Читать книгу Who Killed Berta Cáceres? - Nina Lakhani - Страница 9
ОглавлениеRío Blanco, April 2013
Dressed in her customary getup of slacks, plaid shirt and wide-rimmed sombrero, Berta Cáceres stood on top of a small grassy mound shaded by an ancient oak tree to address the crowd of men, women and children who’d walked miles from across Río Blanco to discuss the dam. ‘No one expected the Lenca people to stand up against this powerful monster,’ she proclaimed, ‘and yet we indigenous people have been resisting for over 520 years, ever since the Spanish invasion. Seventy million people were killed across the continent for our natural resources, and this colonialism isn’t over. But we have power, compañeros, and that is why we still exist.’
Río Blanco is a collection of thirteen campesino or subsistence farming communities scattered across hilly, pine-forested terrain in the department of Intibucá, a predominantly Lenca region in south-west Honduras. Here, extended families work long days, farming maize, beans, fruit, vegetables and coffee on modest plots of communal land which are mostly accessible only on foot or horseback. Chickens and scraggy dogs dart in and out of every house. Some families also raise cattle, pigs and ducks to eat, not to sell, as there are few paved roads or transport links connecting the communities with market towns. Since being given the land by a former president in the 1940s, these communities have largely been ignored by successive governments – despite election promises to deliver basic health and education services and paved roads.1 With few public services, the communities rely on the Gualcarque River, which flows north to south, skirting the edge of Río Blanco. The sacred river is a source of spiritual and physical nourishment for the Lenca people. It provides fish to eat, water for their animals to drink, traditional medicinal plants, and fun: with no electricity, let alone internet, the children flock to the river to play and swim. The communities live in harmony with the river and with each other. Or at least they used to.
The pro-business National Party government licensed the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam in 2010, ignoring the legal requirement for formal consultation before sanctioning projects on indigenous territory. Not only that, the environmental licences and lucrative energy contracts were signed off at breakneck speed without proper oversight, suggesting foul play by a gaggle of public officials and company executives. In Honduras this wasn’t unusual: the Gualcarque River was sold off as part of a package of dam concessions involving dozens of waterways across the country in the aftermath of the 2009 coup – orchestrated by the country’s right-wing business, religious, political and military elites to oust the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. Not just dams: mines, tourist developments, biofuel projects and logging concessions were rushed through Congress with no consultation, environmental impact studies or oversight, many destined for indigenous lands. The process was rigged against communities; the question was how high did the corruption go.
The hydroelectric project would dissect the sacred river and divert the water away from local needs, generating electricity to be sold to the national energy company (ENEE). The Lenca people knew that without the river, there could be no life in Río Blanco.
That’s why, a few days before Berta’s visit, community members had set up a human barricade blocking road access to the Gualcarque in a last-ditch effort to stop construction going ahead.
Berta addressed the crowd that April day just a stone’s throw from the makeshift roadblock, which was manned in shifts by families utterly fed up with being treated like intruders on their own land. The blue and white flag of Honduras hung between two wooden posts obstructing the gravel through-way. The community had first sought help from COPINH several years earlier. Berta and other COPINH leaders helped them petition local and national authorities, the dam building company Desarrollos Energéticos SA (DESA) and its construction contractor, the Chinese energy giant Sinohydro, making it crystal clear that they did not want the river they relied upon for food, water, medicines and spiritual nourishment to be dammed. Lavish promises by DESA to build roads and schools turned out to be empty. The people held meetings, voted, marched on Congress and launched judicial complaints against government agencies and officials.
But the mayor of Intibucá, Martiniano Domínguez, claimed resistance was futile. The dam was backed by the president, he said, and they should be grateful to DESA, which promised jobs and development for the neglected community. Domínguez green-lighted construction in late 2011, after falsely claiming that most locals favoured the dam. A crooked consultation deed – filled with the names and signatures of people overtly against the dam, and others who couldn’t read or write – was used as proof of community support to shore up permit applications and investments. When heavy machinery rolled in, cables connecting a solar panel to the school’s internet and computer servers were destroyed, fertile communal land was invaded, and maize and bean crops on the riverbank were ruined, while well-trodden walking paths were blocked off. Signposts appeared around the construction site: ‘Prohibited: Do Not Enter the Water’. For many, this humiliation was the last straw.
Berta only found out later, perhaps too late, that the dam project was backed by members of one of the country’s most powerful clans, the Atalas, and that the president of DESA and its head of security were US-trained former Honduran military officers, schooled in counterinsurgency. This doctrine had long been used across Latin America to divide and conquer communities resisting neo-liberal expansion. But Berta grew up during the Dirty War, and by the time of her address at El Roble she had twenty years of community struggle under her belt. She understood the risks of opposing big business interests, and wanted to make sure the people of Río Blanco understood them too.
