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- [00:00]
Nina Lakhani
Foreign.
- [00:19]
Amy Westervelt
Hello and welcome back to drilled. I'm 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 Berta Caceres. 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, etc. 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 Berta's work was. Nina also wrote an entire book on Berta's story. It's called who Killed Berta Caceres? It's really, really excellent and has all of the receipts on this whole wild story. So Nina's going to 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.
- [02:03]
Nina Lakhani
This is an IHEART podcast.
- [02:05]
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- [03:14]
Nina Lakhani
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- [03:26]
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- [04:03]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
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?
- [04:20]
Nina Lakhani
Berta Castres was a, you know, a unique leader. She had this really incredible capacity to explain local struggles in regional and global economic and political sorts 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 traveled internationally. She spent a lot of time with indigenous communities, inland 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 the social movement. People sort of have their little fiefdoms in a way. She could bring together the campus se Latinos with students. 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 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.
- [06:17]
Amy Westervelt
Yeah.
- [06:17]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
How did her work first come on your radar? You were reporting in Central America when she was active.
- [06:22]
Amy Westervelt
What did you first kind of see her do?
- [06:25]
Nina Lakhani
I met her in 2013 during my first trip to Honduras. I went for what was 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. Two international observers who'd come for the election. And she was warning them with such clarity that these were not going to 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, I mean, it was. 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. So I'm. So I met her there and I asked her for an interview. At that time, she was on the lab. There was an arrest warrant out for her on bogus criminal charges related to her leadership in this opposition of this internationally funded dam called Aguazarca. And at the time, her and two colleagues had arrest warrants against them. And so she was sleeping in different places every night. The international at that point had said that 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 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, the situation was like in Honduras, for her personally, for her. 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 go to the river that the Lenka people consider sacred 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 moral and political and ethical clarity, you know, and she knew she had been told to leave the country to safeguard her own life, but she was absolutely determined to stay and to continue fighting for a Better future for people of Honduras.
- [09:13]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
There's this line in your piece where
- [09:15]
Amy Westervelt
you said that when you heard about
- [09:17]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
her assassination, you thought to yourself, jesus, if they can kill Bertla Caceres, 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?
- [09:30]
Nina Lakhani
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 US Congress had taken up sort of her case as had all of the major sort of human rights organizations.
- [10:05]
Amy Westervelt
To give you a sense of Bertha, here's a short clip of the speech that she gave when she accepted the Goldman Prize in 2015.
- [10:35]
Nina Lakhani
Capitalista racista y patriarcal.
- [10:47]
Amy Westervelt
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.
- [11:01]
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- [12:25]
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- [13:25]
Kal Penn
hey everyone, it's Kal Penn. I'm the host of Irsay The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook project, Hail Mary, Massive sci fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you wake up alone, very far from Earth.
- [13:49]
Ray Porter
I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo yo yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that that deeply, emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic. That's great because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah dude, me too.
- [14:21]
Kal Penn
Listen to Irsay the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [14:29]
Nina Lakhani
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 La Esperanza, I think, about a month after her assassination, where I met us 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 the Oblanco, 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. She was under surveillance. 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 on their way back to Argentina. And the goodbye felt like something more than just a normal, see you soon. So I think she knew her 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 I say young soldier from one of the Special Forces who went AWOL a few weeks after her murder because. Because he had been in a unit that had been passed around this hit list in which there was a name and personal details of multiple social and community leaders. Some of them had an X through them who had already been neutralized. And Berta's name was on that list. And so he went AWOR 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, really awful training that he had had as a young soldier, how there'd been military trainers from Israel, from Colombia, from other countries there, and was just really frightened he had to leave the country. He's never been able to go back to the country since, you know. And as I wrote those pieces, I became a target myself. The Honduran ambassador in UK wrot complaints asking for stories to be sort of retracted. The US ambassador in Honduras at the time launched 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 going to launch an Inquiry because the army units that had had this hit list circulated were US trained army units, but they carried out no investigation, didn't speak to any of the people that were in my piche. 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'd never gone into Honduras by air. I've always gone in over land, 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, kept investigating the links. And then I was the only journalist, National 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 hitmen, 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 Baja Oguan 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's that sort of classic case of knowing that you're hitting the right things because you're really upsetting people. When I was reporting on the trial, the threats got came to me from the Aguan, which is this rural sort of region where there's been long standing land conflicts between African palm magnets and campesinos, 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, you know, 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 Barta's death posed a threat to all of them. Yeah.
