Pushkin. Hello and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westerwald. We have a new season coming up for you in April, and in the meantime we'll be bringing you a few bonus episodes. Today, I'm joined by our new senior Global Climate Justice reporter, Nina Lakhani, who has special insight into the story of Berta Cassis. This week marks the ten
year anniversary of Bertha's assassination. She was an indigenous leader in Honduras, and it's been proven that the Damn company building the Damn she was protesting orchestrated a hit on her with the help of various hitman, government officials, police, etc. It was a horrific ordeal for Bertha's family, for the whole movement in Honduras, and it also raised the profile of just how dangerous it was to be an environmental
activist in Honduras. Unfortunately, in those ten years since her death, it has not gotten any better, and Nina did a deep dive on what's been going on in those ten years, what it looks like now, and what the lasting impact of Bertha's work was. Nina also wrote an entire book on Bertha's story. It's called who killed Bertha Casseres. It's really really excellent and has all of the receipts on
this whole wild story. So Nina's going to walk us through that story and what's been going on in the decade since all of that happened in this episode today. That's coming up after this quick break. So, Nia, you read a whole book about Bertha, and I knew of her and her work before you started working on that book as well. What was she like as a person and a leader and what was so charismatic about her that she posed such a threat to these industries.
Bertha Castides was a unique leader.
She had this really incredible capacity to explain local struggles in regional and global economic and political terms, and she could communicate with people from all different sort of walks of life. So she was as comfortable in a sort of rural community as she was talking to members of Congress in the US. She wasn't a person that had any formal education. She had four kids very young, but she was, you know, a sponge.
She traveled internationally.
She spent a lot of time with indigenous communities in land and environmental struggles around the world.
And she was just really really smart.
She was a political strategist, and she had this ability to unite communities, which is really unusual in the social movement people sort of have their little fiefdoms. In a way, she could bring together the Cambasinos with students, she could bring together feminists with unionists. And I think this ability to bring people together, as well as her really.
Sort of very charismatic communication style.
She had this ability to convince, to really explain things to people that the elites, that political and economic elites found really threatening. And she could do this intellectually. She was very good with words, but she was a person that loved action. She now loved nothing more than being at protests organizing civil disobedience.
She was a pacifist.
Her organization was a non violent class through organization. But I think just this ability to be comfortable and powerful and convincing, you know, really in so many different spaces, among so many different sort of movements, really was a threat to the status quo in Honduras.
Yeah, how did her work first come on your radar? You were reporting in Central America when she was active. What did you first kind of see her do?
I met her in twenty thirteen during my first trip to Honduras, I went for what were meant to be the first legal elections after the two thousand and nine coups, and so I went on a reporting trip and I met her integrity Gulpay in a capitol where she was participating in a press conference to international observers who'd come for the election, and she was warning them with such clarity that these were not going to be three and fair elections, but the social movement was being repressed that
there was literally a hitless circulating with the names of social leaders, including her, around the country who were being targeted. I mean, and when I got to take Usigap, I mean, it was I was living in Mexico at the time, and I'd been to other Central American countries, but the level of militarization was like nothing I'd seen before. It looked like a war zone. So I met her there and I asked her for an interview. At that time,
she was on the LAMB. There was an arrest warrant out for her on bogus criminal charges related to her leadership in this opposition of this internationally funded dam called Aguazadga, and at the time, her and two colleagues work had arrestaurrants against them, and so she was sleeping in different
places every night. The International at that point had said that if they were arrested, they would consider them prisoners of conscious because it would be completely arbitrary and politically motivated. But she in writed me to go to Laspardanza, which is the town in western Honduras where she lived and she died, And so I went there a couple of days later and I did my only interview with her. That was the only time I got to interview her, you know, and she just laid out very very clearly.
I mean a situation was like in Honduras for her personally, for her family, I mean the threats that they faced.
At that point, three of her children.
Were studying outside of the country because of the threats that the whole family faced.
And she described to me, with a real sort of.
Sadness, how what it was like to not be able to go to the river that the lenk of people consider sacred because of their rest woman, because of the militarization in the community. And I remember really clearly she said to me, look, I'm taking all the measures that I can to protect my life. But when they want to kill me, they will kill me. And I just remember that hour I spent with her. It was like one of those sort of moments you have as a journalist that are quite life changing.
She was so impressive. She had such moral and.
Political and ethical clarity, you know, and she knew she had been told to leave the country to safeguard her own life, but she was absolutely determined to stay and to continue fighting for a better future for people of Honduras.
There's this line in your piece where you said that when you heard about her assassination, you thought to yourself, Jesus, that they can kill But like I said, as they can kill anyone. So yeah, just kind of what was it like hearing that news and how did you dig into investigating what happened there.
Yeah.
I was on vacation at the time when I woke up to various miscalls for my editor at the time saying they've killed Bertha.
Killed Bertha.
