Who Killed Berta Cáceres?. Nina Lakhani
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He signed up anyway, with Chávez at his side, promising cheap oil for a hundred years and free tractors for campesinos to boost food production. Love him or hate him, Chávez had a flair for name-calling, and he took the opportunity to rub up the country’s businessmen and media moguls, calling them pitiyanquis. The catchy insult made headlines, as did calling Cardinal Rodríguez a parrot of the empire. Yet despite the anti-US posturing and public displays of affection, Chávez and Zelaya were not especially close, personally or politically. ‘Chávez was a military man who never took Mel seriously, saw him as a cowboy in politician’s clothes,’ said the academic Víctor Meza, Zelaya’s interior minister. ‘The relationship was pragmatic and opportunistic, never ideologically driven,’ said economist Hugo Noé Pino. ‘Both were populists and provocateurs, but that’s where the similarity ends.’
Berta backed Zelaya’s alliance with Petrocaribe and ALBA, and respected Chávez, though she was privately very critical of the imposition of energy and petrol projects on indigenous territories in Venezuela. ‘My mum didn’t blindly follow. She taught us never to idealize anyone, including her,’ said daughter Bertita. Still, the Comandante Chávez was for a while Berta’s online profile picture.
Energy
In 2006, ENEE, the national electricity company, was on the verge of bankruptcy after years of mismanagement, corruption and perverse contracts favouring a tiny handful of suppliers and distributors. Prices were high, defaults mounting, and blackouts long and frequent.13 The energy matrix was dominated by oil- and coal-fired plants controlled by two of the country’s richest industrialists: Fredy Násser, son-in-law of Miguel Facussé, and Schucry Kafie. They boasted lucrative contracts, negotiated in the early 1990s during a regional energy crisis, in which ENEE paid fixed prices and remained responsible for repairs and maintenance. The energy magnates were furious when these and other inflated contracts were sent to Congress for revision.14 But ENEE was haemorrhaging money, so in 2007 Zelaya sent in the big guns, the defence and finance ministers, to stop the rot. (The finance aspect makes sense, but deploying the armed forces seems like a retrograde step in a fragile democracy.)15 Mejía asked General Romeo Vásquez to put together a management team to run ENEE. Two of its members are important to Berta’s story.
Julián Pacheco Tinoco, then a colonel and head of military protocol, was assigned to manage human resources at ENEE. An SOA-trained counterinsurgency and intelligence specialist, Pacheco went on to become security minister under Juan Orlando Hernández (president since 2014), with overall responsibility for policing COPINH protests against Agua Zarca and for providing protection to Berta,16 as well as to hundreds of other threatened defenders and journalists – a position he held when she was killed. Pacheco was named in at least two separate US drug trafficking cases involving Los Cachiros, the criminal group which thrived in the department of Colón during his time as regional commander. He was also targeted in a US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigation, alongside Juan Orlando Hernández, into ‘large-scale drug trafficking and money laundering activities relating to the importation of cocaine into the United States’ dating back to 2013,17 according to court documents unsealed in 2019. Pacheco has never been indicted and has denied any wrongdoing.
The other relevant character was Roberto David Castillo Mejía, a second lieutenant in the Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence Department, who in 2004 graduated from the prestigious US military academy West Point with a degree in electrical engineering. Castillo was assigned as head of operations at ENEE’s Tegucigalpa electricity dispatch centre. He so impressed his employers that in January 2008, when the rest of the military intervention team left after having apparently rescued ENEE from collapse, he stayed on to work with the newly appointed director, Rixi Moncada.18 Arístides Mejía said Moncada asked for Castillo to stay on; Moncada claimed it was the other way around. What’s clear is that Castillo was looking for a way out of the army, reluctant to serve the full eight years agreed in return for the West Point subsidy. Castillo was formally hired in January 2008 as management control coordinator, a fancy title for technical expert. Over the next twenty months, until September 2009, Castillo improperly claimed salaries from both ENEE and the armed forces, profiting by 212,986 Lempiras (around $9,000), according to a government audit. He was also rebuked for selling office supplies and computer accessories from his company, Digital Communications SA,19 to the armed forces at inflated prices in 2007 and 2008, and ordered to repay 270,568 Lempiras (around $11,000). The sales violated state contracting rules, and auditors were not fooled by his name having been removed from the company just before the sales. I spoke to an old army friend I’ll call Adrián, another graduate officer who, like Castillo, felt uncomfortable in the military environment. Adrián claimed that Castillo offered him a 10 per cent cut if he helped secure similarly overpriced sales. ‘I asked him why not just lower prices, win the contracts fairly, and not pay bribes, but he just laughed.’