- [19:53]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
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?
- [20:06]
Nina Lakhani
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 Lenka 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, you know, 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 reverting 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 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 the investigation into her murder at that time, the DAM company was continuing to pay police investigators, journalists to present information that served them. They were receiving images from the crime scene themselves, right, 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 became the only eyewitness to blame the murder on him, to blame the murder on her colleagues, her organization, to blame the murder on a romantic partner. All of this was coordinated. And the DAM company could not have done that themselves. They didn't do it 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 in this. Right, but this was an organized criminal enterprise that orchestrated the violence against Barta. The Lenka community 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, 2/3 of the money that was purported by two international banks, international development banks, was diverted to pay for the surveillance, the intelligence operations, the informants, the murder itself, this armed security. And the banks involved, well known international banks, that an utter failure of their own due diligence obligations. Right? And their obligations around human rights. Barta wrote to 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 are 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, 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 to pay a coyote to try and get to the U.S. right. That's not justifying what they did at all. But they were also victims of the same sort of structural violence that exists in the country.
- [24:37]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
Right. Like ultimately they pulled the trigger, but they're not the ones that planned and orchestrated and all of that. That's so sad.
- [24:46]
Nina Lakhani
Just to underline, the US is sort of role in this. You know, I mean, two of the intermediaries had received US training at different points of their career. A whistleblower, I've already mentioned, he in this unit called satru, which terrorized the Aguan region after the coup and which received lots of US training. And it's worth just naming David Castillo. David Castillo was the president and founder of the DAM company. He was a former intelligence officer trained at West Point in New York State. And he is 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, the US made him right. And he used these intelligence tactics and strategies to try to get close to Balta, to infiltrate the community. And you know, the US has this launch and glorious history of training people who go on to commit some of the worst sort of human rights abuses in Latin America.
- [26:05]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
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.
- [26:34]
Amy Westervelt
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.
- [26:46]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
Tell us a little bit about him and his work. What's his story?
- [26:51]
Nina Lakhani
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 and Bertha's organization, they organize around environmentally destructive megaprojects, but they also do a lot of work around training and helping communities develop local energy alternatives to global capitalist projects. And him and Bertha go back years. She 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 said, you know, they'd really been in the trenches and the two organizations would do a little back and forth of training each 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 because he was going to do several days of workshops for Lenka community members on renewable energy projects. So he'd got there, they'd stayed up late talking, you know, 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 had been reconnaissance missions. The ex military sort of officers that had been paid as intermediaries had conducted 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 Bertha and the other shot and another shot Gustavo. And they shot him in the face and it hit his ear and so he was bleeding a lot because it was like. And so he just stopped. He just laid down and pretended to be there and they thought he was dead. So he survived an assassination attempt, right? And then stayed still and quiet until he was shot. 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 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. You know, 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.
- [30:08]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
Too close.
- [30:10]
Nina Lakhani
Too close. Yeah. I mean, I think all of that personally has obviously had this huge impact on his physical well being, on his psychological well being. When I spoke to him just a week or two ago, saying it's only now, little by little, that he's sort of reading, like, the court files, she's just been too difficult. And he's just realizing 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 think the other thing to say is that for him, 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 spent years really focused on demanding justice for Berta. Right. And trying to recuperate and refocus. And, you know, it was a huge crisis that had a lot of the work that him and Bertha had initiated regionally. Like, they had all of these. These, like, regional sort of meetings where groups with 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.
- [31:19]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
Yeah, I thought that was so interesting and important reading your piece, because sometimes I think 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?