And at the time, she was absolutely the most well known environmental and social leader in the Americas. She'd been awarded the prestigious Goldman Prize the year previously, she'd only a few months earlier had an audience with.
The poet in Rome, and so she was really well known. You know, I member the.
US Conguess had taken up sort of her case has had all of the major sort of human rights organizations.
To give you a sense of Bertha, here's a short clip of the speech that she gave when she accepted the Goldman Prize in twenty fifteen.
Despertemos, despertemos u manida jian wait Tempo Luis tra concience, Yes, Louis tra conciencia, couridas porlecho, the star solocon Templando laostruccion bassale, la de preda song capitalista rasista ipatriarcal.
She says, wake up, wake up, humanity, We're out of time. We must shake our consciences free of the repatacious capitalism, racism, and patriarchy that will only assure our own self destruction.
And I think it was just so clear to me then that the sense of entitlement and impunity that those who ordered her murder must have felt to carry out that assassination, because there's no way that you could kill someone who was so well known internationally without there being at least a tacit sort of you know, agreement from people very high up.
I arrived in Honduras.
In life Spanser, I think about a month after her assassination.
Where I met.
It was for the first time her mother, who was such a huge inspiration to her sort of social and political work, who's ninety three.
By the way now and still in life, Speranza.
And the first piece I wrote then was I interviewed and spoke to many of her colleagues who were with her in those last days and weeks.
I went to the oblanc Or where the dam.
Had been destined and sanctioned to be sort of constructed, and what became really clear to me was.
That she knew that time was running out.
She was under surveillance, there were informants everywhere, and she had been making She'd been making plans, you know, She'd shared the ability to sign checks, for example, with other people in the organization. She'd said goodbye to one of her daughters a couple of days earlier. She was on their way back to Argentina, and the goodbye felt like something more than just a normal sea soon.
So I think she knew had time was running out, and so that was.
The first piece that I wrote, and then I just started digging, and like I was able to get hold of documents that showed that some of the Intermediris who had been paid by the Damn Company were former army officials who had received training by the US at different points.
In their career.
And I saw a young soldier from one of the Special Forces who went Able a few weeks after her murder because because he had been in a unit that had been passed around this hit list in which there was a name and personal details of multiple social and community leaders, some of them had an X through them who had already been neutralized, and Berta's name was on that list, And so he went Able and ended up coming to me and talked to me about this hit list.
He at the time remembered a lot of the training, really awful training that he had had as a young soldier, how there'd been military trainers from Israel, from Columbia, from other countries there, and was just really frightened he had to leave the country.
He's never been able to go back to the country since, you know.
And as I wrote those pieces, I became a target myself. The Honduran ambassador in UK wrote complaints asking for stories to be sort of retracted. The US ambassador in at the time launched a campaign to discredit me, giving background chats to all sorts of people in Honduras, claiming that I was just this woman who didn't really understand how that armed forces worked.
They were forced to at least.
Say they were going to launch an inquiry because the army's units that had had this hit list circulated were US trained army units, but they carried out no investigation, didn't speak to any of the people that were in my piece.
But I became a target from that point.
Really, there was like these online campaigns calling me a media terrorist. And really, since then, that's twenty sixteen, I'd never gone into Honduras by air. I've always gone in overland, which is very difficult, like it can take a long time. Because I was warned, you know, that I could be
stopped coming in. And then I kept investigating the links, and then I was the only journalist National International to attend every day the first trial, which was for eight people, one who had nothing to do with it, but seven between them were the hit men, the hired assassins, and
the intermediaries. And at the start of that trial, I had some really serious threats come my way, some press releases from these fake groups in the Baha Guan region, which is a really conflicted, dangerous part of Honduras, declaring me persona non grata, linking me to Mexican drug cartels, calling me.
A terrorist, all sorts of things.
And so yeah, the deeper I dug, the more threats I got, which and it's that sort of classic case of knowing that you're hitting the right things because you're really upsetting people. When I was reporting of from the trial, the threats came to me from the Aguan which is this rural sort of region where there's been long standing land conflicts between African palm magnets and Campasinos, which really, on the surface have nothing to.
Do with Butter's case, But I think it really showed that.
This network of economic, political, military, religious elites, the oligarchy that rules Honduras and many many other sort of countries in Latin America, you know, control the media, control the banking sector, control so much of the power in the country are connected, you know, And so a journalist that was sort of digging into the modus operandi and the structures and systems behind Butta's dev posed a threat to all of them.
Yeah, okay, So walk us through what we know or what's been made public so far about exactly what happened here, who orchestrated this, and how did the government play into it?
Too?
Well.
We know that Butt was assassinated specifically because of her campaign thought the construction of its internationally financed dam on this river considers sacred by the Lenca people, and that her organizing and her leadership had stalled the project, which was impacting the profits.
Of the Damn Company. We know now from.
