In That Moment I Knew We Were Lost
This is the story of the assassination of two environmental and human rights activists within weeks of one another in Honduras. One was a living legend, the other, new to the movement. I reported and wrote it for PLAYBOY in Spring 2016, and was the first American journalist on the ground investigating the murders. It was a tense assignment that produced a riveting true crime story that never did get published. Even good magazine stories get killed sometimes. Maybe it was too dark for a glossy mag. Maybe that’s just the way the business works. I’ve always been proud of the effort, passion and risk that went into this, but for some reason I haven’t shared it until now. Hope you’ll give it a read.
By Adam Skolnick
At around 8:30pm, on March 2, 2016, Berta Cáceres had dinner with her old friend, Gustavo Castro, at El Fogón, a popular restaurant and bar in downtown La Esperanza. A jumble of historic buildings with terracotta rooftops high in the Honduran sierra, La Esperanza (which translates as “hope”) is a quaint town of 11,000 and among the most peaceful in the country. It was also home to its most famous human rights and environmental activist. Who, before midnight, would be lying dead on her bedroom floor.
A 2015 recipient of the esteemed Goldman Prize, Berta Cáceres, 44, had been fighting for indigenous rights in her native Honduras since she was sixteen. For the past three years she and her organization, COPINH (Consejo Civicó de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras), were entrenched in battle against DESA (Desarrollos Energeticos, SA), a company owned in part by the wealthy and powerful Atala family and formed to build and operate the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project, a dam meant to harness the energy of the Gualcarque River in an emerald valley called Rio Blanco. Where the Gualcarque irrigated the local cash crop, shade-grown coffee, and the corn and bean plots that had kept the resident Lenca people well fed for generations. Three months a year, in the rainy season, it is swollen, muddy and hard charging with enough force to illuminate a skyscraper. The rest of the year it is meandering and mellow, rippling with foamy cascades as it slithered northeast through the fertile mountains.
The river is everything to the people of Rio Blanco. It’s where they do laundry, flirt and pair off under the stars. It’s been a playground for young children, a source of contemplation and reflection for Lenca elders. It is part of them, and in 2013 it looked as though it would be taken away. Suddenly, national police and private security shadowed them along the riverside, and roads were under construction without their consent. In response, Berta and her fellow organizers rallied the community to create roadblocks, shut down construction, and call out DESA executives for obtaining illegal land concessions.
Her critics considered her an anti-capitalist obstructionist, so hell bent on stopping corporations from moving the country forward that she was keeping the communities she represented needlessly underdeveloped. The truth is, Berta and COPINH had fought a wide range of projects slated for Lenca land over the years including solar and wind farms. Castro, director of an environmental non-profit in Chiapas, Mexico, intervened and suggested she embrace green energy, which he argued could help the Rio Blanco community develop on their terms.
On March 2, Castro conducted a renewable energy workshop at COPINH’s educational center in La Esperanza, known as Utopia. Nearly 100 people from Rio Blanco were bussed in, and after a long day in the classroom, and a nice meal together, he and Berta climbed into her truck for the short drive home. As she turned onto a dirt road leading out of the town center they passed a local cop. “It’s your turn to take care of me next weekend,” she said with a smile.
The Rio Blanco campaign had been one of the most heated in COPINH’s history. Threats against her life had been rolling in via text message, phone calls and in person from small-time politicians, DESA employees, soldiers, and deputized thugs. COPINH documented more than thirty of them in three years. Honduras, where 90% of all violent crimes go unpunished, has long been a graveyard for environmental activists and human rights defenders. According to London-based human rights watchdog, Global Witness, 111 activists were murdered there between 2002-2014, with 12 killed in 2014 alone. In response to those threats the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ruled the state was obligated to grant her police protection. It was supposed to be a 24/7 thing, but she principally used them when traveling to Rio Blanco and through the neighboring communities that were the source of those threats.
She and the officer joked amicably before she continued on the rutted road toward a still unfinished subdivision outside of town. At around 10pm she pulled up to her prim, single-story, avocado green house with a red tin roof. She’d bought it with her Goldman Prize money and moved in the previous January. Until then she’d lived her entire life at her mother’s house, where she and her ex-husband raised four children. But as threats mounted, Cáceres came to believe she was a danger to those she loved. She’d already sent three of her children away to Guatemala and Argentina, and she wanted to keep her mother safe too.
