Who Killed Berta Cáceres?. Nina Lakhani
Ismael Moreno, a Jesuit priest known as Padre Melo, to confirm Gustavo would guest on his radio show. ‘She was scared, but it was Camilito she was most worried about,’ Melo said: Berta had recently received an anonymous message threatening to chop her only grandchild into pieces.
Back at the workshop, Berta messaged SOAW’s Brigitte Gynther at 4:44 p.m., asking when she’d be back from Colombia. ‘I never found out what she wanted to tell me,’ said Brigitte. ‘But I knew something was wrong. She only contacted me when something was seriously wrong.’
After the workshop, Berta messaged a Swiss journalist who was interested in mining struggles in Honduras. ‘We’ve not allowed mines to enter [Lenca territory], but there are communities under threat,’ she texted him at 7 p.m., promising they would speak the following day.
Berta and Gustavo then left Utopía, popping in to visit her mother again before heading to her favourite downtown eatery, El Fogón, for dinner and a beer. Just before 9:30 p.m., a black double-cabin Toyota Hilux with polarized windows and no number plates was seen by a neighbour outside her mother’s house. Berta and Gustavo arrived back at her place just after 9:30 p.m.
Berta’s green and gold bungalow stands amid a scattering of garishly painted houses, some still empty or under construction, enclosed by a mishmash of wire and white wooden fencing, with views of a lake and distant pine-forested hills. The bungalow is on an unsurfaced road about 150 metres from the security gate, which is operated by two guards working in twelve-hour shifts.
The layout is unusual, with the front door leading into the open-plan lounge and a flimsy wooden back door leading into the kitchen. She and Gustavo sat on the front patio talking for half an hour or so, enjoying the breeze. Then he smoked a cigarette, while Berta finished working on a document. A couple of cars drove past behind the wire perimeter fencing.
Gustavo retired to the guest bedroom nearest the lounge. Berta’s room was at the other end of the narrow hallway. After changing into an olive-green t-shirt and black shorts trimmed in red and white, she sat on her bed, legs stretched out, and kept working. At 11:25 she sent a message to Juan Carlos Juárez, the police liaison officer charged with overseeing her protection. ‘Wherever you are, I wish you well. Please be careful. Besos [kisses].’
At around 11:35, Gustavo heard a noise. Tap! Tap! Tap! He thought it was Berta cleaning or fetching something from the kitchen, and barely looked up from his laptop. A minute or less later there was a louder, duller sound. Thud! Gustavo assumed Berta had dropped something in the kitchen. Then he heard her call out: ‘Who’s there?’
‘It was then I realized that someone was in the house and something bad was going to happen,’ Gustavo recalled. Seconds later, a tall, dark-skinned youth with cropped hair, wearing a black top and white scarf, kicked open the bedroom door and aimed a gun at his head from about two metres away. He heard the fuzzy sound of a walkie-talkie. Seated on the bed, Gustavo was looking straight at the gunman, when he heard Berta’s bedroom door being forced open. It sounded as if she was struggling to push someone away. Then he heard three shots. Bang! Bang! Bang! Berta’s legs gave way and she fell backwards. She tried to defend herself and scratched at the gunman as he bent over her. But she was weak, and the killer stamped on her bleeding body until she could no longer resist.
Gustavo jumped up off the bed and in a split second lifted his left hand to protect his face as the gunman fired a single shot. Bang! The bullet grazed the back of his left hand and the top of his left ear. Gustavo lay completely still on the floor as blood oozed from the wounds. The gunman was convinced and left, but still Gustavo dared not move. He didn’t hear a car drive away – what if the assassins were still inside the house? Moments later he heard Berta’s voice. ‘Gustavo! Gustavo!’
He ran to her and saw his friend sprawled on her back between the bedroom door and the wooden closet, struggling to breathe. Her curly black hair was sticky with the blood from three bullet wounds, spreading across her shorts and t-shirt.
Gustavo squeezed through the small gap between the door and her shivering body. He knelt down and wrapped his arms around her, trying to keep her warm and alive. ‘Don’t go, Berta! Don’t die! Stay with me,’ he begged. But Berta Cáceres was bleeding to death.
‘Get my phone,’ she murmured. ‘On the table.’ At around a quarter to midnight Berta uttered her last words. ‘Call Salvador! Call Salvador!’
Then she was gone.
Berta Cáceres had been murdered. Killed in her bedroom less than a year after winning the foremost prize for environmental defenders.
Gustavo survived. But would his eyewitness evidence be enough to identify the gunmen? And who was behind this bold execution? Could there ever be justice for someone like Berta in a country like Honduras, where impunity reigns supreme?
Would we ever know who killed Berta Cáceres?
Río 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