Investigations that have happened and from the court cases that have happened so far, that the Damn Company was part of an organized criminal enterprise which included Damn executives. It included the highest hitmen. It included military trained intermediaries, but it also included state officials and armed forces, both by acts and by emissions. And by that I mean you know sort of counterinsurgency campaign to neutralize her that lasted
for many years. It included the vogu dis criminal charges, included intimidation, It included arming community members against each other, It included attempted bribes, all of those things that were
classic counterinsurgency manuals from the Cold War area. They tried with bertain, and when they couldn't silence her, they killed her right And this criminal enterprise was involved in all of that in all sorts of ways, from the surveillance to we know from the evidence that I've seen that the Damn Company would learn through informants that they were paying in the community, when, for example, protests were being planned, or when a road clock was being planned, they would
simply have to ask the government to send troops, to send police there to repress the community's peaceful protests. We know that the investigation into her murder at that time, the Damn Company was continuing to pay police, investigators, journalists to present information that served them. They were receiving images
from the crime scene themselves right in group chats. And we also know that there was a coordinated plan to blame the murder on Gusabacastro, who was Butther's friend, who happened to be there and who they thought they had killed, but who survived by feigning death, and so he became the only winners, to blame the murder on him, to blame the murder on her colleagues, her organization to blame
the murder on a romantic partner. All of this was coordinated and the Damn Company could not have done that themselves.
They didn't do themselves right.
There were elected officials and safe employees at every level, from the police to the prosecutor's office, the Attorney General's office, to the military to everywhere that were involved either by AXE or emissions in this right. But this was an organized criminal enterprise that orchestrated the violence against Burla. The Lenca community then attempted to cover it up. And which is one last thing. I mean the financial institutions involved
in this. We also know now that two thirds of the money, two thirds of the money that was purported by two international banks to interto international development banks was diverted to pay for the surveillance, the intelligence operations, the informants, the murder itself. This armed security and the banks involved, well known international banks that an utter failure of their own due diligence obligations right and their obligations around human rights.
Butter wrote to some of these banks back in twenty thirteen pleading with them not to fund this damn because of the repression that was already being orchestrated. People had already been killed, the community had already been terrorized.
But they went ahead anyway.
So the financial institutions that should be held accountable for their role in this, but it stems from the hired hit men, who, by the way, I interviewed in jail, and it was honestly so sad. These were kids, poor kids, exactly the type of kids that Berter was fighting for a better future before. You know, at least two of them were planning to use the money they get paid to pay a coyote to try and.
Get to the US.
Right, not justifying what they did at all, but there's also victims of this same sort of structural violence that exists in the country.
Right, Like, ultimately they pulled the trigger, but they're not the ones that planned and orchestrated and all that. That's so sad.
Just to underline, the US is sort of roleing this, you know, I mean, two of the intermediates had received US training at different points of their career. A whistleblower I've already mentioned he was in this unitch called Sattrage, which had terrorized the Aguan region after the coup, and which received lots of US training, and it's worth just naming David Castillo. David Castile was the president.
And founder of the Damn Company.
He was an informer intelligence officer trained at West Point in New York State, and he is the only one so far to have been convicted of playing a role in masterminding the murder. He was also one of the people convicted of fraud regarding the license of the dam that was sanctioned in this post coup pro business sort of environment without due process, without proper consultations, without prop
environmental assessments. But yeah, the US made him right, and he used these intelligence tactics and strategies to try to get close to about her, to infiltrate the community. And you know, the US has this long inglorious history of training people who go on to commit some of the worst sort of human rights abuses in Latin America.
Totally. You spoke with gustavol Castro recently too. For this piece. I'm going to play a little bit of tape from him here and then would love to hear more about him as well.
Mondon, which is on.
And he says, on the one hand, it's just as you say, she's enormously missed, but at the same time, she's present in so many ways. Even in places where they didn't know her, they know her now and she's present. Tell us a little bit about him and his work. What's his story.
Yeah, Kristavo Castra is this really highly regarded Mexican environmentalist and anti capitalists sort of thinker and organizer. He's the founder and director of an organization called Mundos Chiapas Other Worlds, and that organization which works very closely with Bertha and ba organization. They organize around environmentally destructive mega projects, but they also do a lot of work around training and helping communities develop local energy alternatives to global capitalists projects.
And him and Bertha go back years. She had some amazing anecdotes about her. They were in Quebec together in two thousand and one for the anti globalization protests. They did a lot of organizing against NaSTA together, and so you know, they'd really been in the trenches, and the two organizations would do a little back and forth of training each other and sharing experiences and knowledge.
He was in Live Speranza that night.
He'd arrived that day having not seen Bersa for quite some time. I mean after the two thousand and nine coup, Bertha, the whole social movement in Honduras was in this perpetual state of crisis, constantly fighting and struggling to stop these illegally sanctioned projects. Right, So they hadn't seen each other for some years, but he'd gone to live Speranza, and he was there because he was going to do several days of workshops for Lenka community members on renewable energy projects.
