Who Killed Berta Cáceres?. Nina Lakhani
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the region’s elite death squads at the CREM,’ said Padre Melo, who in the early 1980s was posted at a church near the base. ‘I would be stopped on my motorbike by American soldiers demanding to see my ID – they were authorized to do that!’
After the Cold War ended, these repressive security structures were not dismantled. Instead, they morphed into powerful criminal networks linked to corruption and the trafficking of arms and drugs, with clandestine parallel security structures that as part of their remit would target social justice activists labelled anti-development or terrorists. Modern enemies for modern times.
The implementation of US national security policies through the counterinsurgency doctrine marked a watershed in Honduras, and played a major role in Berta’s life and death. In the months after the April 2013 community meeting at El Roble, under the eponymous old oak tree, a systematic campaign to crush opposition to the Agua Zarca dam was rolled out, using a classic sliding scale of counterinsurgency tactics: slurs, repression, inducements, infiltrators, informants, criminalization. A Guatemalan lawyer, with years of experience investigating civil war crimes, told me that Berta’s murder bore the hallmarks of a military intelligence-backed special operation. That’s why to understand who she was and why she was murdered, you have to understand the past.
The Corporate Campaign against the Agua Zarca Dam Opponents
The military background of senior DESA managers frightened Berta. Bustillo was openly aggressive towards her and community leaders, but it was David Castillo’s intelligence past that troubled her most.
Years later, in text messages uncovered during the discovery phase of the murder trial, DESA’s financial manager, Daniel Atala Midence, is shown using his political influence to press false charges against COPINH leaders, whom he referred to as criminals and even murderers. The texts also show how he authorized regular cash payments to informants in the community, including members of COPINH, who spied on Berta and the organization before reporting back to Bustillo and Rodríguez. It’s a business practice that the company felt was justified in order to protect their investment from protests that delayed construction. Atala ran the day-to-day business with David Castillo, who offered Berta incentives such as money for local projects if she would support the dam and end hostilities between the company and the community.
Rebel with a Cause
By 1983, the twelve-year-old Berta was rebellious and outspoken, according to Ivy Luz Orellana who met her on their first day in 7th grade. ‘She was very studious, learned quickly and was a natural leader who hated following pointless rules and would speak out against unfairness,’ said Ivy, who shared with me a splendid collection of school photos that show a youthfully frivolous side of Berta. In one, Berta is fifteen and strutting along some sort of pageant catwalk wearing a fancy white dress, make-up and kitten heels, beaming happily. The picture appeared in the local paper.
By then she’d met her future husband, Salvador Zúñiga, a student activist six years older who was regularly invited by Doña Austra to the family home. Zúñiga had co-founded the radical Patriotic Student Organization of Lempira (Organización Patriótica Estudiantil de Lempira – OPEL), whose main objective was to purge Honduras of foreign armies. This made Salvador a target, and in 1984 rumours circulated that he was on a military hit list. With friends and colleagues already dead or disappeared, the nineteen-year-old crossed the border into El Salvador where he helped move the sick and injured to relative safety in Honduras.
After middle school, Berta, like most of her siblings, trained as a primary school teacher at the La Esperanza normal, mainly because it was the only free secondary education available. She started the three-year training course in 1986, aged fifteen, and immediately joined OPEL. When the radical student group’s president was killed, Berta was elected to succeed him. In one of her first acts as president, she organized strikes to protest the unfair exclusion of a student, which saved him and got the teacher behind it thrown out. ‘By the time we entered the normal, Berta’s ideals were very clear: she was a leader and wanted to be free, do other things, rather than get married and have kids,’ said her old schoolfriend Ivy.
This didn’t stop Berta having fun, and her friends remember her as witty, outgoing and happy to break the rules. Ivy recalls that ‘Berta was beautiful and had lots of boyfriends … She loved to dance, we were great dancers, but our mothers were strict so we’d sneak off to the Paraíso disco in the afternoons. We danced to merengue and 80s American pop music like Michael Jackson, songs in English we didn’t even understand. Berta was popular, happy and loved life, and that never changed in the thirty-plus years we were friends, even when things got so difficult at the end.’ In later years, Berta would jokingly call old schoolmates, like Ivy, who became National Party voters, capitalistas de mierda (fucking capitalists). She never lost her playfulness, nor avoided people with opposing views.
Outside the normal, Berta got serious with like-minded new friends. Like her brother Carlos and his friends a decade earlier, the youngsters met in secret to read banned books on the Cuban revolution and Marxism, debating revolutionary ideas and real-world tactics to help comrades at home and in neighbouring countries. It was a dangerous time to be a revolutionary, and Berta kept this world from her school chums, who had no idea that she started dating Salvador Zúñiga in 1988, the last year of teacher training. She was seventeen, he was twenty-three, and by this time fully enmeshed in the Salvadoran war effort, supporting units across the tiny country with information analysis, logistics, intelligence and counter-intelligence gathering.
Berta couldn’t get enough of his stories, and was impatient to be involved. ‘Every time I came home I brought her revolutionary texts which we discussed, but we also exchanged poems and romantic novels. She wanted to come with me to El Salvador, that was the plan, that we’d go together after she graduated from the normal … then she got pregnant.’
Zúñiga planned to return to El Salvador for the last rebel offensive, but tried to dissuade Berta from coming with him. ‘War isn’t romantic, it’s cruel, and I didn’t want Berta to come, but she was insistent.’ Doña Austra, who knew nothing about her youngest daughter’s war ambitions, was at the same time trying to ship Berta overseas to have the baby, in order to avoid a town scandal. Berta refused, and the young lovers plotted behind her back.
Olivia Marcela Zúñiga Cáceres was born on 28 June 1989. She looked just like her mother. Three weeks later Berta said goodbye to Austra, telling her that she was taking baby Olivia to visit her brother Carlos in Canada. Instead the young parents left the newborn with Zúñiga’s sister, who lived in nearby Siguatepeque, and went to join the guerrillas. It would be several months before they held Olivia again. The time Berta spent in El Salvador shaped the rest of her life.
Berta was eighteen years old and still weak from giving birth when she joined the war effort with the National Resistance – one of four guerrilla groups in the coalition that formed the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Here, her nom de guerre was Laura or Laurita. Life on the front line was tough. The unit was constantly on the move, and the incursions were rugged and dangerous. The young militants were assigned to logistics and reconnaissance missions – mostly supportive, non-combatant roles. They monitored the radio and put together communiqués for the leadership on what the State Department, Pentagon, European governments, BBC and international groups like Amnesty International were opining about the conflict now in its tenth year. Sometimes they went on separate missions to different parts of the country.
‘From the very first sortie, she was intrepid and determined, even going ahead with the exploration unit without me. Berta never cried, she was calm, strong and fearless even when our unit came under attack. She ate and slept when she could, but showed great discipline even though she hadn’t been trained,’ Salvador said.
Vidalina Morales, a local guerrilla, remembered that Berta seemed shy in Salvador’s presence, and that he at times ridiculed her in front of comrades. But she never shied away from any physical or psychological challenge, and positively bristled if anyone suggested taking it easy.
Antonio Montes, nom de guerre Chico, was a twenty-nine-year-old combatant when Berta and Salvador joined his unit on the imposing