Who Killed Berta Cáceres?. Nina Lakhani
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crowd ran past cordons towards the runway, where soldiers and army trucks were stationed to prevent the plane from touching down. Suddenly there were gunshots, followed by screams. Isis Obed Murillo Mencías, a nineteen-year-old grocery clerk, had been shot in the back of the head. He was the first victim of the coup.3 Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro, was in the crowd and called the military chief, Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, pleading for the gunfire to stop. ‘Are you going to shoot down Mel’s plane?’ she asked. ‘No,’ said Vásquez, ‘he’s not an enemy of Honduras. This is a political crisis; your husband is my friend.’ He explained he would not let the plane land because to do so would mean arresting Zelaya. ‘I won’t humiliate him and risk chaos,’ he told Xiomara, and hung up. Sparing her husband’s life was a modern twist on what was an old-school Latin American coup.
After the fatal gunfire, it was announced that a military curfew would start in an hour. Anyone on the streets after 6 p.m. would face arrest. Berta and Miranda watched Zelaya’s plane swerve up and away and embraced each other tearfully. The last time they’d been together at Toncontín airport, it was to welcome Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president. A week, they say, is a long time in politics and now Berta wondered if she would still stand for the vice-presidency if Zelaya wasn’t allowed back before the November elections.
‘We cried because we knew what this meant,’ Miriam told me years later. ‘Until then, we could still hope democracy would be restored. But when the plane wasn’t allowed to land, we knew the only option was resistance, which meant social movements would be repressed and leaders like us targeted. It was never about Mel or any political party, it was about fighting to restore the rule of law. We cried because at that moment we understood that it was going to be a long, hard struggle, and we were right. Berta is dead, and the struggle continues.’
Making Friends, Losing Friends
Mel Zelaya, wearing his trademark cowboy boots and white sombrero, was inaugurated on 27 January 2006 inside a packed-out national stadium, twenty-five years after the end of military rule. The fifty-three-year-old landowner had beaten National Party veteran Porfirio ‘Pepe’ Lobo Sosa by promising a new kind of Liberal government, centred on transparency and citizen participation. At the inauguration he announced an end to open pit mining, a new reforestation programme, help for small businesses, and energy reform to cut dependence on fossil fuels. The rousing speech left his grassroots supporters enthused, his rivals confounded, and the economic elites reassured by warm words from Carlos Flores Facussé, the business-friendly former president and political dealmaker. Zelaya thanked God, Cardinal Rodríguez, indigenous communities and the new president of Congress, Roberto Micheletti, before leaving feeling pretty pleased with himself.
Zelaya was still basking in the glow when US ambassador Charles Ford called to invite him to lunch at the embassy.4 After a couple of hours of diplomatic chitchat in Spanish,5 Ford gave Zelaya a sealed white envelope. ‘He said not to open it until I got back to the Casa Presidencial,’ Zelaya told me at the Libre HQ more than a decade later (it’s a story I’d already heard, one he’s often recounted over the years). According to Zelaya, the envelope contained a list of nine ministries, the important ones like defence, security, foreign affairs and finance, each alongside three names of potential ministers whom the US would find acceptable.6 ‘He gave me three options for each ministry, letting me pick one was the democratic part … In Honduras, a recommendation by the US is a thinly veiled order.’ I asked Zelaya what he had done with the list. ‘I threw it away.’ Whether fully or partly true, this incident was the beginning of the end of Zelaya’s relationship with Ford.7
Two years later, Ford sent a notably hostile cable. ‘Zelaya remains very much a rebellious teenager, anxious to show his lack of respect for authority figures … There also exists a sinister Zelaya, surrounded by a few close advisers with ties to both Venezuela and Cuba and organized crime.’ He continued,
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 … I have found Zelaya’s real views of the United States hidden not too very deeply below the surface. In a word, he is not a friend. His 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 … The last year and a half of the Zelaya Administration will be, in my view, extraordinarily difficult for our bilateral relationship … Honduran institutions and friendly governments will need to be prepared to act privately and in public to help move Honduras forward.
Just over a year later, Zelaya was deposed. What had gone wrong?
The two most popular theories on the coup are that it was to prevent Zelaya from amending the constitution in order to stay in power, and that it was orchestrated by the US, who feared he was going rogue and could become the next Hugo Chávez. The truth is more straightforward: it was about protecting the wealth and privilege enjoyed by the country’s elites. ‘The coup reminded us that the Honduran oligarchy won’t tolerate even minor reforms if these changes affect their profits,’ said sociologist Eugenio Sosa.
Or, as the former finance minister Hugo Noé Pino put it: ‘The economic elites claimed Honduras was moving towards twenty-first-century socialism, but Zelaya’s fiscal policies were modest, never radical. What they actually feared was losing their absolute grip over the country, that a few state contracts and concessions could slip out of their hands.’ This is perhaps what the US, too, feared most – losing its absolute influence over a country it had dominated economically and politically for over a century. And what could be worse than losing it to the number one enemy, Hugo Chávez?
But Zelaya’s alleged transformation from capitalist landowner to socialist was unlikely, and untrue.8 At best he shifted somewhat to the left, partly because a close circle of progressive advisers encouraged him to listen to and form alliances with civil society groups and Chávez, and partly because the US and its Honduran allies refused to concede on a single issue.
Oil
At the top of Zelaya’s presidential to-do list was energy.9 He convened a meeting with the Honduran who’s who of oil requesting them to abandon or reduce the ‘fuel formula’, a shady tariff which enabled industrialists (distributors, importers, petrol station dealerships) to fix prices and overcharge the state by 4 or 5 Lempiras per gallon. No deal, we won’t give up a penny, came the response. Soon after, Mel opened a bidding war and approached Chávez about buying cheap oil from Venezuela, which was already extending its net across Latin America through the Petrocaribe agreement.10 Zelaya’s search for cheaper oil started a political war. Ford warned Zelaya that the proposed deal with Chávez ‘was changing the rules of the game’ and could jeopardize a pending US aid package. Business leaders, those with oil interests and others, also warned against picking a fight with the US, the country’s principal trading partner. But Zelaya is visceral and combative by nature, and his mind was made up. Soon after, in June 2006, Zelaya met with President George W. Bush.
Bush presided over a two-hour meeting at the Oval Office, also attended by Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador Ford. I’ve heard several versions regarding the exact words that were uttered at that meeting. Arístides Mejía, then defence minister, remembers it as follows: ‘Look, Mr President,’ said Bush, ‘I know you’ve got an oil problem but listen to me, my family is in the oil business, so I know what I’m talking about, the market sets the price. Chávez can’t give you a better price, he’s just going to bring you problems.’
He went on about Chávez for ten minutes or so, according to Mejía, before finishing in Spanish with ‘Cuidado con Chávez’ (Careful with Chávez). Mel responded smoothly: ‘Mira, señor presidente, a famous French philosopher once said that great men are measured by the problems they solve. But Chávez is a small problem, there’s no need to spend so much time worrying about him.’ Bush smiled and the tension was broken. ‘Who’s the French thinker you pulled out of the bag?’ Mejía asked after the meeting. ‘No idea, I made him up,’ said Zelaya. Honduras joined Petrocaribe in December 2007.11
Zelaya’s