It was a cool and pleasant night. Berta and Castro pulled two chairs from the house onto the front porch to chat before bed, and their conversation proved an eerie foreshadowing. “We were talking about how isolated the house was, and how vulnerable she was living there,” Castro said. Her neighborhood was still in the midst of being converted from prairie to upmarket suburb, and most of the neighboring houses sat empty. Yet the pastoral setting was peaceful. Mountains, sprouting with pines, rose up behind her home. Stars twinkled in inky skies.
Just after 11pm, Berta showed Castro to his room and entered hers. Castro set up camp on his bed and was composing emails when, unbeknownst to he and Berta, four men quietly climbed the 5-foot chain link fence on the perimeter of the property and made their way to the back door.
At 11:40pm Castro heard a loud noise coming from the rear of the house. “It sounded as if something really big had fallen,” he said. In reality, one of the men had kicked the door open, leaving a boot print, and entered the kitchen.
“Who’s there?” Berta shouted from her room.
“In that moment, I knew we were lost,” Castro said.
He lunged to lock his bedroom door, but one of the men broke through. Time froze as he stared at an intruder standing ten feet away, without a mask, aiming his gun at Castro’s face.
Meanwhile, at least one more assailant was breaking down Berta’s bedroom door. Castro heard three shots fired, and a second later the man he’d been staring at fired his weapon too. Castro dove to the floor. One bullet nicked his left ear and grazed the side of his head. The other singed the back of his hand. With blood seeping from his wounds, it must have appeared to his would-be assassin that he’d scored a direct hit, and the gunmen took off running.
“They left in complete silence,” Castro said. There was no sound of doors opening, slamming shut or a getaway car. It was as if they’d disappeared into the blank night without a trace.
“Gustavo! Gustavo!” Berta called out. Bloodied and in shock, he staggered to her room, where he found her wounded and bleeding from her chest, arm and chin on the white tiled floor. “Call everyone, call all our people,” she gasped. Castro held her, his head on fire.
“Please Berta, don’t go,” he said. “Stay with us.” She didn’t last long, and just before midnight, it was official. One of the great grassroots activists in world history, the leading advocate for disenfranchised, indigenous Hondurans, and sworn enemy of a corrupt state, had been ambushed and murdered in her own home.
* * *
The subjugation of indigenous people in Honduras dates back to the 16th century when the Spanish first arrived, and the Lenca were one of five native cultures that lived autonomously and traded with one another peacefully. Indigenous people were soon enslaved and sent to work on plantations alongside Africans in chains, and in silver mines that built boomtowns like Tegucigalpa, today’s capitol.
The US took an interest in local politics at the turn of the 20th century when Honduras was on its way to becoming a banana republic, thanks to American owned fruit companies that grew cheap bananas for American consumption on vast tracts of land. They also built and operated telegraph lines and railroads, receiving massive land concessions from the government. The fruit companies demanded long hours, paid notoriously poor wages, and crushed strikes with brute force.
Four hundred years after Spanish conquest, those in the middle and upper classes were largely white skinned and of Spanish descent, and the disenfranchised labor class was populated with dark, indigenous people. Those same color lines exist today, along with an approach to development that remains big business first, in which wealthy corporations seek land concessions from the politicians they buy. No wonder Honduran democracy has long been unstable, with dozens of coups over the years. Yet, during the 1980s, when the socialist Sandinistas took power in neighboring Nicaragua and American military aid jumped from $31 million to over $280 million, to combat that red threat, the seeds of a formidable, non-violent, indigenous movement were being planted in Lenca country.
Born in 1971, Berta Cáceres, was named after her mother, a midwife in La Esperanza. The youngest of four children, she spent her early years tailing Doña Berta on house calls throughout the department (think: county) of Intibucá. Often, they’d visit poor Lenca communities where there was little to no electricity or indoor plumbing. Health care was non-existent, and the nearest schools were miles away. The people young Berta met on those trips were so humble, hard working and warm, their struggles didn’t seem fair.
“She became a humanist, interested in defending human rights,” Doña Berta said. It helped to have a strong mother to emulate. In 1982, Doña Berta, weary of the machismo power structure, ran for Mayor of Intibucá and won by mobilizing the women’s vote. She was one of the country’s first women mayors, and after serving three terms, was elected to Congress in 1990.
