Who Killed Berta Cáceres?. Nina Lakhani
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club, joined by most major Honduran industrialists, promoted deregulation, free trade and a ruthless response to social movements demanding better wages and conditions. APROH’s founding president was General Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, commander of Battalion 3-16.
Since then, the rural poverty generated by land inequality has been compounded by climate change and natural disasters like Hurricane Mitch in 1998; rising food prices; systematic land grabs by agribusiness and tourism developers; and shocking levels of violence perpetrated by state security services and private militias contracted by organized criminal gangs, corrupt politicians and seemingly reputable businesses, at times all working together.
Paradoxically, it was this complex set of harsh conditions which sparked new grassroots social and political movements like COPINH and campesino collectives challenging land distribution in the Bajo Aguán. This pitted the campesinos against feudal king and political heavyweight Miguel Facussé Barjum.
Facussé trained as an aeronautical engineer in Indiana, in the American Midwest, and started his career by converting war planes into commercial carriers, but he built his fortune and notoriety through Dinant Chemicals.11 In the 1980s, during the Contra years, he served as chief economic adviser to the Liberal president Roberto Suazo Córdova and vice-president of APROH;12 he even endorsed selling off Honduras to foreign investors to resolve its fiscal woes. This was Facussé’s breakthrough decade, a time when political connections and capitalist instinct helped him take lucrative advantage of a controversial debt restructuring programme.13 This, and other economic policies blueprinted in the Facussé Memorandum,14 acted as a springboard to convert the evolving merchant class into a cash-rich globally oriented agro-industrial bourgeoisie, perfectly positioned for foreign investors.
But Miguel Facussé was no political ideologue. He believed in making money, and that is what drew him to the fertile Bajo Aguán. The Bajo Aguán was dominated by banana plantations in the first half of the twentieth century, but the population and crop production nosedived in 1974 after Hurricane Fifi destroyed everything, including the railway, and the fruit moguls abandoned the region. Fifi accelerated major agrarian reforms designed by military dictator General López Arellano, who used public funds and post-hurricane international aid to rebuild the region and entice landless peasants to farm uncultivated plains in exchange for community land titles. The general became an unlikely campesino hero, sanctioning technical and financial support to more than 4,000 farming families organized into eighty-four cooperatives. It paid off: by the 1980s the lower Aguán valley was one of the most diverse crop regions in Honduras, known as the grain basket of Central America. But the glory days were short-lived thanks to the imposition of inedible, invasive African palms.
The lofty palm species was aggressively promoted from the early 1990s by World Bank–funded modernization programmes.15 The palms were lauded as the ultimate cash crop which would finally lift peasant farmers out of poverty. Then the official line changed: campesinos were no longer capable of farming palms, because they were too tall and required machinery to extract the fruit and oil. Technical assistance and credit from the government plummeted just as global prices crashed, a devastating combination which asphyxiated the farmers. This wasn’t down to Lady Luck: the plan was always to let the cooperatives fail, affirmed campesino leader Yoni Rivas. Waiting in the wings to pounce was Facussé.
Agrarian law prohibits collective or ejidal legal titles from being sold or mortgaged without permission from the National Agrarian Institute (INA). To circumvent this inconvenience, President Callejas approved a municipal law in 1993 which allowed local governments to sell land titles for a period of three months only.16 This they did via hundreds of small transactions benefiting a handful of powerful businessmen, who had woken up to the profit potential of exporting palm oil for biofuels and processed food. The sales were rushed through with total disregard for ejidal and ancestral land titles owned by Garifuna communities. How did they get the deeds? Some campesinos sold up for the money, but far more were duped or intimidated into signing over the land. The wannabe palm magnates made alliances with local politicians to convince cooperative leaders that there was no hope of competing with modernization, so best to sell up and move on. To deal with those who couldn’t be convinced, the cooperatives were infiltrated and divided, and secret meetings known as misas negras (black masses) were convened under menacing military supervision. And if that failed, stubborn campesino leaders were tortured, abducted and killed, starting with the president and treasurer of the San Isidro cooperative in 1990. In other words, good old-fashioned corporate counterinsurgency.
Thousands of campesino families were evicted: they went from being landowners to pawns on their own land – a starting gun for a protracted bloody struggle that has yet to end.17
Facussé was the biggest beneficiary, gaining control over large swathes of Aguán and beyond for industrial palm oil production. The other major winners were the Salvadoran Reynaldo Canales and the Nicaraguan-born René Morales, whose legal affairs were handled by lawyer Roberto Pacheco Reyes, who later became the secretary of the Agua Zarca dam company, DESA. The three men rapidly acquired the majority of the cooperatives and began importing unregulated armed private security guards to work alongside the military to protect their interests. This toxic mix of ambition, political connections, bullish tactics and military alliances helped turned the Aguán into one of the deadliest parts of the country. The violence was fuelled by the West’s drive for ‘clean energy’. The big fat clean energy lie. But as always, it’s about the land.
Then the coup happened, and the struggle got harder, faster and deadlier.
Toncontín Airport, Tegucigalpa: 5 July 2009
Berta stood arm in arm with Miriam Miranda among the crowd waiting that Sunday afternoon to welcome back Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya. It had been exactly a week since an elite military unit bundled the Honduran president onto a military plane bound for Costa Rica, after having kicked in the front door of his private residence in leafy Tres Caminos.1 It was 6 a.m., and Zelaya was ordered to come downstairs holding his hands high, like a common criminal. ‘Shoot me,’ he dared them, still in his pyjamas, ‘if your orders are to kill me.’ Instead he was flown fifty miles north-west to the Palmerola military airport, which is also where the US war on drugs mission is headquartered. The deposed president stared out of the window at hundreds of battle-ready soldiers as the plane refuelled. The lights were out, the internet was down, radio and television sets stood silent, and church doors were closed.
Zelaya had been warned that a coup could be imminent, but he wouldn’t believe it. ‘You’re living in the Jurassic period,’ he told advisers. ‘This is the twenty-first century, the world wouldn’t allow it.’ But he was wrong. Zelaya was ousted in an old-fashioned coup d’état plotted by a powerful cabal of ultra-right business, political, religious and military players. It was still dark when the plane left for Costa Rica.
A week later, Zelaya was heading back to Honduras after crisis talks with the UN and Latin American heads of state. Berta and Miriam were anxious. The Garifuna contingent were drumming loudly and the air was thick with ceremonial smoke; the atmosphere was charged.
Zelaya thought it safe to return, but the coup plotters had other ideas. Congress had produced a fake resignation letter hours after Zelaya was deposed. The Supreme Court issued a secret arrest warrant based on trumped-up charges and named Congress leader Roberto Micheletti as his replacement, while on television Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez warned that Zelaya’s return could trigger a bloodbath.2 Ironically, in a country so long ruled by military governments, the armed forces had been the last democratic pillar standing until the generals also flipped. After that, it was left to ordinary people to flood into the streets, demanding democracy be restored and Zelaya allowed to serve the final six months of