Who Killed Berta Cáceres?. Nina Lakhani
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Battalion base after he too tried to escape military service. ‘Francisco was so traumatized by the barbarities inflicted on him, we sent him to live in the US,’ said Austra. He was smuggled out using fake ID.
After graduating as a teacher, Carlos joined the Communist Party and moved north to the Bajo Aguán region, to work with campesino banana cooperatives campaigning for land redistribution. According to Doña Austra, he got involved in the armed student guerrilla group Los Cinchoneros, also known as the Popular Liberation Movement, founded in rebellious Olancho in eastern Honduras. Carlos moved to Russia with a scholarship to study history and political science. He was later in Nicaragua, defending the Sandinista revolution against the US-armed Contras. For Berta, Carlos was a real-life revolutionary idol.
Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores was born on 4 March 1971, a chubby, placid baby Doña Austra’s twelfth and last child. Her father José Cáceres Molina (biological father of the four youngest siblings), from the nearby coffee-growing town of Marcala, was an abrasive ex-infantry sergeant from a staunchly nationalist family.2 José Cáceres walked out when Berta was five, after imposing years of what many family members called ‘alcohol-fuelled misery’ on them, and she had little contact with him while growing up. Berta was a sparkling little girl with thick curly hair and a wide smile. By the age of seven or eight she was a regular competitor on the local beauty pageant circuit, picking up prizes as the best-dressed Mayan princess and Señorita Maize. She liked to play football, choreograph dances and put on plays, showing a notable flair for organizing and bossing the other children. But she also grew up running in and out of secretive, politically charged meetings, and from a young age was spellbound by the fiery debates centred on injustices in her corner of the world. By then, in the early to mid-1980s, Austra was involved in fledgling rights groups like the women’s collective, Movimiento de Mujeres por la Paz ‘Visitación Padilla’,3 and helping to organize against the US-backed death squads operating across Central America. Thanks to Austra’s dedication as a community midwife, Berta also saw first hand the miserable conditions endured by neglected hill communities.
Aged twelve or thirteen, she would walk miles with her mother to reach pregnant women in isolated rural cantons with no electricity or running water. Berta assisted: she would fetch hot water and towels, hold candles for light, and sometimes even cut the umbilical cord. Many women spent hours each day collecting clean water and firewood as well as working in the fields and raising children, with no access to contraception or antenatal care, and no escape from violent partners. The grim plight of rural women left its mark on both mother and daughter. Later, Berta came to understand these harsh realities as a local consequence of global rules, a vision which would define her.
Sometimes they travelled to the Colomoncagua refugee camp, forty miles south of La Esperanza, to help pregnant Salvadoran civil war refugees living in concentration camp conditions. These mother–daughter medical missions provided good cover, allowing them to deliver food and medicines, and then sneak out messages for Salvadoran rebel commanders lying low at the family home. The first refugee camps in Honduras opened in early 1981, just as the US (with the aid of military dictatorships) started rolling out the counterinsurgency doctrine, in what Ronald Reagan called ‘drawing the line’ in Central America.4 From this point forward, any Honduran suspected of sympathizing with neighbouring communist revolutionaries risked being murdered or disappeared by US-trained elite soldiers. This disposition to fight American enemies was established as a core characteristic of Honduran military ethos.
It’s worth noting that anti-communist fervour was not a Cold War invention. In the first half of the twentieth century, Central America’s elite landowning families – who enjoyed absolute economic and political power in their regional fiefdoms – were more than comfortable branding popular uprisings as communist threats. Any sniff of a political, social or labour movement demanding even modest reforms to tackle the stark inequalities was crushed, often brutally, to protect the interests of these elites.
In neighbouring El Salvador, the 1932 peasant uprising was ruthlessly quelled, leaving around 30,000 mainly indigenous Pipil people dead.5 In Honduras, the 1975 Los Horcones massacre in rebellious Olancho was one of the worst to be documented. By then, the north coast had been devastated by Hurricane Fifi,6 and campesinos on the brink of starvation squatted on unused arable land in the hope of forcing agrarian reforms. The crackdown was prompt. At least fourteen campesinos, sympathetic clergy and students were rounded up, tortured and killed by soldiers and armed guards on the orders of local landlords unwilling to relinquish a single plot. The dismembered bodies were found buried on land belonging to local rancher José Manuel Zelaya Ordóñez,7 father of the future (subsequently deposed) president, Mel Zelaya Rosales. Thus when the US entered into full-fledged Cold War paranoia, the anti-communist brigade found it easy to sell its counterinsurgency doctrine to Central American elites who were already versed in dirty war tactics, albeit at a more amateur level. The doctrine identified certain social actors – student and peasant leaders, journalists, union organizers and liberation theology priests – as part of the ideological enemy, equating them with violent guerrillas. With this enemy, normal rules of engagement didn’t apply, and the US, with its psychological warfare handbooks,8 torture manuals and death squads, turned Central American armies into well-organized killing machines trained to detect and destroy anyone suspected of even thinking about insurgency.
Sovereignty for Sale
Anti-communist rhetoric wasn’t new, nor was the US peddling influence in Honduras. In fact, while many countries like to boast of a special relationship with the US, Honduras actually has one. Honduras was always connected to international markets via American capital – initially through mining, and then, most famously, through banana exports.9 A ‘banana republic’ is among the worst examples of capitalist hegemony: a country run like a private business for the exclusive profit of corporations and local ruling elites. The term was coined by the American satirist O. Henry in 1901 to describe the corruption and exploitation imposed by the United Fruit Company, now called Chiquita, on Central America. The company relied upon a culture of bribery, a subjugated workforce and smarts to exploit these lands for obscene profits. Under the leadership of Samuel Zemurray, dubbed ‘Sam the Banana Man’, by the 1920s United Fruit controlled 650,000 acres of the most fertile plains in Honduras, almost one-quarter of all arable land in the country, as well as major roads, railways and ports. Here the company was known as El Pulpo, the octopus, for its far-reaching tentacles permeating every aspect of life from labour rights to infrastructure to politics. ‘In Honduras, a mule costs more than a member of parliament,’ Zemurray famously once said.
In the hot and humid northern city of El Progreso, a wonderful black and white framed photograph of the 1954 huelga de bananeros, or banana workers’ strike, hangs above Jesuit priest Padre Melo’s desk. Taken a stone’s throw away on the main road known as the Boulevard, it shows hundreds of defiant-looking men and women standing together, like an impenetrable human wall. After decades of subjugation, a flourishing campesino movement decided to fight back against slave-like conditions and brought the industry to a standstill, in what was the first serious challenge to the ‘special relationship’ and US profits. The campesino uprising was spuriously blamed on agitators from Guatemala, and plans were hatched to tackle both problems using the 1954 Military Assistance Agreement, which authorized the US to treat Honduras as a military satellite.
The US used its new outpost to train and arm mercenaries against Guatemala’s first democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. United Fruit had lobbied hard for the CIA-backed 1954 military coup,10 after Árbenz proposed taking some unfarmed land from multinationals to redistribute to landless peasants. The violent intervention paved the way for a bloody thirty-six-year civil war. The 1954 bilateral military agreement was a watershed geopolitical moment for the whole region, and Honduras has hosted American bases, forces and weapons ever since.
As for the campesino revolt which promised so much it was tamed by a series of modest reforms including a new labour rights code, social security benefits, and false promises of land redistribution. Some organizers were jailed, others co-opted; the most stubborn were disappeared or killed in local crackdowns such as the Los Horcones massacre. In the words of Padre Melo, ‘at that time when serious left-wing political