Meanwhile, the younger Berta became a student leader at her high school and then a local teacher’s college, where she’d recruit fellow activists to fight for human rights on a regional and national stage. Among them was her future husband, Salvador Zuniga.
Their courtship spanned the fledgling days of COPINH, an organization they co-founded, and their honeymoon was a successful campaign to halt 36 logging operations on Lenca territory. Yet, from the start, what set Berta apart from other activists of her generation wasn’t her commitment. It’s not too difficult to find informed 20 year olds willing to take to the streets for a cause. It was her vision.
In 1993, with the Clintons in the White House, and NAFTA on their legislative agenda Berta approached her mother with a plan to ratify a new bill called, Agreement 169, which would make it illegal for the government to give indigenous ancestral land away to corporations intent on developing it unless they had prior, public and informed consent. Although NAFTA didn’t directly impact Honduras, Berta and Salvador could see what similar free-trade agreements would mean for their country. International investment in Honduras would spike, and logging, mining and hydroelectric projects would soon follow. The World Bank was already engaged in an effort to privatize land that according to a 19th century Honduran law, belonged collectively to indigenous people.
“The richest parts of the country in terms of natural resources and biodiversity are where indigenous people live,” Salvador explained. For the Lenca, such a commercial climate promised forced migration from the farm to lawless urban slums patrolled by gangs, and an elimination of their way of life, not to mention that of myriad animal and plant species that thrived in and around their territory. Just 22-years-old, and without a university degree, Berta Cáceres was building a legal framework, which she’d use to defend indigenous rights and their land for the rest of her life.
Fast forward to 2001 and the birth of Plan Puebla a Panama. Drafted by government and business elite without community participation, it was a regional infrastructure program in which communication, transportation and energy infrastructure were plotted on a map linking Southern Mexico to Panama. With Agreement 169 on the books, Berta and COPINH kept tabs on proposed development projects slated for Lenca territory, often arriving in communities long before developers to organize opposition. One of their more satisfying victories occurred in 2006, two years after the first major Central American free trade agreement [CAFTA-DR] went into effect. That’s when the Inter-American Development Bank, a huge international, for-profit entity that provides loans, grants and technical assistance for large scale projects in Central and South America, invested in the proposed El Tigre dam on the Rio Lempa, the largest river in Central America. Berta and COPINH mobilized the community and defeated the project.
That same year, Manuel Zelaya, the heir to a timber fortune, was elected president, but Zelaya proved to be a friend of the worker and took a leftist tack as president. He doubled the minimum wage, declared a moratorium on hydroelectric projects, aligned with the socialist administrations of Cuba, Bolivia, and Venezuela and was a willing ear for indigenous communities. Three years later, he was ousted in what our own CIA called a military coup in a secret cable to Washington. Yet, the US, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was the only major country to stop short of going public with that condemnation. If we had labeled it a military coup, aid to the Honduran military would have stopped until the previous government was re-installed. Instead, Clinton helped organize an emergency presidential election, and a right-winger named Juan Orlando Hernandez was elected president. Soon after, he began handing out land and river rights in indigenous territory as if it was the turn of the 20th century all over again.
In 2011, DESA was officially formed to finance and build the Agua Zarca dam on Rio Gualcarque. The company’s leadership roster reads like a who’s who of the entitled and corrupt. According to documents obtained by Global Witness, DESA’s president, Roberto David Castillo Mejia worked in army intelligence before joining the Honduran state’s main energy company, ENEE. He was once found guilty of corruption for receiving salaries from both the army and the energy company at the same time and for price gouging the army through a supplier he owned. Second in command, Jacobo Nicolas Atala Zablah, is first cousin to Camilo Atala the billionaire owner of Banco Ficohsa, one of Central America’s largest banks, which is known to be engaged in money laundering for drug cartels. Also on the board is Jacobo’s brother, Jose Eduardo Atala Zablah, one time Honduran Director of the regional bank, Banco Centroamericano de Integración Económica (BCIE), and Roberto Pacheco Reyes, the former Minister for Governance and Justice in Honduras. DESA soon secured $24 million in financing from BCIE, a commitment to invest from the Central American Mezzanine Infrastructure Fund (CAMIF), a client of the World Bank, and hired the Chinese firm, Sinohydro, to design and build Agua Zarca.