- [32:04]
Nina Lakhani
So far, eight people have been convicted of participating in the murder. David Castillo is the most senior of the other seven. Are the hired Assassins and the intermediaries, 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, Bertha is among almost 100 land and environmental defendants that have been murdered in the last 10 years. And there's been no accountability for any of those people. So it's a small miracle in a way. And it's really thanks to who she was, right? The fact that her murder triggered this international outrage. But really thanks to like the persistence of her four children, of her organization, of the people who knew and who loved her, who have never stopped demanding justice. I remember when I went to La Esperanza a month after her murder and I met her daughters and two of them said to me, they were in their early 20s at the time and they said to me, we know that it's on us to get justice for our mother, that the state is not going to do it, that we are now going to dedicate our lives to doing that. And they have, right? And so there's been a huge amount achieved, but. And there's also been like some people, three people were convicted for the fraud around the dam concession itself. But there is so many people and so many institutions that have not been investigated, to name a couple. The dam company, the financial manager was a man called Daniel Atala Midens. He and David ran the dam company that did all the day to day operations. There's been an arrest warrant out for him for two and a half years. He was involved with David in diverting the funds, in paying the informant, in paying the assassins, all of those things. He has not been arrested. I mean, and the fact it took eight years to even issue that arrest warrant is an absolute travesty of justice. An investigation by independent experts that was supported by the Inter American Commission of Human Rights recently published a 500 page report in which they talk about all the different sort of levels of accountability that remain. The shareholders of the dam company who were in the group chats when the violence and the repression and the illegal payments were being organized. Right? Who either knew or should have known. The government officials, institutions, the armed forces that participated in the violence before, during and after her murder have never been investigated. Right. You know, one of the things that strikes me as most sort of, I guess, emblematic of this is that the dam license, despite there being convictions around the fraud in that license, has never been revoked. Indigenous communities across the country and Other rural communities continue to face huge obstacles in obtaining community collective land titles, which means that they are very vulnerable to the terrible laws that exist in Honduras where, you know, any old person can come along and lay claim to a piece of land in which there isn't a land title. And so that contrast, constant threat lingers over the community even to this day.
- [35:33]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
I think it makes sense now to talk about Garifuna and Miriam so like that. To me that's just such a classic example of this, that there was this
- [35:42]
Nina Lakhani
2015 Inter American Court of Human Rights.
- [35:45]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
Yeah. That like said, yes, the government illegally allowed all of this development on these people's land. They should be have the land returned to them or be compensated, whatever. And then you know, what has happened in the meantime. So yeah, can you talk a little bit about that? And then I want to play some tape from Miriam who was Bertha's friend and is fighting that fight now.
- [36:11]
Nina Lakhani
Yeah, Miriam Miranda. I mean another extraordinary woman, an extraordinary indigenous leader. Her and Bertha were best friends, they were comrades, they were sort of sisters in the struggle. Both were targets of misogynist, racist smear campaigns. They were called bad mothers, they were called anti development. But they always had each other. They were together everywhere. And I think Barta's loss has been, you know, no one in the movement has felt it as much as Miriam has. I think just this fear, this constant fear that she could be next. And it's a well founded fear. She has received so many different threats, has really sort of caused her to retreat a lot from the public work that she was doing as she remains sort of an incredible leader. I spoke to her the other day and she was very clear that two events mark the indigenous and land struggles in Honduras in the last decade. One is the murder of her friend and the other was this inter American Court landmark sentence at the end of 2015 which found that the state of Honduras had violated the human rights and the ancestral territorial rights of the Garithinaput people on the north coast of Honduras in a community called Linford de la Cruz and later in Punta Gorda as well. And that the state of Honduras was ordered to return the land, pay whatever compensation be necessary to the people who were going to this land to apologize and to make sure these things never happened again. Right. Ten years on, that land has not been returned. More land, more ancestral land has been taken, has been sold to private investors. Some of the people who have bought this land illegally include government officials from every single party that exists in the country. There has been ongoing development and encroachment and those Garifuna leaders who have been trying to get the state to comply with his sentence have been disappeared. They've been killed, they've been forced into exile, they've been forced to migrate to the US or elsewhere. And it's this perpetual state of violence and land grab that have continued. I actually spoke to a local leader in June for De La Cruz yesterday, a woman called Frances. And on the 10th anniversary of the court sentence that was the end of last year, they're so sick, fed up of non compliance with the state that they've decided to take matters into their own hand and have started to reoccupy peacefully the land that is theirs, that the highest court in negotiations continent has ruled to be their ancestral land. And the result has been that they have been criminalized. They are now facing criminal charges that if found guilty, they could face up to nine years in prison. Right? And, but she said to me that this is our land, we are not going to give up on our land and we're going to keep occupying it. But this is constant state of fear and struggle. And I think the Galifuna community and the Lenka community, because of who Miriam and Bertha were, you know, always worked so closely together and their struggles. There's a lot of parallels between the two.