‘Are you sure you want to fight this project? Because it will be tough,’ she told them from the grassy mound beneath the oak tree. ‘I will fight alongside you until the end, but are you, the community, prepared – for this is a struggle that will take years, not days?’ A sea of hands rose into the air as the crowd voted to fight the dam.
Standing nearby was the figure of Francisco ‘Chico’ Javier Sánchez, a squat, moustachioed community leader in a black cowboy hat. ‘Berta warned us that opposing the dam would mean threats, violence, deaths, divisions, persecution, infiltrators, militarization, police, sicarios, and that everything would be done to break us. COPINH was ready to support us in peaceful protests and actions, but it had to be our decision, the community’s, because it was us who would suffer the consequences. We were totally ignorant, but she was very clear. Everything she told us that day came true, and worse.’
Three years later, five Río Blanco residents were dead, and so was Berta Cáceres.
Role Models
Berta’s mother, Austra Berta Flores López, is a staunchly Catholic, no-nonsense matriarch and was the most important role model in Berta’s life. Born in 1933 in La Esperanza, Doña Austra is a nurse, midwife, activist and Liberal Party politician, descended from a long line of prominent social and political progressives who were maligned and persecuted as communists during a string of repressive dictatorships. I interviewed the straight-talking Doña Austra several times, before and after Berta’s murder – always at the spacious single-storey colonial-style house she built in the early 1970s, and always while drinking sweet black coffee in her legendary parlour adorned with religious knick-knacks and old photos. It’s in this room that Doña Austra has, over the past four decades, hosted a motley crew of colourful characters including Salvadoran guerrilla commanders, Cuban revolutionaries, Honduran presidents and American diplomats. If walls could talk!
La Esperanza, which means ‘hope’ in Spanish, is a picturesque place in the hills surrounded by sweet-smelling pine forests and dozens of small villages. Lying 120 miles west of the congested concrete capital, Tegucigalpa, at the end of a snaking road riddled with potholes, it is the coolest and most elevated town in Honduras. Politically the set-up here is slightly odd, as La Esperanza merges seamlessly with the city of Intibucá; they are divided by a single street but administered by separate municipal governments. Intibucá is the older of the twin cities, and traditionally Lenca. La Esperanza houses the newer mestizo or ladino community; Berta’s maternal great-grandparents (from Guatemala and the neighbouring department of Lempira) were among the first mid-nineteenth-century settlers. Growing up, Doña Austra witnessed the strict ethnic apartheid that banned indigenous inhabitants of Intibucá from entering mestizo schools and churches in La Esperanza.
As a little girl, Austra travelled on horseback to visit her father in El Salvador where he was intermittently exiled during the dictatorship of General Tiburcio Carías Andino (1933– 49). ‘We’d load one beast with food like dried meat and tortillas, the second one my mother and me would ride for two days to reach my father,’ she recalled. ‘I come from a family of guerrillas. Some ended up in chains as political prisoners, others were exiled or killed. My family has always fought for social change, and for that we were labelled communists.’
Austra Flores was widowed at the age of fifteen, after three years of marriage to a much older man. Then she trained as a nurse, and later as a midwife. In those days she was often the only health professional in town, so patients would walk miles to the house and wait on benches lined up on the shaded front porch and back patio. Many were impoverished campesinos who brought a hen, some firewood or a sack of maize as payment in kind. ‘We didn’t have much money, but there was always enough to eat,’ said Doña Austra, who even now keeps her leather medical bag handy for when patients turn up. Some still walk miles, and they still wait on the very same wooden benches.
By the mid-70s, student rebellions were part of a burgeoning human rights scene in which Berta’s older brother Carlos Alberto, Austra’s fifth child, from a different relationship, played a role. Elected student leader of the La Esperanza teacher training college, the Escuela Normal Occidente, he led a hunger strike to oust the abusive and ineffective director. When he was shot in the left shoulder by soldiers deployed to evict striking students at the college, Doña Austra rushed him to Tegucigalpa for surgery.
The injury inspired Carlos to be more than a local student activist. He led nationwide strikes forcing a string of rotten head teachers to resign, and convoked clandestine meetings at the family home to organize hands-on support for leftist guerrilla groups in neighbouring El Salvador and Nicaragua. His belligerent leadership was noted, and the family became targets for the feared state intelligence service, the Dirección Nacional de Investigación (DNI).