Little did they know, Berta and COPINH had been organizing in Rio Blanco for years. At first, the local people were polite to her, but steered clear. They’d heard COPINH were communists, and were afraid to get involved, but COPINH kept showing up, and when they did, Berta, part Lenca herself, didn’t just discuss politics. She also taught long lost Lenca customs and helped foster a sense of pride in their shared culture.
In April 2011, Martiniano Dominguez, the mayor of Intibucá, arrived in Rio Blanco looking to organize a town hall, where company executives would pitch Agua Zarca in the hopes of winning community support. They promised 24-hour electricity, a first for Rio Blanco, and DESA engineers still claim the project would illuminate 22,000 homes. No small thing in poverty stricken Honduras. COPINH referenced the seasonal flow of the river and cited similar cases in which no additional electricity materialized in towns where dams had been built nearby.
According to local leader, Rosalinda Dominguez Madrid, and several other COPINH members in Rio Blanco, in response, the mayor took two of the town’s board of governors to a private house where they signed paperwork authorizing public consent. “He offered them money,” Madrid said, “a great amount of money.”
To strengthen their case, DESA sent in canvassers to go door to door pretending to conduct a population census that required a signature from every home. Armed with those signatures, the company was able to create a bureaucratic illusion that they’d won public approval, and were granted land rights from the minister of the Environment and Natural Resources. In 2012, Sinohydro’s first earthmovers showed up and began widening the 1.5-mile trail down to the river, into a road that would lead to Agua Zarca headquarters on the riverside.
With the community’s river access cut off, COPINH returned the favor. On April 1, 2013, they set up camp in the middle of Sinogydro’s road. Berta, whose marriage with Salvador had ended, was there along with one of the local leaders at that time, a farmer named Tomas García. Company envoys soon approached García with an offer of 20,000 Lempiras (a little under $1,000) to stop protesting and convince others to do the same. He refused. On July 14, an armed platoon approached the roadblock, García and others waved their machetes in defiance. Two shots were fired. One killed García, the other wounded his young son.
In the aftermath, Berta delivered a fiery speech. “We are going to continue to denounce this crime against indigenous peoples even if they want to deny our very existence,” she said, “[and we will] continue to defend the life of the sacred Gualcarque River against threats of invasion from DESA and other companies and from this very army!”
When news broke of García’s death and of DESA’s corrupt attempts to demonstrate public approval for Agua Zarca, Sinohydro and CAMIF both pulled out of the deal. Furious, DESA leadership approached the prosecutor’s office in La Esperanza to step in on their behalf. In August 2013, prosecutors charged Berta Cáceres with coercion. On September 20, 2013, she was ordered to jail. The community and their roadblock was unmoved.
In 2014, the coercion charges against Berta were dismissed, and the camp was attacked twenty times. Three more people were killed and a 12 year-old boy’s face was slashed so badly, his cheek flapped in the wind. Eventually, in 2015, DESA made a deal with leaders of the town on the other side of the river, San Francisco de Ojuera, and moved their headquarters to the opposite riverbank.
DESA had already partnered with the German appliance and energy giant, Siemens, to build the dam and won a new round of funding from the Dutch development bank, FMO, who kicked in $15 million, and the FinnFund, a development bank in Finland, which contributed $5 million. FMO is 51% owned by Dutch taxpayers the rest of their funding comes from private equity and trade unions. FinnFund is owned completely by Finnish taxpayers. This time DESA received legitimate public approval to build their headquarters, but the river was to be dammed at the same location, so the people of Rio Blanco continued to fight.
Through it all, there were dozens of threats made against Berta. Last November, when she was driving toward Rio Blanco, three shots were fired towards her truck. In December, a member of DESA’s private security team, Olvin Mejía, threatened to kill ten COPINH members, with Berta at the top of his list. According to Rio Blanco residents, Mejía was part of a mob that had burned down the house of one COPINH supporter the previous May and cut off another’s finger with a machete. In late December 2015 he was arrested for illegal weapon possession, and according to COPINH’s attorney, Victor Fernandez, who saw his police file, he’d been accused of murder in the past. After his arrest, DESA’s head of security allegedly bailed Mejía out of jail.