So he'd got there, they'd stayed up late talking, you know, he was staying with her in her house, and they'd both gone to bed.
They knew he was there, but we know.
From the evidence from the trials and from like various sort of phone tapping documents and so forth, that there had been reconsistance missions. The ex military sort of officers that had been paid into mediries had conducted reconnaissance missions.
So they knew he was there.
And in fact, there was four assassins, like one who stayed in the car and three who went to the house. One shot brother and the other shot and another shot was over and they shot him in the face and it hit his ear, and so he was bleeding a lot because of it. Was like, and so he just stopped. He just laid down and pretended to be there, and
they thought he was dead. So he survived an assassination attempt, right, and then stayed still and quiet until he was sure everyone had gone, and then tried to get help, and he took him hours to raise anybody. If he finally managed to get in touch with people in Mexico who got in touch with people in Honduras.
Who sent help.
And it's important to think that when people called for help, they absolutely did not call the police, right because they knew they weren't to be trusted. And so he was sort of whisked away by members of COPING, but then spent this almost a month trapped in Honduras as they tried to pin the crime on him. They took his boots to test for evidence. I mean they did, you know. There was just this concerted effort, and he actually ended up having to take refuge in an embassy because they
were trying to arrest him. I remember interviewing his lawyer at the time and doing a story and when he was eventually allowed to leave and go back to Mexico, him and his family ended up spending two years in exile in Spain because they didn't feel safe in Mexico either.
Too close.
Yeah, I mean, I think all of that personally has like obviously had this huge impact on his physical well being, on his psychological well being. When I spoke to him just a week to ago, saying, it's only now little by little that he's sort of reading like the court file. She's just been too difficult, and he's just realizing how close it was that he could have ended up in jail for this right, Like it was so close that he really escaped with his liberty.
And I think the other thing.
Of say is that for him that all of that sort of personal trauma. But like for him and many people in the social movement, her assassination, her loss was
a huge hit to the whole social movement. They've spent years really focused on demanding justice for Bertha Right and trying to recuperate and refocus, and you know, it was a huge crisis that had a lot of the work that him and Bertha had initiated regionally, Like they had all of these regional sort of meetings when groups with different organizations would come together and they would plan and strategize across the region. They've only just restarted those a couple of years ago.
Yeah, I thought that it was interesting and important reading your piece because sometimes I think at least Gustavo wasn't arrested, and like, we do know that it was the Damn Company and the government, and there's been some accountability, some
people have gone to jail. Things like that. People will be like, oh, okay, the social movement fought back, and yes, in some ways that's true, but it also it creates this vacuum, not just of that leadership, but then so much time being spent dealing with the impact of that that takes away from all of the other work that they were doing for so long. Okay, speaking of accountability, you mentioned David Castillo. Who else has been tried or imprisoned or fined or whatever for their role in this.
So far eight people have been convicted of participating in the murder that with Castilio is the most senior of those. The other seven are the high assassins and the intermediates. At least two of them had direct links to the Damn Company. Police officer was recently convicted of tampering with the crime scene and tampering with evidence, and that for Honduras,
that's honestly nothing short of a miracle. I mean, Bertha is among almost one hundred land and environmental defenders that have been murdered in the last ten years, and there's been no accountability for any of those people.
So it's small miracle in a way.
And it's really thanks to who she was, right the fact that her murder triggered this international outrage, but really thanks to the persistence of her four children, of her organization, of the people who knew and who loved her, who have never stopped demanding justice. I remember when I went to like Sponanza a month after her murder and I met her daughters.
And two of them said to me.
They were in their early twenties at the time, and they said to me, we know that it's on us to get justice for our mother, but the state is not going to do it. That we are now going to dedicate our lives doing that. And they have right. And so there's been a huge amount achieved, and there's also been like some people, three people were convicted for the fraud around the Damn concession itself. But there is so many people and so many institutions that have not been investigated.
To name a couple, the Damn Company.
The financial manager was a man called Danielle Atala Millns. He and David ran the Damn Company sort that did all the day to day operations. There's been an arrest warrant out for him for two and a half years that he was involved with David in diverting the funds, in pain, the informants in pain, the assassins, all of those things. He has not been arrested, I mean, and the fact it took eight years to even issue that
arrestaurant is an absolute travesty of justice. An investigation by independent experts that were supported by the Inter American Commission of Human Rights recently.
Published tzo hundred page report in.
Which they talk about all the different sort of levels of accountability that remain. The shareholders of the Damn Company who were in the group chats when the violence and the repression and the illegal payments were being organized.
Right, who either knew or should have known.
The government officials, the institutions, the armed forces that participated in the violence before, during, and after her murder have never been investigated.
Right, you know.