‘The house would be surrounded by orejas [Spanish for ears, meaning informants], it was always under surveillance and we’d hear boots on the roof. Soldiers and DNI men would come in and search the house, but they never looked in there,’ said Austra, showing me the wooden wardrobe in the bedroom where they once hid books and pamphlets considered subversive. ‘If the DNI had found those, we would have been taken away to the 10th Battalion base [located in nearby Marcala] where Salvadorans looking for supplies or safety were locked up and disappeared.’
Several of Carlos’s friends, other student leaders, were disappeared during the 1970s, by which time Austra’s house was the de facto socialist (with a small ‘s’) headquarters, used to store medicines and food for the Salvadoran guerrillas and hide their commanders. She also hid young men, boys really, seeking to avoid the military conscription that wasn’t abandoned until 1995. Francisco Alexis, her eighth child, was jailed, starved and tortured at the 10th Battalion base after he too tried to escape military service. ‘Francisco was so traumatized by the barbarities inflicted on him, we sent him to live in the US,’ said Austra. He was smuggled out using fake ID.
After graduating as a teacher, Carlos joined the Communist Party and moved north to the Bajo Aguán region, to work with campesino banana cooperatives campaigning for land redistribution. According to Doña Austra, he got involved in the armed student guerrilla group Los Cinchoneros, also known as the Popular Liberation Movement, founded in rebellious Olancho in eastern Honduras. Carlos moved to Russia with a scholarship to study history and political science. He was later in Nicaragua, defending the Sandinista revolution against the US-armed Contras. For Berta, Carlos was a real-life revolutionary idol.
Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores was born on 4 March 1971, a chubby, placid baby Doña Austra’s twelfth and last child. Her father José Cáceres Molina (biological father of the four youngest siblings), from the nearby coffee-growing town of Marcala, was an abrasive ex-infantry sergeant from a staunchly nationalist family.2 José Cáceres walked out when Berta was five, after imposing years of what many family members called ‘alcohol-fuelled misery’ on them, and she had little contact with him while growing up. Berta was a sparkling little girl with thick curly hair and a wide smile. By the age of seven or eight she was a regular competitor on the local beauty pageant circuit, picking up prizes as the best-dressed Mayan princess and Señorita Maize. She liked to play football, choreograph dances and put on plays, showing a notable flair for organizing and bossing the other children. But she also grew up running in and out of secretive, politically charged meetings, and from a young age was spellbound by the fiery debates centred on injustices in her corner of the world. By then, in the early to mid-1980s, Austra was involved in fledgling rights groups like the women’s collective, Movimiento de Mujeres por la Paz ‘Visitación Padilla’,3 and helping to organize against the US-backed death squads operating across Central America. Thanks to Austra’s dedication as a community midwife, Berta also saw first hand the miserable conditions endured by neglected hill communities.
Aged twelve or thirteen, she would walk miles with her mother to reach pregnant women in isolated rural cantons with no electricity or running water. Berta assisted: she would fetch hot water and towels, hold candles for light, and sometimes even cut the umbilical cord. Many women spent hours each day collecting clean water and firewood as well as working in the fields and raising children, with no access to contraception or antenatal care, and no escape from violent partners. The grim plight of rural women left its mark on both mother and daughter. Later, Berta came to understand these harsh realities as a local consequence of global rules, a vision which would define her.
Sometimes they travelled to the Colomoncagua refugee camp, forty miles south of La Esperanza, to help pregnant Salvadoran civil war refugees living in concentration camp conditions. These mother–daughter medical missions provided good cover, allowing them to deliver food and medicines, and then sneak out messages for Salvadoran rebel commanders lying low at the family home. The first refugee camps in Honduras opened in early 1981, just as the US (with the aid of military dictatorships) started rolling out the counterinsurgency doctrine, in what Ronald Reagan called ‘drawing the line’ in Central America.4 From this point forward, any Honduran suspected of sympathizing with neighbouring communist revolutionaries risked being murdered or disappeared by US-trained elite soldiers. This disposition to fight American enemies was established as a core characteristic of Honduran military ethos.
It’s worth noting that anti-communist fervour was not a Cold War invention. In the first half of the twentieth century, Central America’s elite landowning families – who enjoyed absolute economic and political power in their regional fiefdoms – were more than comfortable branding popular uprisings as communist threats. Any sniff of a political, social or labour movement demanding even modest reforms to tackle the stark inequalities was crushed, often brutally, to protect the interests of these elites.