Around that same time, Tomás Gómez of COPINH received a phone call from a DESA supporter who told him that they were going to fix things with Berta Cáceres “for better or for worse.”
* * *
Gustavo Castro remained alone in Berta’s house for over two hours after she was killed. Tomás Gómez showed up at 2:15am and Castro climbed into his truck as more than a dozen COPINH members approached the house on foot, followed by local police. According to Castro everyone walked into the house to get a view of the fallen hero, contaminating the crime scene.
Nelba Raudales, 36, a local prosecutor with just 10 months on the job was on call that night and disputes the accusation that the crime scene had been compromised. She arrived at 3am, and claims that about 18-20 police and military personnel had secured a perimeter by then and only she, a forensics specialist and two investigators were inside working the case. By dawn, Raudales had been removed from the case and a team from the capitol had stepped in. Outside, Berta’s family and her fellow activists were seething as the sun rose. Castro and Aureliano Molina were taken in for questioning.
Molina, 28, was a legacy member of COPINH. He grew up in a farming family and when he was seven years old his parents had fought alongside Berta to kill five hydroelectric projects on three different rivers. After graduating from university with a degree in agriculture and engineering in 2009, he took a full-time position with COPINH and protested the coup, marching shoulder to shoulder with Berta and 3000 indigenous people. In 2011, when he was just 23, their mutual affection turned romantic.
Her most recent boyfriend, it made sense investigators would need to speak with him, and when he was asked to make a statement Molina didn’t hesitate. To him, it was an opportunity to direct investigators toward DESA and the threats coming out of the Rio Blanco campaign, including and especially Mejía. When he arrived at the police department just after 7am, however, he was placed in a cell and his hands were covered in plastic bags, sealed with zip ties. Next, they made him kneel in an interview room and asked him how he killed her?
He told investigators that he’d been home, two hours away, when he heard the news, but his alibis were his father and brother-in-law, and investigators didn’t believe any of them. The questioning went on for 12 hours. He claims that at one point an investigator cocked his weapon and placed the barrel of his gun to his head. “Say how you did it,” the detective commanded.
“It was psychological torture,” Molina said.
At 10am, after his wounds had been treated, still sleepless and in his blood soaked clothes, Castro also sat down with federal investigators in La Esperanza to reconstruct the timeline of events. Afterwards, they asked him to describe his would be assassin to an artist. The resulting sketch looked exactly like Aureliano Molina.
According to Molina, his hands remained bagged until 7pm when he was finally sent for a round of ballistics tests. Sometime afterward he was placed back in an interview room and could see his face on a televised news report. Someone had leaked to local media that Berta was killed as part of a scandalous love triangle, and that the authorities had their man. Police knew that in 2012, Salvador and Molina had once nearly brawled in the Cáceres family home, and depending upon whose story you believed, either Salvador or Molina brandished a machete that night. Factor in the 16-year age gap and it did make for a juicy narrative.
The only witness to what he still considers a political assassination, Castro is convinced that the sketch artist he’d spoken with was working from a photograph of Molina rather than Castro’s description. Terrified for his life, Castro was escorted to the Mexican embassy in Tegucigalpa via an armed motorcade on the evening of March 5. His flight out to Mexico City was scheduled for March 6 at 6am, and Dolores Jimenez Hernández, the Mexican ambassador, and her consul accompanied him to the airport. In a dramatic scene, ten men he’d never seen before, dressed in plain clothes, surrounded Castro as he approached immigration for his exit stamp.
Hernández, 64, a career diplomat not known for fending off armed mobs, threw herself in front of Castro and demanded the men identify themselves. They were police, they said, and Castro was under arrest. She politely yet firmly refused to comply, and managed to bring Castro to her home, safely. The next day, the papers reported that he had tried to flee. That love triangle story still had legs, and he was a part of it. Castro wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country for four more weeks.
For over a week, the investigation continued to focus on COPINH. With a boot print on the back door, the cops searched for a match, confiscating boots from every male COPINH member they could find, including Molina who was finally released by Del Cid after an intense 48-hour incarceration, during which even COPINH’s own lawyers wouldn’t come to his aid. Ballistics and DNA tests vindicated him. There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime scene. Meanwhile, there had been no raid of DESA’s offices, and no apparent attempt to follow up on the threats COPINH had meticulously documented, and Mejía had yet to be detained or questioned in the case. Then on March 15, there was another brutal murder within COPINH’s ranks.
