Four months after the June 2009 right-wing coup d’état against President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, I interviewed coup general Romeo Vásquez at his office in the Honduran capital. An alumnus of the notorious U.S.-run School of the Americas—traditionally the go-to institution for Latin American dictators, death squad leaders, and torturers—Vásquez was your typical jovial military lecher, informing me with a wink that he would not at all mind taking a second wife.
On the subject of the coup, he had high praise for his “very democratic soldiers”—since you can’t get much more democratic than overthrowing the democratically elected president of a country and then proceeding to beat up peaceful anti-coup protesters and to shoot them in the head. In the general’s view, it was the protesters who were guilty of unspeakable crimes, such as “insulting people, dirtying walls” with graffiti, and “setting buildings on fire.”
Indeed, following a month and a half of brutal repression by security forces, flames had briefly engulfed one of the Tegucigalpa branches of the Popeye’s fast food establishment—an event that, unlike the killing of anti-coup Hondurans, was swiftly elevated to the rank of national tragedy. After all, in a country designed to serve as a vehicle for elite enrichment and corporate profit, life is cheap.
This reality is made painfully clear in a new book by journalist Nina Lakhani, focusing on one extraordinary life cut short by the powers that be in Honduras: Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet. Murdered in her bedroom in March 2016 at the age of 44, Berta was the cofounder of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) and had spent much of her existence stepping on the toes of power—or, more appropriately, stomping them into the ground. The very act of asserting indigenous humanity and rights was practically seen as a criminal affront to a prevailing system of predatory capitalism predicated on the subjugation of the masses and the usurpation of land and resources.
The last straw, apparently, was Berta’s leading role in opposing the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam on indigenous Lenca territory—a project undertaken in a context of massive institutionalized corruption and sketchiness and without the required consultation of the local community. As Lakhani details, this community stood to lose the Gualcarque River, which it depended on not only for its critical water and plant and animal life, but for its spiritual importance. The project was backed by the Atala Zablah family, an integral component of Honduras’ ruling class, and evidence uncovered during the murder inquiry suggests it was indirectly “partially funded by the World Bank Group, which has a mandate to give socially responsible development loans to alleviate poverty.” Rarely do U.S.-backed international financial institutions miss a chance to outdo themselves in the realm of irony.
The coup against Zelaya—who despite possessing no real leftist credentials had pledged a smattering of reforms benefiting the environment and the poor—paved the way for wanton extractivism. In the aftermath of the coup, Lakhani writes, the Gualcarque River was “sold off as part of a package of dam concessions involving dozens of waterways across the country,” in a sinister auction that also saw “mines, tourist developments, biofuel projects and logging concessions… rushed through Congress with no consultation, environmental impact studies or oversight, many destined for indigenous lands.” It was not an accident that Porfirio Lobo, who assumed the presidency of Honduras via illegitimate postcoup elections, declared the country “open for business.”
The United States, of course, was instrumental in the coup’s success, with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later admitting in her memoir Hard Choices her machinations to ensure that Zelaya, the lawful president, would not return to power. (As I was to discover, this admission was subsequently mysteriously excised from the book’s paperback edition.) Lakhani revisits a pre-coup cable from former U.S. ambassador to Honduras Charles Ford that is sure to nauseate even those intimately acquainted with Uncle Sam’s obscenely patronizing attitude vis-à-vis the self-declared Latin American “backyard.”
In it, Ford complains that Zelaya “remains very much a rebellious teenager, anxious to show his lack of respect for authority figures,” and that, “unlike most other Honduran leaders in recent times, Zelaya’s view of a trip to the big city means Tegucigalpa and not Miami or New Orleans.” The horror! Ford continues on to bemoan that Zelaya’s views “are shaped not by ideology or personal ambitions but by an old-fashioned nationalism where he holds the United States accountable for Honduras’ current state of poverty and dependency.” Well, yeah. Honduras doesn’t hold the distinction of being the original “banana republic” for nothing.