In neighbouring El Salvador, the 1932 peasant uprising was ruthlessly quelled, leaving around 30,000 mainly indigenous Pipil people dead.5 In Honduras, the 1975 Los Horcones massacre in rebellious Olancho was one of the worst to be documented. By then, the north coast had been devastated by Hurricane Fifi,6 and campesinos on the brink of starvation squatted on unused arable land in the hope of forcing agrarian reforms. The crackdown was prompt. At least fourteen campesinos, sympathetic clergy and students were rounded up, tortured and killed by soldiers and armed guards on the orders of local landlords unwilling to relinquish a single plot. The dismembered bodies were found buried on land belonging to local rancher José Manuel Zelaya Ordóñez,7 father of the future (subsequently deposed) president, Mel Zelaya Rosales. Thus when the US entered into full-fledged Cold War paranoia, the anti-communist brigade found it easy to sell its counterinsurgency doctrine to Central American elites who were already versed in dirty war tactics, albeit at a more amateur level. The doctrine identified certain social actors – student and peasant leaders, journalists, union organizers and liberation theology priests – as part of the ideological enemy, equating them with violent guerrillas. With this enemy, normal rules of engagement didn’t apply, and the US, with its psychological warfare handbooks,8 torture manuals and death squads, turned Central American armies into well-organized killing machines trained to detect and destroy anyone suspected of even thinking about insurgency.
Sovereignty for Sale
Anti-communist rhetoric wasn’t new, nor was the US peddling influence in Honduras. In fact, while many countries like to boast of a special relationship with the US, Honduras actually has one. Honduras was always connected to international markets via American capital – initially through mining, and then, most famously, through banana exports.9 A ‘banana republic’ is among the worst examples of capitalist hegemony: a country run like a private business for the exclusive profit of corporations and local ruling elites. The term was coined by the American satirist O. Henry in 1901 to describe the corruption and exploitation imposed by the United Fruit Company, now called Chiquita, on Central America. The company relied upon a culture of bribery, a subjugated workforce and smarts to exploit these lands for obscene profits. Under the leadership of Samuel Zemurray, dubbed ‘Sam the Banana Man’, by the 1920s United Fruit controlled 650,000 acres of the most fertile plains in Honduras, almost one-quarter of all arable land in the country, as well as major roads, railways and ports. Here the company was known as El Pulpo, the octopus, for its far-reaching tentacles permeating every aspect of life from labour rights to infrastructure to politics. ‘In Honduras, a mule costs more than a member of parliament,’ Zemurray famously once said.
In the hot and humid northern city of El Progreso, a wonderful black and white framed photograph of the 1954 huelga de bananeros, or banana workers’ strike, hangs above Jesuit priest Padre Melo’s desk. Taken a stone’s throw away on the main road known as the Boulevard, it shows hundreds of defiant-looking men and women standing together, like an impenetrable human wall. After decades of subjugation, a flourishing campesino movement decided to fight back against slave-like conditions and brought the industry to a standstill, in what was the first serious challenge to the ‘special relationship’ and US profits. The campesino uprising was spuriously blamed on agitators from Guatemala, and plans were hatched to tackle both problems using the 1954 Military Assistance Agreement, which authorized the US to treat Honduras as a military satellite.
The US used its new outpost to train and arm mercenaries against Guatemala’s first democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. United Fruit had lobbied hard for the CIA-backed 1954 military coup,10 after Árbenz proposed taking some unfarmed land from multinationals to redistribute to landless peasants. The violent intervention paved the way for a bloody thirty-six-year civil war. The 1954 bilateral military agreement was a watershed geopolitical moment for the whole region, and Honduras has hosted American bases, forces and weapons ever since.
As for the campesino revolt which promised so much it was tamed by a series of modest reforms including a new labour rights code, social security benefits, and false promises of land redistribution. Some organizers were jailed, others co-opted; the most stubborn were disappeared or killed in local crackdowns such as the Los Horcones massacre. In the words of Padre Melo, ‘at that time when serious left-wing political and guerrilla groups were developing in neighbouring countries, in Honduras they were being co-opted and the insurgency was cleverly transformed into a benign popular movement pacified with a few gains.’11 The fruit companies continued to meddle in Honduran affairs to lower costs and maximize shareholder profits. For example, in 1972 United Fruit, by then renamed United Brands, bankrolled its friend, dictator General Oswaldo López Arellano to power, again illustrating how US capital dominated the most lucrative markets by owning politicians.12 It was a special relationship that demanded docile political lapdogs, not business partners, which partly explains why in Honduras a modern-day oligarchy took so long to emerge.