* * *
Nelson García, 43, was relatively new to COPINH. A dental hygienist with a scrap metal business on the side, he worked hard to make a decent life for his wife and three children in Peña Blanca, a gritty, steamy, lowland town of 25,000 people. A do-gooder by nature, in 2014 he’d been pulled into a local battle to secure 12 acres of land for a group of destitute single mothers who had rightfully inherited it.
Fish farming is the main industry in the area, and about five years ago an Israeli expatriate tried to build his own tilapia operation. When it failed, he donated his land to the city so they could provide housing for those same single mothers. When they learned they’d won the equivalent of a lottery ticket, the women approached town leadership for land titles, but the mayor wanted 15,000 Lempiras (about $660) for each plot.
That doesn’t sound like much, but impossible for poor women on the fringes of an unforgiving economy. The dispute went on for nearly three years and the women turned to COPINH for help. In 2014, with COPINH’s and Nelson’s guidance the women occupied the land, built homes and planted gardens. They called the community, Rio Chiquito, and for two years they happily lived there, but the mayor never gave in.
In the dark early morning hours of March 15, 200 armed soldiers and police officers escorted a bulldozer into Rio Chiquito. Residents were forced to flee with whatever they could carry and watched from afar as their houses were leveled. Nelson arrived around dawn with breakfast for all the evicted families who told him their stories from a harrowing night.
Saddened by what he saw, he returned home at 7:30am. His wife, Mercedes had been concerned for his safety since the day before when she received a call from someone they did not know, adamant that Nelson buy some of his scrap metal. He asked odd questions about Nelson’s schedule and when she told her husband about it she asked him not to call the man back. Nelson agreed. That morning, the man called again. This time he said he didn’t need Nelson to come by his yard. He’d found another buyer. When she hung up she noticed two young thugs across the street, watching the house. All of it put Mercedes on edge. Nelson poured himself a glass of water as she mopped the kitchen floor, then grabbed his keys. He had to step out again to pick up metal from one of his regular suppliers. She didn’t like it.
“God takes care of these things,” he said sweetly. “I’ll be right back.” She continued to mop the floor half-heartedly, as she watched her 14-year-old son and husband climb into the cab of his truck. Suddenly someone she had never seen before appeared in her kitchen window, taking a handgun from his waistband.
“Hola Jefa,” he said with a smile.
Nelson saw him and turned the key, but the engine wouldn’t spark. The assassin seized the moment and approached the truck, firing. Their son jumped out and ran into the house, unscathed. Wounded, Nelson also tried to escape. In the commotion, their four-year-old son wandered into the driveway. “No papi! No papi!” He screamed, as Nelson attempted to run away, and his killer approached from behind.
“That’s when he finished him,” Mercedes said. Shot through the mouth, eye and chest, Nelson collapsed at the edge of his driveway. A neighbor rushed him to a local clinic, but by the time they arrived, he was dead.
A second COPINH murder within two weeks put everyone with any interest in Honduras on notice. The Dutch bank, FMO, and FinnFund had already disseminated half of their combined $20 million dollar investment in DESA, but suspended the remainder as they scrambled for a way out. Prosecutors raided DESA offices at their headquarters on the Rio Gualcarque, and weapons were repossessed from security and local police in the Rio Blanco area.
Quietly, the US embassy had taken an interest in Berta’s case immediately after her death. A federal prosecutor based at the embassy, and a former New York City detective with 100 solved homicides on his resume, who also happened to be a Honduras resident, were tapped to consult with Honduran investigators. Stateside FBI labs were utilized to process evidence.
On March 27, known hit man Didier Enrique “El Electrico” Ramirez, 39 was arrested for the Nelson Garcia murder. “They have the right man,” Mercedes said after his arrest. Though Nelson’s murder did not appear to be directly connected to Berta’s assassination, it demonstrated how easily those who speak up against the powerful in Honduras are eliminated.
All of it was too much for Mercedes to process. When I spoke with her over the phone in early April, she and her children were in protective custody. She’d started receiving graphic, threatening calls on the same day she buried her husband. Now she and her children move from cramped apartment to cramped apartment in strange cities with no money and only two changes of clothes. Her youngest is stricken with unrelenting nightmares, and Mercedes often fantasizes about running away to the United States.