Berta Cáceres understood quite well the accountability of the United States—and, as Lakhani emphasizes, “to understand who she was and why she was murdered, you have to understand the past.” This past encompasses not only the banana republic era of the early twentieth century but also things like the 1954 Military Assistance Agreement, which “authorized the US to treat Honduras as a military satellite”—enabling the CIA coup of that same year against democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, another character who had been of the oh-so-radical opinion that maybe a bit of national territory could be put in the hands of landless peasants rather than U.S. corporations.
With the victory of the Sandinista revolution in neighboring Nicaragua in 1979, the aptly dubbed “U.S.S. Honduras” served as a convenient launchpad for terrorist Contra attacks against the latest Communist Enemy. The red menace also justified the formation of Battalion 3-16, described by the Baltimore Sun as a “CIA-trained military unit that terrorized Honduras for much of the 1980s.” During the 1981-85 tenure in Honduras of U.S. ambassador and “Cold War zealot” John Negroponte, Lakhani notes, U.S. military aid skyrocketed in “a pretty straightforward cash-for-turf deal in which the U.S. gained free rein over Honduran territory in exchange for dollars, training in torture-based interrogation methods, and silence.”
Having grown up in the midst of Cold War zealotry, Berta relentlessly “connected the dots from local to global.” Lakhani cites a recollection by Honduran Garifuna leader Miriam Miranda of how, during a march for indigenous rights, Berta stopped to decorate the walls of Palmerola airbase—home of Joint Task Force Bravo—with anti-imperialist murals: “Militarization and repression, Berta explained as she wielded her paintbrush, go hand in hand with [neoliberalism], because it is an economic and political model which must destroy some of us in order to thrive.”
And the connecting of dots hardly stopped there. Throughout her service as an activist, Berta placed local events and injustices within the necessary context of an overarching system of patriarchal, racist capitalism. In other words, she commanded just the sort of awareness of how the universe operates to pose a distinct threat to domestic elites and their neoliberal mentors in the United States, who prefer to string everyone along with cheery discourses of “development” and impending prosperity to mask the actual goal of general misery and crushing inequality.
To be sure, imperial habits die hard. As Berta herself presciently remarked: “We don’t call it that anymore, but in Central America the counterinsurgency strategy against social movements was never suspended and that’s exactly what’s being used now, to decapitate those of us fighting and resisting capitalism in our own territories.” Adding material evidence to that claim, Lakhani observes that both the president and head of security of DESA, the Agua Zarca dam construction company, were “U.S.-trained former Honduran military officers, schooled in counterinsurgency.”
Ultimately, seven individuals, including DESA officials, were convicted of Berta’s murder—a rare instance of legal action in a country where impunity reigns, femicides abound, and defending the environment is often a death sentence. Ostensibly, then, the question of “Who killed Berta Cáceres?” has been answered.
But as Lakhani demonstrates, it’s not really an answer at all. In fact, it was an entire system that killed Berta—a U.S.-backed world order, if you will—and pinning the blame on seven people is, well, a refusal to connect the dots.
Lakhani leaves the reviewer with so few opportunities for critique that literally the only quibble I could come up with was that, on a couple of occasions, Porfirio Lobo Sosa’s last name appears instead as Sosa Lobo. The book might have also benefited from some maps, a list of acronyms and a cast of characters.
Of course, Honduras is also an incredibly dangerous place to be a journalist, and Lakhani—no stranger to potentially life-threatening smear campaigns—has exhibited great bravery in telling Berta’s story. Just as Berta connected the local to global, Lakhani paints the big, brutal picture, using the life and death of one immensely courageous Honduran woman to lay bare global structures of power in an era in which the “battle for the planet” is on.
The epigraph at the beginning of the book reads: “You can’t kill the truth.” Indeed, the manuscript is proof of that. And in the end, Who Killed Berta Cáceres? is about so much more than Berta Cáceres—just as Berta herself was about so much more than Berta.