One of the things that strikes me is most sort of I guess emblematic of this is that the damn License, despite there being convictions around the ford in that license, has never been revoked. Indigenous communities across the country and other rural communities continue to face huge obstacles in obtaining community collective land titles, which means that they are.
Very vulnerable to the terrible.
Laws that this in Honduras, where you know, any old person can come along and lay claim to a piece of land in which there isn't a laned title and so that constant threat iLINK goes over the community even to this day.
I think it makes sense now to talk about Gadifuna and Miriam so like that. To me, that's just such a classic example of this that there was this twenty fifteen.
Inter American Court of Humanoides.
Yeah that like said, yes, the government illegally allowed all of this development on these people's land. They should be have the land to return to them or be compensated whatever, And then you know what has happened in the meantime, So yeah, can you talk a little bit about that? And then I want to play some tape from Miriam who was birth as friend and is fighting that fight.
Now, yeah, me, Me and Miranda, I mean, another extraordinary woman, an extraordinary indigenous leader. How and Bertha were best friends, They were comrades, They were sort of sisters in the struggle. Both were targets of misogynists, racist smear campaigns. They were called bad mothers, they were called antidevelopment. But they always had each other. They were together everywhere. And I think Balta's loss has been you know, no one in the
movement has felt it as much as Miriam has. I think just this fear, this constant fear that she could be next, and it's a well founded fear. She has received so many different strates she has really sort of caused her to retreat a lot from the public work that she was doing, or she remained sort of an incredible leader.
I expect to her the other.
Day, and she was very clear that two events mark for indigenous and land struggles in Honduras in the last decade.
One is the murder of her friend, and the other was this inter American court landmark sentence at the end of twenty fifteen, which found that the State of Honduras had violated the human rights and the ancestral territorial rights of the Goris and Garth and I put people on the north coast of Honduras in a community called in For de la Cruz and later in Punda Gooda as well, and that the State of Honduras was ordered to return the land, pay whatever compensation be necessary to the people
who are going to list land, to apologize and to make sure these things never happened again.
Right ten years on, that land has not been returned.
More land, more ancestral land has been taken, has been sold to private investors.
Some of the people who have bought.
This land illegally include government officials from every single party that exists in the country.
There has been.
Ongoing development and encroachment, and those Gathon are leaders who have been trying to get the state to comply with this sentence have been disappeared, They've been killed, they've been forced into exile, They've been for to my great to the US or elsewhere. And it is perpetual state of violence and land grabs that have continued. I actually spoke to a local leader and zoom For de la Cruz yesterday, a woman called Francis and on the tenth anniversary of the.
Court sentence that was the end of last year.
They're so sick fed up of non compliance with the state that they've decided to take matters into their own hand and have started to reoccupy peacefully the land that is theirs that the highest court in the continent has ruled to be their ancestral land. And the result has been that they have been criminalized. They are now facing criminal charges that if found guilty, they could face up to nine years in prison. Right But she said to
me that this is our land. We are not going to give up on our land, and we're going to keep occupying it. But this is constant state of fear and struggle. And I think the galley for on our community and the Lenca community because of who Miriam and both the words ah, you know, always work so closely together, and there's struggles. There's a lot of parallels between the two.
It was so interesting to me that you described what's happening there and that people can because so many of the indigenous people don't have like hard copy land titles, that it's that these people can come in and be like, oh, this is my land, and then if you can't prove that you own it, with this title, then you don't have a leg to stand on and I get to just take this land. It's wild, absolutely wild.
The onus is on communities who have lived on the land for decades, if not centuries.
The onus is on them then to prove that they are not invaders.
And because of this absolutely outrageous reform to the Penal Code in twenty twenty, which was condemned by every single international law expert, that you can imagine a business person, someone who wants a piece of land can register a peace of land in their name or the name of anyone at the land registry, take it to a court and say, hey, this is my land and its invaders on it, and the community there can be evicted within forty eight hours.
They're called express evictions.
You know.
So you have communities across the country just live in on in shacks on the side of the road because they have been taffed off their land, where they have cops, where they have you know, ancestral rights, and yeah, it's a completely outrageous and illegal.
We kind of touched on this a little bit, but you know, you had the coup and postcup, you had this very pro business narco government, and then you had this brief period of the Libre Party that seemed like they were going in the right direction, but didn't make any changes to sort of the major structural foundations of this stuff. So they didn't enforce this ruling from the
regional core either. Right. So I want to play a little bit of tape from this woman Karen Spring, that you spoke with about this, because I thought she had this great line about how it doesn't matter who's in charge. The problem is, you know, is endemic, and it's also connected to neoliberal capitalism globally. And then I want to talk a little bit about what the Leabti Party was and why it didn't sort of work to change things.
It's systemic.
It doesn't matter who's in power in Honduras, or who's in the presidential palace or the Supreme Court or the public prosecutor's office.
It's systemic.