- [39:28]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
It was so interesting to me that you, you described what's happening there and that people can't, because so many of the indigenous people don't have like hard copy land titles, that it's, that these people can come in and be like, oh, this is my land. And then if you can't prove that you own it with this title, then you don't have a leg to stand on. And I get to just take this land. It's, it's w. Absolutely wild.
- [39:54]
Nina Lakhani
The onus is on communities who have lived on the land for decades, if not centuries. The onus is on them then to prove that they are not invaders. And because of this absolutely outrageous reform to the penal code in 2020, which was condemned by every single international law expert that you can imagine, a business person, someone who wants a piece of land, can register a piece of land in their name or the name of any at the land registry, take it to a court and say, hey, this is my land and there's invaders on it and the community there can be evicted within 48 hours. They're called express evictions, you know, so you have communities across the country just living on, in shacks on the side of the road because they have Been tafed off their land, where they have crops, where they have, you know, ancestral rights and yeah, it's a completely outrageous and illegal.
- [40:51]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
We kind of touched on this a little bit. But you know, you had the coup then post coup, you had this very pro business narco government and then you had this brief period of the Libre Party that seemed like they were going in the right direction, but didn't make any changes to sort of the major structural foundations of this stuff. So they didn't enforce this ruling from the regional court either. Right. So I want to play a little bit of tape from this woman, Karen Spring, that you spoke with about this because I thought she had this great line about how it doesn't matter who's in charge. The problem is, you know, is endemic and it's also connected to neoliberal capitalism globally. And then I want to talk a little bit about what the Libre Party was and why it didn't sort of work to, to change things.
- [41:41]
Karen Spring
It's systemic. It doesn't matter who's in power in, in Honduras or who's in the presidential palace or the Supreme Court, the, or the public prosecutor's office. It's systemic. It's part of how the system functions, the neoliberal economic system. It needs impunity, it needs corruption, it needs political actors to be involved in organized crime in order to advance in countries like Honduras and many others around the world. This is how the system is supposed to work. And, and it's very unfortunate.
- [42:17]
Amy Westervelt
Karen Spring is co coordinator of the Honduras Solidarity Project. She mobilized help on the night of Bertha's murder.
- [42:25]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
Okay, so Nina, what was and is
- [42:28]
Amy Westervelt
the Libre Party and what did they try to do?
- [42:31]
Nina Lakhani
Yeah, until the coup. Honduras in its sort of very brief democratic sort of period of, I don't know, 20, 25 years, it was a two party system, right. The National Party and the Liberal Party, which honestly resembled a lot the Democrats and the Republic, was very little between them in many things. Powerful elites running two parties. The Liberal Party was ostensibly better than the National Party when it came to human rights and sort of some social issues, but there wasn't that much between them. The coup happened, which is orchestrated mostly by the National Party and their economic sort of military, religious allies, but with some Liberal Party members around the fringes too. And then, you know, in the wake of that, in the country coming years, the Libre Party is born really out of the resistance to the coup. Right. So it includes academics, unionists, social movements, all of those things, but also has veteran politicians from the Liberal Party, Right. Including Manuel Zelaya, who was the Liberal Party president who was deposed in the coup. Right. And among many others. And a lot of these Liberal Party politicians have their own connections to land violations, alleged connections to organized crime and other types of wrongdoing. Right. But it does rise out of the social movement. And Manuel Zelaya would have liked to have been president again, but he was a man that the US could not do business with. Right. And there was no way they were ever going to allow him to run for president again. So his wife, former first lady Xiomara Castro, runs for president and wins at the end of 2021 and comes into power in 2022. It definitely brought hope, right? Being completely cynical, I don't know how much Neymar Castro wanted to be president. And I think lots of evidence that I saw her husband was running a lot of things in the background, but it did bring hope. And one of the things that I think people were really sort of energized about at the beginning was that she announced these sor priority investigations, these commissions, which included a commission into the Garifuna land issues, into the implementation of the Inter American Court human rights sentence, into Aguan land conflicts, into Berta's case, for example. We learned some really important things. There was good steps taken, but at the end of the day, it's about action, right? And they failed to deliver transformative actions, structural changes. The people I spoke to, the analysts I spoke to, would say that all of the commissions, inquiries they set up have to be thought of as failures because they did not achieve structural changes. But interestingly, like Honduras, like Latin America, general social movements are very active despite the huge risk that they face. People go out into the streets, they protest, they demand better. And that. That really didn't happen during the Libre government. Right. And I think partly people say it's because everyone was exhausted after 13 years of national Party abuses. I think people also didn't want to close the door to dialogue with the government. I think people felt reassured because so many people from the resistance ended up in government. And so they didn't have that pressure on the streets, which I think is really important. And so I think, I think, you know, there was some positive changes. There was definitely fewer land grabs, there were fewer land, environmental activists murdered, but, you know, nowhere near enough. And certainly they cannot claim that they delivered on their promises.
