it up. And just one last thing. I mean, the financial institutions involved in this.

We also know now that two thirds of the money, two thirds of the money that was purported by in two international banks to, into international development banks, was diverted to pay for the surveillance, the intelligence operations, the informants, the murder itself, the armed security. And the banks involved, well-known international banks that's an utter failure of their own due diligence obligations, right? And their obligations around human rights. Berta wrote two some of these banks back in 2013, pleading with them not to fund this dam because of the repression that was already being orchestrated.

People had already been killed, the community had already been terrorized, but they went ahead anyway. So, there were the financial institutions that should be held accountable for their role in this. But, it stems from the hired hitmen, who by the way, I interviewed in jail and it was honestly so sad.

These were kids, poor kids. The type, exactly the type of kids that Berta was fighting for a better future for, you know, at least two of them were planning to use the money they get paid to pay a coyote to try and get to the U.S. right? It's not justifying what they did at all, but they're sort of also victims of the same sort of structural violence that exists in the country.

 Like ultimately they pulled the trigger, but they're not the ones that, planned and orchestrated and all of that. That's so sad.

 To underline the U.S.'s' sort role in this, you know, I mean the two of the intermediaries had received US training at different points of their career. The whistleblower I've already mentioned, he was in this unit called Xatruch, which terrorized the Aguán region after the coup.

And which received lots of U.S. training. it's worth just naming David Castillo. David Castillo was the president and founder of the Dam company. he was an former intelligence officer trained at West Point in New York State. And and he's the only one so far to have been convicted of playing a role in masterminding the murder.

He was also one of the people convicted of fraud regarding the license of the dam that was sanctioned, in this post coup pro business sort of environment without due process, without proper consultations, without proper environmental assessments. But yeah, he... the U.S. made him right.

And he used these intelligence tactics and strategies to try to get close to Berta, to infiltrate the community, and, you know, the US has this long and inglorious history of training some of the worst sorts of people who go on to commit some of the worst sort of human rights abuses in Latin America.

 Totally. You spoke with Gustavo Castro recently too, for this piece. I'm gonna play a little bit of tape from him here and then would love to hear more about him as well.

 por un lado, todo eso que tú dices, se le extraña un montón muchísimo, pero pero al mismo tiempo, al mismo tiempo, está tan presente en todos lados. Que incluso donde no la conocían, la conocen y está muy presente. Eh?

 He says, on the one hand, it's just, as you say, she's enormously missed, but at the same time, she's present in so many ways, even in places where they didn't know her, they know her now, and she's present.

Tell us a little bit about him and his work. What's his story?

 Yeah. Gustavo Castro is this really highly regarded Mexican environmentalist and anti-capitalist sort of thinker and organizer. He's the founder and director of an organization called Otros Mundos Chiapas, Other Worlds. And that organization which worked very closely with Berta's organization, they organize around environmentally destructive mega projects, but they also do a lot of work around training and helping communities develop local energy alternatives to global capitalist projects. And him and Berta go back years, he has some amazing anecdotes about her. They were in Quebec together in 2001 for the anti-globalization protest. They did a lot of organizing against NAFTA together. And so, they'd really been in the trenches and, the two organizations would do a little back and forth of training each other and sharing experiences and knowledge.

He was in La Esperanza that night. He'd arrived that day having not seen Berta for quite some time. I mean, after the 2009 coup, Berta, the whole social movement in Honduras was in this perpetual state of crisis constantly, fighting and struggling to stop these illegally sanctioned projects, right? So they hadn't seen each other for some years, but he'd gone to La Esperanza and he was there 'cause he was gonna do several days of workshops for Lenca community members on renewable energy projects. So he'd got there, they'd stayed up late talking, and he was staying with her in her house and they'd just both gone to bed. They knew he was there, but we know from the evidence, from the trials and from like various sort of phone tapping documents and so forth that there'd been reconnaissance missions, the ex-military sort of officers that had been paid intermediaries had conducted reconnaissance missions.