It's part of how the system functions, the neoliberal economics system. It needs impunity, it needs corruption, it needs political actors to be involved in organized crime in order to advance in countries like Honduras and many others around the world. This is how the system is supposed to work, and it's very unfortunate.
Karen Spring is co coordinator of the Honduras Solidarity Project. She mobilized help on the night of Bertha's murder. Okay, so, Nina, what was and is the Liberal Party and what did they try to do?
Yeah?
Until the coup Pondurus in its sort of very brief democratic sort of period of twenty five years, it was a two party system, right, the National Party and the Liberal Party, which honestly resembled a lot the Democrats and the Republicans. Right, there was very little between them in many things. There were powerful elite to running two parties. The Liberal Party was ostensibly better than the National Party when it came to human rights and sort of some
social issues, but there wasn't that much between them. The coup happened, which is orchestrated mostly by the National Party and their economic sort of military religious allies, but with some Liberal Party members around the fringes too, and then you know, in the wake of that, in the coming years, the Liberal Party is worn really out of the resistance
to the coup. Right, so it includes academic mix unionists, social movements, all of those things, but also has veteran politicians from the Liberal Party right, including Manuel Zelaya who was the Liberal Party president who was deposed in the coup right and among many others, and a lot of these Liberal Party politicians have their own connections to land violations, alleged connections to organized crime and other types of wrongdoing.
Right, But it does rise out of the.
Social movement, and Manil Zelaya would have liked to have been president again, but he was a man that the US could not do business with, right, and there was no way they were ever going to allow him to run for president again. So his wife, former US Lady Zielma Castro, runs for president and wins at the end of twenty twenty one and comes into power in twenty
twenty two. It definitely hope, right, being completely cynical, I don't know how much to day Marcostra wanted to be president, and I think lots of evidence that I saw her husband was running a lot of things in the background.
But it did bring hope.
And one of the things that I think people were really sort of energized about it at the beginning was that she announced these sort of priorities investigations, these commissions, which included a commission into the Gaddi Funna land issues, into the implementation of the Inter American Court the Human Right sentence, into Aguan land conflicts, into Batera's case, for example.
We learned some really important things.
There was good steps taken, but at the end of the day, it's about action, right, and they failed to deliver transformative action, structural changes. The people I spoke to, the analysts I spoke to and would say that all of the commissions in quiries they set up have to be thought of as failures because they did not achieve structural changes. But interestingly, like Honduras, like Latin America in general, social movements are very active despite the huge risks that
they face. People go out into the streets, they protest, they demand better, and that really didn't happen.
During a liberal government, right.
And I think partly people say it's because everyone was exhausted after thirteen years of National Party abuses. I think people also didn't want to close the door to dialogue with the government. I think people felt we should reassured because so many people from their resistance ended up in government, and so they didn't have that pressure on the streets, which I think is really important. And so I think, you know, there was some positive changes. There was definitely
fewer land grads. There were fewer land environmental activists murdered, but you know, nowhere near enough, and certainly they cannot claim that they delivered on their promises.
It's a good lesson for American politics. I feel like this happens all the time where I mean, we saw it in the like Trump to bide into Trump cycle in the US too, where people really got galvanized around just getting rid of this one administration and not the structural things underneath that we're going to continue to be bad. And I mean there's so much lecturing. I don't know if this was happening in Honduras too, but in the US there was so much like lecturing of the center
left to the left. You know, it's like, don't criticize the IRA and don't criticize whatever. And it's like, well, then you end up with no structural change and policies that can easily be chucked out as soon as the next conservative government comes in, which the Conservatives seemed to know really well. And it sounds like the National Party has learned that left as well.
Yeah, you know, we have the National Party president that governed for two terms. Juan or Lando Hernandez was running a criminal enterprise through the party. Him and his brother Tony had and As, who was a member of Congress, were both convicted in the Southern District of New York of being major drug traffickers and arm traffickers.
To the US.
Juan Lando Hernandez was sentenced to forty five years in jail in twenty twenty four, and at the end of last year it pardoned by Donald Trump.
Right and now.
Trump supported National Party Canada has been re elected into government a construction magnet, and really the brief respite that the Liblo Party sort of provided despite not making any real major changes is over. And I think the parallels between what you've just described in the US and Honduras are really important to make.
Right.
It's that actually being on the streets, the public protests.
Are essential to delivering long term transformational changes. Right. Are they enough on their own?
No?
But without them it's not possible. Right.
So, now, I remember when Biden one, I was living in the US then, and even in the newsroom I was working in the relief among some people was like, oh my god, we can just we can breathe again.
We can just you know, we can returned exactly exactly. And you know what, rights are very hard to fight for, but it's even.
Harder to keep them right. And I think both these countries can show us that.