- [46:17]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
It's a good lesson for American politics. I feel like this happens all the time where, I mean, we saw it in the, like Trump to Biden to Trump cycle in the Us too, where people really got galvanized around just getting rid of this one administration and not the structural things underneath that were going to continue to be bad. And I mean, there's so much lecturing. I don't know if this was happening in Honduras too, but in the US There was so much like lecturing of the center left to the left. You know, it's like, don't criticize the IRA and don't criticize whatever. And it's like, well, then you end up with no structural change and policies that can easily be chucked out as soon as the next conservative government comes in, which the conservatives seem to know really well. And it sounds like the National Party has learned that lesson as well.
- [47:08]
Nina Lakhani
Yeah, you know, we have the National Party president that governed for two terms. Juan Orlando Hernandez was running a criminal enterprise through the party. Him and his brother Tony Hernandez, who was a member of Congress, were both convicted in the Southern District of York, New New York, of being major drug traffickers and armed traffickers to the U.S. juan Orlando Hernandez was sentenced to 45 years in jail in 2024. And at the end of last year, pardoned by Donald Trump. Right. And now Trump supported National Party candidate has been reelected into government, a construction magnet. And really the brief respite that the Libre Party sort of provided despite not making any real major changes is over. And I think that the parallels between what you've just described in the US And Honduras are really important to make. Right. Is that actually being on the streets, the public protests are essential to, to delivering long term transformational changes. Are they enough on their own? No. But without them it's not possible.
- [48:20]
Amy Westervelt
Right.
- [48:20]
Nina Lakhani
And so I remember when Biden won, I was living in the US then, and even in the newsroom I was working in, the relief among some people was like, oh my God, we can just, we can breathe again. We can just, you know, we can go. Branches return. Exactly, exactly. And you know what? Rights are very hard to fight for, but it's even harder to keep them. Right. And I think both these countries can show us that.
- [48:47]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
Okay, I want to talk about Juan Lopez and his assassination in 2024. That was when the Libre Party was still in power. Right. So, you know, a very similar situation to Bertha happened under this party. Another example of how this is happening regardless of who's in power. But tell me a little bit about who he was and what happened in that situation.
- [49:09]
Nina Lakhani
Juan Lopez was a community leader from the Bajo Guan area. He was an evangelical pastor. He was one of the key People who helped organize opposition to this huge polluting iron ore mine that had been sanctioned within a nationally protected forest area where there are sort of really important water sources serving thousands of people in the area. And this mine was owned by a very, very powerful wealthy couple linked to the National Party. The community is called Waipinol. And he was one of the key leaders in organizing that. And the repression against that community that happened during the previous administration, but also during the Liberal administration was really just like outrageous. Seven people, I think, not Juan, but seven other leaders were jailed for two years without bail for bogus charges. Juan and many others faced criminal charges as well. The community was military. They had threats all of the time. But the interesting thing about Juan was that at the time of his murder, he was actually an elected Libre Party official in the city of Tacoa, which is the main city in Niaguan. So he was like a local sort of councillor. And he had been calling out alleged corruption between the mayor, a Libre Party mayor, and organized crime. And he had been calling this out and he had been investigating these sort of alleged corruption, links to the mine, but also linked to other sort of wrongdoing, organized crime. And he was shot dead coming out outside a Church in September 2024. I mean, it was really the most impactful murder of environmental and land defender since Berta. You know, Juan was much loved, incredible communicator, very well known, and a Liberal Party elected official, right? He loved, like Berta was meant to be the recipient of protective measures that had been ordered by the Inter American Commission of Human Rights because of the threats that he was facing. And he was killed. Anyway, like with Berta, the case of the Guapino Defenders was well known by and had been taken up by many different UN experts who after his death, specifically called out for an independent investigation that looked at at the ties between the mining company and the local mayor in the mayor's office in the crime. None of that has happened so far. Three alleged assassins have been charged and their trial is due to start later this year. But none of those who conspired or ordered paid for this murder have been. There's no evidence have even been investigated. And I've spoken to people who have contacts in the prosecutor's office. The investigation has not proceeded at all. And so really to this day, if we think about since the coup, I'd say I don't know, at least 200 land and environmental defenders have either been killed or disappeared in Honduras. And Batas is by far the case where there has been Most accountability, accountability remains almost impossible. Impunity remains the norm. And I think with Juan's case, what we're seeing is example of that.