The End Justifies the Means
In Nicaragua, the Sandinista victory against the US-backed Anastasio Somoza dictatorship in 1979 caused blind panic in the US. Cuba was regarded as a humiliation, but at least it was an island, where socialist uprising could be isolated. Nicaragua on the other hand was on the same land mass, just a few hundred miles from the Panama Canal. So when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1981 on an anti-communism mandate, the US turned its number one geopolitical partner into a major Cold War proxy battleground. The big guns – the spooks, special forces and top ally Ambassador John Negroponte – were deployed to Honduras with a clear mission: do whatever it takes to stop the communist rot.
British-born Negroponte, a zealous anti-communist action figure who cut his diplomatic teeth in Vietnam under Henry Kissinger, served in Honduras during its dirtiest years. This was no unlucky coincidence. The Cold War zealot played down, in fact didn’t mention, the huge spike in human rights violations – targeted arbitrary arrests, torture, the forced disappearances, and murder of suspected dissidents and refugees – in his diplomatic cables. During his 1981–85 tenure, military aid rocketed from $4m to $77.4m a year, a pretty straightforward cash-for-turf deal in which the US gained free rein over Honduran territory in exchange for dollars, training in torture-based interrogation methods, and silence.13 This patronage created a loyal force hooked on American money, equipment, training and ideology: cheaply-bought loyalty which the US would count on again and again.
Negroponte was a cardinal figure in the Contra war, coordinating support for the anti-Sandinista mercenaries who were trained, armed and commanded from clandestine bases. But the US role was much more than merely supportive. According to covert ops veteran Mario Reyes (a Mexican-born soldier posted to Honduras during the Contra war), ‘We conducted secret night-time missions to take out targeted Sandinistas on Nicaraguan territory; the killings were blamed on the Contras, that was the point, but it was us, and the Russians knew it was us.’
Reagan spent a billion or so dollars backing the Contras, whom he referred to as the ‘moral equivalent of the founding fathers’. Some of that money came from CIA-backed drug trafficking which flooded poor neighbourhoods with cocaine, especially African-American neighbourhoods, and helped dampen post-civil rights social revolts. In the end, CIA-traded cocaine muzzled two impoverished communities thousands of miles apart, and fuelled the burgeoning international drug trade.
Another funding stream was illegal arms sales. Negroponte oversaw the approval of a new military treaty which authorized US use of the Palmerola Air Base, sixty miles north-west of Tegucigalpa. From here, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North ran the Iran-Contra operation – a clandestine effort to circumvent US law by selling weapons to Iran.14 A key ally for this operation was Juan Matta Ballesteros, the original Honduran drug capo. More about him later. What else did Honduras get in return? It was a see-no-evil approach, but Negroponte knew perfectly well what horrors the military were perpetrating on civilians. He and his superiors positively applauded the elimination of so-called subversives. This is the essence of the counterinsurgency doctrine: the end justifies the means.
Michael McClintock is tall, with a soft Ohio accent and a long, thinning grey ponytail. He was Amnesty International’s Latin American researcher during the Cold War years and became a renowned scholar on special forces and counterinsurgency doctrine. He witnessed the before and after effect first hand in Honduras. ‘With the arrival of Negroponte,’ he told me, ‘there was a sudden and huge injection of American dollars and personnel, and within a year or two the military had identified and got rid of social leaders and incipient guerrilla groups. They literally wiped them out, clearing the decks to make Honduras an American aircraft carrier for Central America.
‘It was a day-and-night change. The system changed from one of a sloppy rule of law, where powerful people get away with murder, to an organized ideological audit – a census of who’s thinking bad thoughts and then going after them. It had a hugely corrupting influence on the armed forces and weak public institutions. Then add poverty and supercharge it with cocaine, and you understand why people flee,’ he added.