Okay, I want to talk about one Lopez and his assassination in twenty twenty four. That was when the Liberal Party was still in power, right, so you know, a very similar situation to Bertha happened under this party. Another example of how this is happening regardless of who's in power. But tell me a little bit about who he was and what happened in that situation.
Juan Lopez was a community leader from the Baho Guan area. He was an evangelical pasta. He was one of the key people who helped organize a position to this huge polluting iron ore mine that had been sanctioned within a nationally protected forest area where there are sort of really important water sources serving thousands of people in the area. And this mine was owned by a very very powerful,
wealthy couple linked to the National Party. The community is called Wapinol, and he was one of the key leaders in organizing that and the repression against that community that happened during the previous administration but also during the Liberal administration was really just like outrageous. Seven people, I think, not Juan, but seven other leaders were jailed for two years without bail from bogus charges. Juan and many others based criminal charges as well community as militarizers.
I had threats all of the time.
But the interesting thing about Juan was that at the time of his murder, he was actually in an elected Liberal Party official in the city of Takoa, which is the main city in naguan So he was like a local sort of counselor. And he had been calling out alleged corruption between the mayor, a Liberal Party mayor, and organized crime. And he had been calling this out, and he had been investigating any sort of alleged links to the mind but also linked to other sort of organized crime.
And he was shot dead coming out outside a church in September twenty twenty four. I mean, it was really the most impactful murder of a environmental land defender since Berther.
You know, one was much loved, incredible communicator, very well known, and a Liberal Party elected official right he liked Berther was meant to be the recipient of protective measures that had been ordered by the Inter American Commission of Human Rights because of the threats that he was facing, and he was killed anyway, like we've but the case of the Guapino defenders was well known by and had been taken up by many different UN experts, who after his
death specifically called out for an independent investigation that looked at the ties between the mining company and the local and the mayor's office in the crime.
None of that has happened so far.
Three alleged assassins have been charged and their trial is due to start later this year, but none of those who conspired or ordered paid for this murder have been There's no evidence I have even been investigated, and I've spoken to people who have contacts in the prosecutor's office, the investigation has not proceeded at all, and so really to this day, if we think about since the coup, I'd say I don't know.
At least two.
Hundred landing environmental defenders have either been killed or disappeared in Hondura, and is by far the case where there has been most accountability. Accountability remains almost impossible, Impunity remains the norm. And I think with One's case, what we're seeing is another example of that.
You just started to talk about this connection between what happened with Ernandez and then being convicted and then pardoned by Trump, and then I don't know, a year later he is going after Maruro for drug trafficking charges and using it as an excuse to take over Venezuela. So yeah, I mean you must have been going like, oh my god, there's so many parallels.
Yeah, well, I mean the Venezuela piece of this goes back to the coup actually, right, And so Manuel Selaijah, the liberal president who was deposed in two thousand and nine. When he came into office, he was just like another landowner, right, he'd been involved in logging. It comes from one of the oldest trace Spanish sort of settler families, I mean, but slowly over his mandate as he became closer to the social movement right, and he actually became quite close
to Chavez. He go Chaves at the time and was buying oil from Venezuela, and the US government at the time, specifically Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, absolutely hated this right, loathed loathed as a liar who decided to buy Venezuelan oil because energy prices are so disgustingly high, like outrageously high in Honduras because of this sort of mafia monopoly
of the energy sector. When Hilary was standing for president against Trump, I went back and investigated her role in that, and I didn't find any smoking gun of the US involvement in the coup.
But I absolutely can.
Say that the US and hy Clinton inarticular allowed the coup to proceed, and they allowed the post CU regime to do what it wanted to do because the liar was a persononym Gwaetaf as well as the US was concerned. Right, So the Venezuela and goes back to then now fast forward land Orlando Hernandez was pardoned at the end of last year, literally as plans were already underway by the
US to illegally depose Madua. Literally at the same time, Trump was claiming that Maduro and his wife and the Venezuelan regime were part of cartel, which doesn't exist.
I know that one kills me because you could see it. They're like talking about it as that exists. And then they kind of get a couple of leaders that are friendly to them to repeat this name, that this exists, and then yeah.
Well they claimed they were leading the is like this nickname that Venezuelan journalists gave two first Venezuelan military office, but then anyone from the state who were engaged in allegedly corrupt actions.
So it doesn't exist as a group.
It's like a loose term to describe corrupt officials. So yeah, so I mean literally, they pardoned this major drug trafficker. I mean, Hernandez unleashed scale of violence not before seen
in Honduras. He deployed the army and the police created a whole new militarized police force in order to run this criminal enterprise, which, by the way, led to huge amounts of targeted killings of journalists, of defenders, of lawyers, of political opponents, of children, of women, and two hundreds of thousands of Honduans fleeing the country to immigrate to the US. Right, the man responsible for that, I've been transporting tons and tons and tons of cocaine to the US.
Yeah, the US described it as him making a cocaine highway from Latin America to the US.