I’d arrived in Honduras on March 31, and if any significant strides had been made in the Berta case by then, it was impossible to know, because authorities weren’t talking to the media or the Cáceres family who were livid at the freeze out, at the investigators’ slow pace, and continually questioned their objectivity. Even “El Electrico’s” arrest was of little solace. “Whoever did it, whoever’s hands did it, is the least important to us,” Laura Cáceres, 23, Berta’s youngest daughter told me. “We’re looking to find the masterminds of these killings.”
I visited Rio Blanco on April 2, and construction was still underway on the Rio Gualcarque. Rosalinda Madrid and about 150 villagers met me at their original protest site, and after lunch we walked to the riverside. The children were first to dive into the water, and soon a squadron of national police, with rifles slung over their shoulders appeared on a bluff across the river. One of them took aim at a few of the younger children swimming and playing. Adults shouted slurs in response, so he trained his weapon on them too. Then it landed on me before panning back to the kids. Enraged, three Rio Blanco teens had seen enough. The week before they had been tear gassed while swimming in their river. This time they ignited the brush just below the bluff where the police were standing. Flames shot up quickly and the police retreated from black smoke.
Honduras as a whole felt just as combustible. Corrupt and crime riddled, it’s a nation with little opportunity or upward mobility, and to many Hondurans, Berta Cáceres had long been that shining beacon of hope. Impassioned, intelligent, tireless, she took aim at the the gilded class with her words, and filled her people with resolve. In her career she and COPINH had defeated dozens of mega projects in Lenca territory. Now she was gone.
In the days after her death, protests erupted in La Esperanza and Tegucigalpa and street artists painted her portrait on walls across Honduras. Her funeral mass took place at an altar to the Virgin Mary, carved into stone cliffs that rise above the center of La Esperanza. It was conducted by ten priests, and attended by international dignitaries, and thousands of citizens, who’d traveled there from around the country to bid her farewell. Afterward, a crew of costumed Garifuna drummers from the Caribbean coast led a procession to the cemetery. It was a royal burial for their warrior queen.
On May 2, two months after her murder, news broke that four suspects had been taken into custody, including three people with DESA ties. Sergio Ramon Rodriguez Orellana, was DESA’s manager for social and environmental issues at Agua Zarca, and one of the Inter-American Development Bank’s contractors in Honduras—the first concrete tie to real money in the case. According to bank records he had been contracted to conduct environmental impact reports for two previous infrastructure projects in Honduras. In other words, it was his job to vet possible infrastructure projects for their environmental and social impact. Development banks are supposed to be held to high human rights and ecological standards, and if conflicts, corruption or degradation are found, loans should not go through. Orellana had been outed as an industry man, and accused of being the mastermind behind Berta’s murder.
Douglas Geovanny Bustillo, DESA’s on-site security chief, was also apprehended. He first blipped onto the COPINH radar when he threatened Berta with sexual assault via text message in 2015. Two suspects with military connections were captured, as well. Mariano Diaz Chavez was an active duty major that once served alongside American soldiers in Iraq, and Edilson Duarte Meza, 25 was a former captain in the Honduran army. According to a story in El Heraldo, one of Tegucigalpa’s two largest newspapers, they were the triggermen, and had been paid 500,000 Lempiras (US$22,100) to do the job. Duarte reportedly confessed to his role in the murders.
But who paid them? Orellana, Bustillo, or their superiors? A high-ranking source in the prosecutor’s office in Tegucigalpa told me in May to expect more arrests. “Regardless of their social position and status, people will be found,” they said under the condition of anonymity. “We will get everyone involved, regardless of who they are, and whatever connections they have.”
Unless corroborated by independent, international investigators, however, the Cáceres family is unlikely to be appeased by any arrests. Strangely, Castro hadn’t even glanced at the suspects’ photos when we spoke last May. Unless the family is satisfied with the outcome, he said, “I’m not interested in seeing them.”
Still, the May arrests clarified at least one outcome. Two days later both FMO and FinnFund permanently withdrew their funding and, Voith, a world leader in hydroelectric supplies, became the latest multinational company to pull out of Agua Zarca. For now, at least, the dam has been buried along with Berta, and the Rio Blanco community can only hope that their beloved river will run free forever.