So they knew he was there. And in fact there was four assassins, like one who stayed in the car and three who went to the house, one shot Berta, and, and the other shot, and another shot Gustavo. And they shot him in the face and it, it hit his ear. His and so he was bleeding a lot because of, it was like and so he just stopped.

He just laid down and pretended to be dead and they thought he was dead. So he survived an assassination attempt. Right? And then, stayed still and quiet until he was sure everyone had gone and then tried to get help and it took him hours to raise anybody.

He finally managed to get in touch with people in Mexico who got in touch with people in Honduras who sent help. And it's important to think, think that when people called for help, they absolutely did not call the police, right? Because they knew they weren't to be trusted. And so, he was sort of whisked away by members of Copinh, but then spent this almost a month trapped in Honduras as they tried to pin the crime on him. They took his boots to test for evidence. I mean, they did,

 There was just this concerted effort and he actually ended up having to take refuge in an embassy because they were trying to arrest him.

 I remember interviewing his lawyer at the time and doing a story and when he was eventually allowed to leave and go back to Mexico, him and his family ended up spending two years in exile in Spain because they didn't feel safe in Mexico either.

 I think too close. Yeah. I mean, I think all of that personally has like obviously had this huge impact on his physical wellbeing, on his psychological wellbeing, when I spoke to him just a week or two ago, he was saying it's only now. Little by little that he's sort of reading like the the court files, it's just been too difficult.

 And he's just realizing how close, how close it was that he could have ended up in jail for this, right? Like, it was so close that he really escaped with his liberty. And I, I think the other thing, says that for him, that all of that sort of personal trauma, but like for him and many people in the social movement, her assassination, her loss was, a huge hit to the whole social movement.

They've spent years really focused on demanding justice for Berta, right. And trying to recuperate and refocus. And, I mean, it was a huge crisis that had a lot of the work that him and Berta had initiated regionally, like they had all of these like regional sort of meetings where when groups would, different organizations would come together and they would plan and strategize across the region.

They've only just restarted those a couple of years ago.

 Yeah. I thought that was so interesting and important reading your piece 'cause sometimes I think, 'cause at least Gustavo wasn't arrested and like we do know that it was the dam company and the government, and there's been some accountability.

Some people have gone to jail, things like that. People will be like, oh, okay. The social movement fought back and yes, in some ways that's true, but it also, it creates this vacuum, not just of that leadership, but then so much time being spent dealing with the impact of that, that takes away from all of the other work that they were doing for so long.

Okay. Speaking of accountability, you mentioned David Castillo. Who else has been tried or imprisoned or fined or whatever for their role in this?

 So far eight people have been convicted of participating in the murder there. Castillo is the most senior. Of those, the other seven are the hired assassins and the intermediaries at at least two of them had direct links to the dam company.

 one police officer was recently convicted of tampering with the crime scene and tampering with evidence.

And that, for Honduras, that's honestly nothing short of a miracle. I mean, Berta is among almost a hundred land and environmental defenders that have been murdered, in the last 10 years. And there's been no accountability for any of those people.

Transcription

This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the hired hit that took Berta Cáceres’s life and robbed both the Honduran and global environmental movements of a uniquely effective leader. Cáceres was targeted by a dam company, with an assist from the police, military, government officials and international banks because of her effective organizing on behalf of her people, the Lenca. Nina Lakhani literally wrote the book on Cáceres’s killing, and in this episode she walks us through what happened then, what’s happening now, the role the U.S. played in all of it, and what Americans can learn from the way Honduran activists continue to show up in the face of violent repression.

10 Years After Berta Cáceres’s Murder, Why Is It Still So Dangerous for Environmentalists in Honduras?

Drilled A true-crime podcast about climate change, hosted by investigative journalist Amy Westervelt. Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts .

A true-crime podcast about climate change, hosted by investigative journalist Amy Westervelt. Listen here, or 

A true-crime podcast about climate change.

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10 Years After Berta Cáceres’s Murder, Why Is It Still So Dangerous for Environmentalists in Honduras?

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10 Years After Berta Cáceres’ Murder, Why Is Honduras Still So Dangerous for Environmental Activists?