The most prolific state-sponsored killing machine was without doubt Battalion 3-16, which McClintock describes as America’s ‘most glowing innovation’ in Honduras. It was created and commanded by General Gustavo Álvarez, a man the US could do business with.15 Officially it was an intelligence unit, but it also stalked, kidnapped, tortured and disappeared scores of suspected subversives. Its operatives were trained in counterinsurgency surveillance and interrogation techniques by the CIA in secret locations in the US, and at home by Argentine torture specialists on US-controlled army bases.16 In truth, the dirty war casualties in Honduras pale in comparison to its civil war-ravaged neighbours. Officially, 184 people were disappeared during the 1980s, though the exact number of people tortured and executed remains unknown, according to the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras (Spanish acronym COFADEH); for years, decomposed bodies were dug up on isolated riverbanks or in citrus groves. The 1981 forced disappearance of Ángel Manfredo Velásquez Rodríguez was the first such case ruled on by an international tribunal. The university student vanished after being interrogated and tortured at a police station and 1st Battalion military base by the DNI and G-2 (intelligence wing). The Honduran government denied any knowledge or involvement, told the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACrtHR) that he’d gone off with Salvadoran guerrillas, and refused to hear the family’s case in domestic courts. The case changed international law, and forced disappearances were designated a crime without statute of limitations.17
Special Forces: ‘Whatever, Whenever and Wherever’
To understand counterinsurgency, it is necessary to understand the role of special forces – an elite corps created by the US in the 1950s to combat the occupying forces in Western Europe, using unconventional warfare. Under John F. Kennedy their numbers and role expanded to include preemptive strikes and terror tactics against the international menace that was communism. The time to act was now, according to the field manuals, in order to neutralize popular leaders before they became violently militant. In Honduras the Special Forces were created in 1979, a few months after the Sandinista victory, and were touted as an urban anti-subversive ground force to liquidate guerrilla groups.
What’s so special about the Special Forces? Special means irregular, super-soldiers trained to bend the rules and operate outside normal parameters because, they are told, the end justifies the means. When there are no limits, killing is the ultimate way to neutralize a threat. This threat might be real, like an armed guerrilla fighter, or imagined, like the children of campesinos slaughtered lest they grow into guerrillas. But before this ultimate penalty, a range of tried and tested techniques from the counterinsurgency spectrum – smear campaigns, blackmail, bribery, threats against loved ones, jail, torture and disappearance – can be deployed to neutralize the target. Informants, infiltrators and surveillance are key tools to gathering intelligence to divide, dominate and conquer communities. That’s why to understand counterinsurgency, you need to understand Special Forces and military intelligence. Both are secret because both bend the law, McClintock told me.
US-backed special forces perpetrated some of the worst atrocities and most emblematic executions in the region, including the assassinations of Archbishop Óscar Romero and Bishop Juan Gerardi.18 The crème de la crème from each country were sent for training to the School of the Americas (SOA) in Georgia, and its satellite centre in Panama. In Honduras, at least nineteen members of Battalion 3-16 graduated from the infamous Fort Benning military school.19 A much larger number were trained at home at the US regional training centre (Centro Regional Entrenamiento Militar, CREM), close to the Caribbean port city of Trujillo in the Bajo Aguán. ‘The Americans trained the region’s elite death squads at the CREM,’ said Padre Melo, who in the early 1980s was posted at a church near the base. ‘I would be stopped on my motorbike by American soldiers demanding to see my ID – they were authorized to do that!’
After the Cold War ended, these repressive security structures were not dismantled. Instead, they morphed into powerful criminal networks linked to corruption and the trafficking of arms and drugs, with clandestine parallel security structures that as part of their remit would target social justice activists labelled anti-development or terrorists. Modern enemies for modern times.
The implementation of US national security policies through the counterinsurgency doctrine marked a watershed in Honduras, and played a major role in Berta’s life and death. In the months after the April 2013 community meeting at El Roble, under the eponymous old oak tree, a systematic campaign to crush opposition to the Agua Zarca dam was rolled out, using a classic sliding scale of counterinsurgency tactics: slurs, repression, inducements, infiltrators, informants, criminalization. A Guatemalan lawyer, with years of experience investigating civil war crimes, told me that Berta’s murder bore the hallmarks of a military intelligence-backed special operation. That’s why to understand who she was and why she was murdered, you have to understand the past.
The Corporate Campaign against the Agua Zarca Dam Opponents
The military background of senior DESA managers frightened Berta. Bustillo was openly aggressive towards her and community leaders, but it was David Castillo’s intelligence past that troubled her most.
Years later, in text messages uncovered during the discovery phase of the murder trial, DESA’s financial manager, Daniel Atala Midence, is shown using his political influence to press false charges against COPINH leaders, whom he referred to as criminals and even murderers. The texts also show how he authorized regular cash payments to informants in the community, including members of COPINH, who spied on Berta and the organization before reporting back to Bustillo and Rodríguez. It’s a business practice that the company felt was justified in order to protect their investment from protests that delayed construction. Atala ran the day-to-day business with David Castillo, who offered Berta incentives such as money for local projects if she would support the dam and end hostilities between the company and the community.