In October 2007, David Castillo travelled to Brazil with ENEE to open negotiations with Constructora Norberto Odebrecht to finance and build two new mega dams, Los Llanitos and Jicatuyo, on the Ulúa River. This is the country’s most important waterway, flowing 400 km north to the Caribbean and connecting to the Gualcarque in Río Blanco. The contract was signed in January 2009 by Moncada and Zelaya, and modified a year later, post-coup, at an ENEE board meeting attended by Castillo.
Odebrecht is a subsidiary of Odebrecht SA, the region’s largest construction conglomerate, which in 2016 admitted to spending hundreds of millions of dollars in corrupt payments to foreign political parties, campaign funds and politicians, in order to grease the wheels of public works projects such as gas pipelines, airport terminals and hydro-electric dams.20 In the biggest corruption scandal ever uncovered in Latin America, executives eventually admitted paying bribes in over half the countries on the continent, as well as in Angola and Mozambique, among others, and in a leniency deal agreed to pay $2.6bn in fines to US, Swiss and Brazilian authorities. In Honduras, prosecutors announced in early 2018 that several officials, from three administrations (presidents Zelaya, Micheletti and Lobo), were under investigation for possible Odebrecht-linked corruption. By mid-2019, no charges had been brought, but the case remained open.
Berta first met Zelaya in the mid-1990s when he was director of the social development fund (FHIS), working closely with Doña Austra, La Esperanza’s first female mayor at the time.21 (Austra was a card-carrying Liberal until the coup, after which she stopped backing the party.) Berta’s brother, Gustavo Cáceres, was minister for youth in Zelaya’s government. I never asked Berta if she voted for Zelaya. Berta and Salvador advised him after the coup, but she was hardly a Zelayista.
Zelaya’s negotiations with Brazil irked the energy and construction magnates, as well as community groups like Berta’s COPINH and Miriam’s OFRANEH who objected to yet more projects being imposed on indigenous and rural lands without free, prior and informed consent. In contrast, the working poor applauded Zelaya’s decision to raise the minimum wage by 60 per cent, to $289 in urban areas, to cover the cost of the canasta básica, or basket of staple goods. But this move infuriated the business sector. Adolfo Facussé, the bullish business figurehead, accused the president of imposing communist policies in order to create economic chaos and justify tax increases. ‘The private sector will resist,’ he warned.
I myself first met Zelaya in mid-2017, at party headquarters in Tegucigalpa, where he was coordinating the campaign for the forthcoming elections. It was late, after 9 p.m., and he started the interview disconcertingly: ‘Your blouse needs ironing,’ he said, rubbing the ever so slightly creased fabric between his thumb and index finger. A typical example of everyday machismo in Honduras, or an attempt to put me off? Probably a bit of both.
Zelaya said that it was during his time as director of the FHIS that he realized that capitalism had turned the country’s genuine landowners – the natives and Afro-Hondurans – into its poorest people. ‘I dedicated my presidency to governing for the majority but not by taking away from the minority; they did very well in my time.’
Standing for Vice-President
In a deeply polarized society like Honduras, where everyone picks sides, Berta rejected party politics and regarded the country’s two-party