- [52:38]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
You just started to talk about this connection between what happened with Hernandez and then being convicted and then pardoned by Trump, and then, I don't know, a year later, he is going after Maruro for drug trafficking charges and using it as an excuse to take over Venezuela. So, yeah, I mean, you must have been going like, oh, my God, there's so many parallels.
- [53:02]
Nina Lakhani
Yeah, well, I mean, the Venezuela piece of this goes back to the coup, actually. Right. And so Manuel Zelaya, the liberal president who was deposed in 2009, when he came into office, he was just like another landowner, right? He'd been involved in lots of logging. He comes from one of the oldest traced Spanish sort of settler families. I mean, but slowly over his mandate, as he became closer to the social movement, right. And he actually became quite close to Chavez, Hugo Chavez at the time, and was buying oil from Venezuela and the US Government at the time, specifically Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, absolutely hated this, right? Loathed, loathed Zelaya, who decided to buy Venezuelan oil because energy prices are so disgustingly high, like outrageously high in Honduras because of this sort of mafia monopoly of the energy sector. When Hillary was standing for president against Trump, I went back and investigated her role in that, and I didn't find any smoking gun of the US involvement in the coup. But I absolutely can say that the US and Hillary Clinton in particular, allowed the coup to proceed and they allowed the post coup regime to do what it wanted to do because the liar was a Persona nonum gratifa as far as the US was concerned. Right, so the Venezuela link goes back to then. Now, fast forward. Juan Orlando Hernandez was pardoned at the end of last year, literally as plans were already underway by the US to illegally depose Maduro. Literally at the same time, Trump was claiming that Maduro and his wife and the Venezuelan regime were part of drug cartel which doesn't exist.
- [55:04]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
I know that one kills me because
- [55:05]
Amy Westervelt
you could see it.
- [55:06]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
They're like talking about it as though it exists. And then they kind of get a couple of leaders that are friendly to them to repeat this name, that this exists. And then.
- [55:15]
Nina Lakhani
And yeah, well, they claim they were leading the Cartel Del Sol. The Cartel Del Sol is like this nickname that Venezuelan journalists gave to first Venezuelan military office, but then anyone from the state who were engaged in allegedly corrupt actions. So it doesn't exist as a group. It's like a Loose term to describe corrupt officials. So, yeah, so, I mean, literally, they pardoned this major drug trafficker. I mean, Hernandez unleashed scale of violence not before seen in Honduras. He deployed the army and the police, created a whole new militarized police force in order to run this criminal enterprise, which, by the way, led to huge amounts of targeted killings of journalists, of defenders, of lawyers, of political opponents, of children, of women, and to hundreds of thousands of Hondurans fleeing the country to immigrate to the US Right. The man responsible for that and for transporting tons and tons and tons of cocaine to the U.S. yeah, the U.S.
- [56:27]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
described it as him making a cocaine highway from Latin America to the U.S. yeah.
- [56:34]
Nina Lakhani
Honduras before the coup was not a major player in the cocaine trade. But a couple of years after the coup, around 80, 80% of the cocaine coming from the south was Transiting through Honduras. 80. Wow. Right. I mean, the coup if as well as unleashing this sort of pro business extractive nightmare on the country, it turned Honduras into a major player in the international drug trafficking trade. And the person found guilty by a US jury and sentenced to 45 years was pardoned by Trump weeks before Nicolas Maduro and his wife were illegally abducted from Venezuela and transported to a jail. I mean, the joke here was the bed was still warm and unders left, the bed was still warm when Maduro landed in it.