Rebel with a Cause
By 1983, the twelve-year-old Berta was rebellious and outspoken, according to Ivy Luz Orellana who met her on their first day in 7th grade. ‘She was very studious, learned quickly and was a natural leader who hated following pointless rules and would speak out against unfairness,’ said Ivy, who shared with me a splendid collection of school photos that show a youthfully frivolous side of Berta. In one, Berta is fifteen and strutting along some sort of pageant catwalk wearing a fancy white dress, make-up and kitten heels, beaming happily. The picture appeared in the local paper.
By then she’d met her future husband, Salvador Zúñiga, a student activist six years older who was regularly invited by Doña Austra to the family home. Zúñiga had co-founded the radical Patriotic Student Organization of Lempira (Organización Patriótica Estudiantil de Lempira – OPEL), whose main objective was to purge Honduras of foreign armies. This made Salvador a target, and in 1984 rumours circulated that he was on a military hit list. With friends and colleagues already dead or disappeared, the nineteen-year-old crossed the border into El Salvador where he helped move the sick and injured to relative safety in Honduras.
After middle school, Berta, like most of her siblings, trained as a primary school teacher at the La Esperanza normal, mainly because it was the only free secondary education available. She started the three-year training course in 1986, aged fifteen, and immediately joined OPEL. When the radical student group’s president was killed, Berta was elected to succeed him. In one of her first acts as president, she organized strikes to protest the unfair exclusion of a student, which saved him and got the teacher behind it thrown out. ‘By the time we entered the normal, Berta’s ideals were very clear: she was a leader and wanted to be free, do other things, rather than get married and have kids,’ said her old schoolfriend Ivy.
This didn’t stop Berta having fun, and her friends remember her as witty, outgoing and happy to break the rules. Ivy recalls that ‘Berta was beautiful and had lots of boyfriends … She loved to dance, we were great dancers, but our mothers were strict so we’d sneak off to the Paraíso disco in the afternoons. We danced to merengue and 80s American pop music like Michael Jackson, songs in English we didn’t even understand. Berta was popular, happy and loved life, and that never changed in the thirty-plus years we were friends, even when things got so difficult at the end.’ In later years, Berta would jokingly call old schoolmates, like Ivy, who became National Party voters, capitalistas de mierda (fucking capitalists). She never lost her playfulness, nor avoided people with opposing views.
Outside the normal, Berta got serious with like-minded new friends. Like her brother Carlos and his friends a decade earlier, the youngsters met in secret to read banned books on the Cuban revolution and Marxism, debating revolutionary ideas and real-world tactics to help comrades at home and in neighbouring countries. It was a dangerous time to be a revolutionary, and Berta kept this world from her school chums, who had no idea that she started dating Salvador Zúñiga in 1988, the last year of teacher training. She was seventeen, he was twenty-three, and by this time fully enmeshed in the Salvadoran war effort, supporting units across the tiny country with information analysis, logistics, intelligence and counter-intelligence gathering.
Berta couldn’t get enough of his stories, and was impatient to be involved. ‘Every time I came home I brought her revolutionary texts which we discussed, but we also exchanged poems and romantic novels. She wanted to come with me to El Salvador, that was the plan, that we’d go together after she graduated from the normal … then she got pregnant.’
Zúñiga planned to return to El Salvador for the last rebel offensive, but tried to dissuade Berta from coming with him. ‘War isn’t romantic, it’s cruel, and I didn’t want Berta to come, but she was insistent.’ Doña Austra, who knew nothing about her youngest daughter’s war ambitions, was at the same time trying to ship Berta overseas to have the baby, in order to avoid a town scandal. Berta refused, and the young lovers plotted behind her back.
Olivia Marcela Zúñiga Cáceres was born on 28 June 1989. She looked just like her mother. Three weeks later Berta said goodbye to Austra, telling her that she was taking baby Olivia to visit her brother Carlos in Canada. Instead the young parents left the newborn with Zúñiga’s sister, who lived in nearby Siguatepeque, and went to join the guerrillas. It would be several months before they held Olivia again. The time Berta spent in El Salvador shaped the rest of her life.
Berta was eighteen years old and still weak from giving birth when she joined the war effort with the National Resistance – one of four guerrilla groups in the coalition that formed the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Here, her nom de guerre was Laura or Laurita. Life on the front line was tough. The unit was constantly on the move, and the incursions were rugged and dangerous. The young militants were assigned to logistics and reconnaissance missions – mostly supportive, non-combatant roles. They monitored the radio and put together communiqués for the leadership on what the State Department, Pentagon, European governments, BBC and international groups like Amnesty International were opining about the conflict now in its tenth year. Sometimes they went on separate missions to different parts of the country.