Yeah, Honduras before the coup was not a major player in the cocaine trade, but a couple of years after the coup, around eighty percent of the cocaine coming from the South was transiting through Honduras. Eighty purl right, I mean, the coup as well as unleashing this sort of pro business extractive nightmare on the country, it turned Honduras into
a major player in the international drug trafficking trade. And the person found guilty by a US jewry and sentenced to forty five years was pardoned by Trump weeks before Nicholas Madua and his wife were illegally producted from Venezuela and transported to a gel. I mean, the joke here was the bed was still and I just left. The bed was still warm when Madua LANDI did in it.
So wow, Okay, So all of this can be very depressing and disheartening for activists, right that It's like, man, the more so it's it's always hard, you're never winning, and then when you do, when you know, you up your chances of being assassinated. Let's talk a little bit about the lasting impact that Bertha had on the movement. Other than I mean, there was this unintentional negative impact of like there was all this time that was that was spent on trying to get justice for Bertha, and
like that took away from other things. But what are some of the things that she helped to put in place that are still there now and maybe coming back to life a little bit now too.
Her family and Copine always sayle but the die she multiplied, and I think that's really true. I mean, honestly, I've been the last decade, the amount of places that I've been, where I've seen murals or slogans like commemorating birthday, friends traveling in places in different continents send me photos of of sort of these you know, yeah, these braffiti or pictures or whatever.
I mean, I think that you.
Know her because of who she was, and because she was so well known internationally, right in indigenous movements, in local struggles in every continent that she she left. Anyone who ever met her has never forgotten her. But now, what I find really like incredible, and Gustava talked a lot about this is that people who were too young to remember but when she was alive, or who never
met her are inspired by her. I as just one example, I was contacted by a young Mexican woman a couple of months ago, who has liber She studying literature in Montreal, and she'd come across my book which is which is available in French, right, and she'd read it and Bertha's story inspired her to write a short story which has
now been published in the book. So it's sort of inspired art, it's inspired documentaries, it's inspired social movements, it's inspired sort of grants and educational opportunities, and I think that is Yes, her loss has been huge, and I don't leaders like Berta do not come along very often,
and I think we really feel her absence. I mean every time there's a scandal in Honduras, so before every election, Like I think it's a gut puncher everyone because you miss her voice, you miss her analysis, you miss her clarity. But who she was and why she has missed so much means that she continues to inspire a social movements, activist leaders around the world, and I think that is real.
And I think over the last few years, I think her organization copy In which is now led by her second eldest daughter, Berthida, has has moved from being in this potectual crisis mode to looking forward to taking actions proactive back and organizing around community land struggles and energy again. And I think some of these sort of regional bodies and confidences and so forth, that people just didn't have the time or energy your heart for a backup and running.
So I think it's been a really slow process.
I think her absence is really it still felt really sort of starkly, but I think who she was and her leadership and her clarity and her courage. She said this to me when I interviewed her that one time. She's like, please, don't think that I'm not afraid. I am afraid, but this is what I'm meant to be doing. And to me, courage is being afraid and keeping going anyway. And I think her courage is inspiring and it continues to sort of motivate people and movements around the world today.
Yeah. Absolutely, it's the kind of inspiration we all need more of these days. I just want to play some short clips here from the commemoration of Bertha's life that happened this week. Asperanza Mina gathered these from various friends that were there. First, we're going to hear from Bertha's daughter Laura Zunjega Casseres.
Yo a viesanos the l No acceptamos lamerte comusi stemma k domin al mundo, no acesia, no acept lagera. Keremos construir associas the past, the terna, the revel dia, care alternativas.
The vidra.
She says, today, ten years after the assassination of my mom, we say again that we do not accept death as a system that dominates the world. We do not accept violence, We do not accept war. We want to build peaceful societies of tenderness, of rebellion that can create alternative ways of life. Bertha's friend, LINKA leader Rosselina Domingez, also spoke at the ceremony, telling the crowd Bertha empowered us women
to fight for our rights as indigenous people. We are no longer afraid of the army, or police or judges. Bertha planted this rebellion and we continue to advance in her honor. After the ceremony, she talked about her role as women's coordinator for Bertha's organization, Copine.
Para important moer is sorely and case well, look, you know the hoperela demas compagners is a verbatnos.
Amir says for me, that role is very important as a woman, following in the footsteps of our colleague Bertha Caserres, who left us with the legacy that we can lead our fellow women and know that we also have the voice to defend and protect ourselves. And that's it for this episode. Again, check out Nina's book if you want to learn more about Berta Casertas. Also go and read the story that she wrote for the website on Bertha
and the ten year anniversary. There's a ton more background information and really interesting details about Bertha and her life and all the things going on and Ondoa since her death in that story that's at drilled dot Media. You can also sign up for our newsletter there. You can also donate to support our reporting there and find all kinds of other stories and resources as well. Check it out. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.
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