- [57:26]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
Wow. Okay, so all of this can be very depressing and disheartening for activists, right? That it's like, man, the more sick. It's always hard, you're never winning. And then when you do it, you know, you up your chances of being assassinated. Let's talk a little bit about the lasting impact that Bertha had on the movement other than, I mean, there was this unintentional negative impact of like, there was all this time that was, that was spent on trying to get justice for Bertha and like, that took away from other things. But what are some of the things that she helped to put in place that are still there now and maybe coming back to life a little bit now too.
- [58:07]
Nina Lakhani
Her family and copinh always say both of them, Dai, she multiplied. And I think that's really true. I mean, honestly, over the last decade, the amount of places that I've been where I've seen murals or slogans like commemorating birthday friends, traveling in places in different continents, send me photos of sort of these, you know. Yeah, these graffiti or pictures or whatever. I mean, I think that, you know, because of who she was and because she was so well known internationally, right. In indigenous movements in local struggles in every continent, that she left a mark. Anyone who ever met her has never forgotten her. But now what I find really incredible, and Gustavo talked a lot about this, is that people who were too young to remember Barza when she was alive or who never met her are inspired by her. As just one example, I was contacted by a. A young Mexican woman a couple of months ago who was living. She's studying literature in Montreal and she'd come across my book, which is available in French, right. And she'd read it. And Berta's story inspired her to write a short story which has now been published in a book. So it sort of inspired art, it's inspired documentaries, it's inspired social movements, it's inspired sort of grants and educational opportunities. And I think that is, yes, her loss has been. Been huge. And I don't. Leaders like Berta do not come along very often, and I think we really feel her absence. I mean, every time there's a scandal in Honduras or before every election, like, I think it's a gut punch for everyone because you miss her voice, you miss her analysis, you miss her clarity. But who she was and why she has missed so much means that she continues to inspire social movements, activists, leaders around the world. And I think, think that is real. And I think over the last few years, I think her organization, copim, which is now led by her second eldest daughter, Bertita, has moved from being in this potential crisis mode to looking forward to taking actions, proactive actions, and organizing around community, land, struggles and energy again. And I think some of these sort of regional bodies and conferences and so forth, that people just didn't have the time or energy or heart for a backup and running. So I think it's been a really slow process. I think her absence is really. It still felt really sort of starkly, but I think who she was and her leadership and her clarity and her courage, she said this to me when I interviewed her that one time. She's like, please don't think that I'm not afraid. I am afraid, but this is what I'm meant to be doing. And to me, courage is being afraid and keeping going anyway. And I think her courage is inspiring and it continues to sort of motivate people and movements around the world today.
- [61:08]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
Yeah, absolutely.
- [61:10]
Amy Westervelt
It's the kind of inspiration we all need more of these days.
- [61:15]
Interviewer (possibly Amy Westervelt or another host)
I just want to play some short
- [61:17]
Amy Westervelt
clips here from the commemoration of Berta's life that happened this week in La Esperanza. Nina gathered these from various friends that were there. First we're going to hear from Berta's daughter, Laura Zuniega Caceres. She says today, 10 years after the assassination of my mom, we say again that we do not accept death as a system that dominates the world. We do not accept violence. We do not accept war. We want to build peaceful societies of tenderness, of rebellion that can create alternative ways of life. Berta's friend Lenka leader Rosalina Dominguez also spoke at the ceremony, telling the crowd, berta empowered us women to fight for our rights as indigenous people. We are no longer afraid of the army or police or judges. Berta planted this rebellion and we continue to advance in her honor. After the ceremony, she talked about her role as women's coordinator for Berta's organization. Copeland, She says, for me, that role is very important as a woman following in the footsteps of our colleague Berta Case, who left us with the legacy that we can lead our fellow women and know that we also have the voice to defend and protect ourselves. And that's it for this episode. Again, check out Nina's book if you want to learn more about Berta Caseras. Also go and read read the story that she wrote for the website on bertha and the 10 year anniversary. There's a ton more background information and really interesting details about Berta and her life and all the things going on in Honduras since her death in that story. That's at Drilled Media. You can also sign up for our newsletter there. You can also donate to support support our reporting there and find all kinds of other stories and resources as well. Check it out. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.
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Nina Lakhani
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Nina Lakhani
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Nina Lakhani
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