‘From the very first sortie, she was intrepid and determined, even going ahead with the exploration unit without me. Berta never cried, she was calm, strong and fearless even when our unit came under attack. She ate and slept when she could, but showed great discipline even though she hadn’t been trained,’ Salvador said.
Vidalina Morales, a local guerrilla, remembered that Berta seemed shy in Salvador’s presence, and that he at times ridiculed her in front of comrades. But she never shied away from any physical or psychological challenge, and positively bristled if anyone suggested taking it easy.
Antonio Montes, nom de guerre Chico, was a twenty-nine-year-old combatant when Berta and Salvador joined his unit on the imposing Guazapa Mountain in Suchitoto, from where the guerrillas launched the last offensive on the capital San Salvador in November 1989. Berta was part of the health brigade, drawing on her childhood experiences with her mother to help treat wounded combatants as they advanced towards the capital. Back at camp after the nine-day offensive, Berta organized classes for the children and taught literacy to adults in the guerrilla-controlled areas, which tried to retain a sense of normality despite being under constant threat of attack. Her commitment to the Salvadoran cause impressed Chico.
‘Berta witnessed terrible atrocities, she saw the consequences of war on unarmed civilians and was visibly moved by the suffering. But she was a restless young woman, with a hardworking spirit and willingness to contribute to all sorts of activities with people trying keep their lives going in complex conflict zones. It’s clear that these experiences marked the rest of her life.’
In late 1989, as Berta and Salvador prepared for the final offensive, a disarmament deal to end the Contra War in Nicaragua was signed in Honduras. The Tela Accord essentially marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War.
That same year, the once feared general Gustavo Álvarez was killed, prompting Carlos, Berta’s big brother, to return home after more than a decade abroad.20 In 1989, a few days after Álvarez was killed, human rights defender and physician Dr Juan Almendarez was in Bolivia at an anti-tobacco conference when he got word that his name was circulating on a military hit list. After Ambassador Negroponte had him sacked as university rector in 1982, Dr Almendarez had frequently been followed, photographed and harassed, so it came as no surprise. Before boarding the flight home, he told a friend: ‘If I don’t make it home, tell the world it was the military.’ This probably saved his life. Arriving in Honduras, Dr Almendarez was held at gunpoint in an airport taxi by agents from the Argentine Anti-communist Alliance (AAA), School of the Americas graduates operating in cells across Central America. He was taken to the DNI’s infamous torture centre in Tegucigalpa for interrogation. ‘The main interrogator knew every move I’d made for years, and named several compañeros who’d been disappeared and murdered …“How shall we kill you?” he asked me. “Peel your skin off, cut you in pieces, use a big hammer, or electric shocks, which would you prefer?” ’ Another interrogator demanded to know who killed General Álvarez. ‘I told him that it was probably the CIA, which is what I believed.’21
Berta and Salvador returned in February 1990. Berta, almost nineteen, was pregnant with their second child and happy to be reunited with baby Olivia. But the couple remained committed to the cause and would secretly go in and out of the country with high-ranking fighters like Commander Fermán Cienfuegos, whom they escorted between Nicaragua and El Salvador, often via Doña Austra’s safe house.
Bertita Isabel Zúñiga Cáceres was delivered at home in La Esperanza by her grandmother on 24 September 1990. But even then, the couple didn’t end their militancy. They went back several times, sometimes with both infants who served as the perfect camouflage to smuggle Salvadoran fighters across the border. Once, when Olivia was eighteen months old and just learning to talk, she called out ‘Pompa, pompa!’ to the soldiers on the border, confusing them with friendly guerrillas on the other side whom she knew as compas (short for compañeros).
Enough Bloodshed
In El Salvador, 80,000 people died, 1 million were displaced and 8,000 disappeared over twelve years of brutal conflict. In Guatemala, more than 200,000 mostly poor indigenous campesinos were killed in the thirty-six-year war, 93 per cent of them by US-backed forces.22 The decade-long Contra war in Nicaragua cost 50,000 lives. But no matter how many US tax dollars were funnelled to military dictatorship after military dictatorship, no matter how many weapons and planes America sent, there wasn’t a single battlefield victory. Every peace deal, however flawed, was signed thanks to dialogue and negotiations off the battlefield, almost certainly greased by economic interests. Berta and Salvador came home certain of one thing: armed struggle was not the way forward.‘We saw with our own eyes how war generates abuses on each side, and that the majority who died were young, poor men and women who took up arms because they were hungry or forcibly recruited, not because of ideology,’ said Salvador. ‘Times were changing, and we came home convinced of the need to launch an unarmed social movement. Whatever we did in Honduras, it would be without guns.’
