Who killed Berta Caceres?, Nina Lakhani, Verso Books, 2020, 336pp, £19 hardback.
Berta Caceres was a political activist who was murdered at her home in 2015 by gunmen paid by representatives of the Agua Zarca dam development taking place on Lenca land. The Lenca are an indigenous people mainly living in modern-day Honduras. Lenca herself, Caceres gave her life to the struggle for indigenous people’s rights. Her political biography has been covered in many essays and obituaries. What this book adds to those inspired by her example is the economic and political context of her life, written by investigative journalist Nina Lakhani.
Less than a year before she was killed at just 42 years old, Caceres accepted the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for her leadership of the anti-dam campaign. But she was more than simply an environmental activist, from her earliest days. Caceres was raised in a household where political resistance was a fact of life. Her mother’s house was a meeting place for supporters of leftist guerrilla movements in neighbouring El Salvador and Nicaragua (p17). It later became a de facto headquarters for Salvadoran guerrillas, with whom Berta’s older brother Carlos was deeply involved. Ten years later, when Caceres was training to be a teacher, she met with like-minded youngsters ‘to read banned books on the Cuban revolution and Marxism’ and to ‘debate revolutionary ideas and real-world tactics’ (p31). At 18, Caceres and her 24-year-old partner Salvador Zuniga left Honduras to support the Salvadorans. For eight months, the couple lived among the guerrillas, supporting logistics and reconnaissance sorties. Later, Caceres joined a health brigade to treat wounded combatants, while also organising literacy classes and other lessons for guerrillas and their children.
In March 1993 the couple founded the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisations of Honduras (COPINH). The Zapatista uprising of January 1994 in Mexico ‘helped the fledgling group grasp how indigenous rights went hand-in-hand with the protection of land, forests and rivers’ (p39). COPINH subsequently launched a campaign of road-blocks, sit-ins, and continuous protest against illegal logging. In June the same year, the organisation led an unprecedented mobilisation of numerous indigenous communities on a six-day march from their homelands to the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa to demand not only legal recognition of their rights to territory and traditional ways of life, but also modern social services such as schools and hospitals and improved infrastructure. The organisation also put many Honduran citizens from indigenous communities back in touch with their cultural roots. ‘No one expected the Lenca people to stand up against this powerful monster,’ said Caceres at an anti-Agua Zarca rally, ‘and yet we indigenous people have been resisting for over 520 years, ever since the Spanish invasion. 70 million people were killed across the continent for our natural resources, and this colonialism isn’t over. But we have power, campaneros, and that is why we still exist’ (p11). An important legal victory from this period was the 1995 ratification by the Honduran state of the 1989 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which guaranteed the right to self-determination. Lakhani notes that without the pressure applied by grassroots groups like COPINH, the ratification would only be worth the paper it was written on. ‘Of course, these instruments didn’t put an end to the violation of ancestral and community land rights. But they set the legal battleground for Agua Zarca and hundreds of other projects sanctioned for indigenous territories with blatant disregard for ILO’ (p41) Through application of the convention, COPINH assisted Lencas in attaining over 200 land titles.
Following the US-backed 2009 coup which deposed elected president Manuel Zelaya (see FRFI 210), hope in a state solution seemed forlorn. Dozens of new hydroelectric dams and mining concessions were approved. Forests were sold off for carbon credit schemes. Agricultural land grabs intensified. The US, which refused to condemn the coup, took an increasingly active role in counterinsurgency. Even in 2014, Caceres was saying, ‘We’re still living the coup. All the power and machinery of the coup remains intact, not only that, it’s been consolidated by the oligarchy and transnational powers through the expansion of grand capital in megaprojects’ (p161).
The Agua Zarca dam is a case in point. The company president is a US-trained former military intelligence officer. Phone records show close connections between Agua Zarca executives and state officials. The project was fast-tracked for state approval despite environmental concerns and community opposition. Construction was initially conducted by the Chinese giant Sinohydro.
The book describes the history of the Honduran elite: a mix of landowning families who trace their roots back to the time when much of the country was organised into plantations administered by the US, as well as bourgeois families whose forbears, mainly Palestinian Christians, migrated from the declining Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century to form a nascent merchant class in the country. One of these, the billionaire banker Camilo Atala Faraj, was a major stakeholder in the dam project and helped to channel millions in loans which originated ultimately from the World Bank’s private lending arm. Another key funder was the Dutch development bank FMO, which refused to pull out of the project until after Carceres was murdered. The World Bank continues to deny any responsibility for the Agua Zarca project.
It is a tragedy that Caceres did not survive to see the 2022 election of Xiomara Castro, but she would likely have been just as wary of Castro’s promises as she was of Castro’s husband, Zelaya. Caceres was even dubious about accepting the Goldman prize, which came with a hefty cash reward as well as international recognition. Lakhani describes the prize as a double-edged sword, which gave Caceres a renewed reputation and friends in high places abroad but also made her a higher-profile target.
What seems at first glance a very local and culturally specific struggle reveals its roots in the exploitation inherent to imperialism. So mass resistance to imperialism will inevitably come from the alliance of many disparate struggles that demand basic human rights and freedoms.
Adam Grey
