Emblematic yet Exceptional: a review of Nina Lakhani’s Who Killed Berta Cáceres?
Review by Ben Leather
“I want to live, there are many things I still want to do in this world. I take precautions, but in the end… When they want to kill me, they will do it.”
As midnight approached on 2 March 2016, Berta Cáceres lay dying in her friend’s arms. Gunmen had broken into her bungalow and shot her three times, before attempting to murder her fellow environmentalist Gustavo Castro too.
Berta’s prophecy had come true. But how? Who murdered her? And which political and economic interests had conspired to leave this inspirational leader — who only months before had collected the world’s most prestigious environmental prize at a glittering ceremony in San Francisco — dead in her Honduran home at the age of 44?
In order to answer these questions Nina Lakhani’s Who Killed Berta Cáceres? takes us to the heart of the Honduran mafia-State. A rollercoaster ride through modern Honduran history provides the context of corruption, corporate capture, blinkered US meddling in the region, and the counterinsurgency practices that continue to annihilate dissent to this day.
Emblematic yet exceptional
With more than four land and environmental defenders murdered globally every week for standing up to destructive business projects imposed upon communities, Berta’s case is representative. Yet it is also exceptional. In my job investigating rights abuses with Global Witness, we are constantly told of corporate and State actors colluding to violently silence activists. Yet rarely is the evidence so clear. Lakhani lays it out with a clarity sadly absent in the bungled investigation and trial of Berta’s aggressors in Honduras.
Cáceres had been campaigning for years against the construction of the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam on indigenous land and the sacred Gualcarque River by a Honduran company, Desarrollos Energéticos SA (DESA). In spite of clear violations of the affected community’s rights, the project had attracted financial backing from international development banks.
DESA’s head honchos included ex-government and military figures, as well as members of powerful business families. Current Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández (whose brother was recently convicted of drug trafficking offences in New York) had reportedly fast-tracked the project and other dams through congress.
This is a story of the risks facing those who take on entrenched elites and attempt to change the status quo. Early in her book, Lakhani quotes a former Honduran judge as saying “Anyone threatening the model had to be sent a message. Berta was a threat to the model”.
A concerted campaign to silence dissent
The book talks us through the text messages exchanged by those who carried out Berta’s murder in the run up to the crime. Originally presented at the trial, when laid out in black and white these paint a sordid picture of how an ex-soldier and a hired hitman colluded with both the company’s environmental manager and its former security chief to kill an indigenous leader.
We are also presented with evidence of the range of tactics used by the company in the years prior to Berta’s killing: paying informants, planting moles in the COPINH organisation that Berta led, smear campaigns, coercion, and the constant tapping up of political and police contacts to act against the indigenous and environmental activists opposing the illegal dam. Company officials were involved.
We hear about the author’s conversations with an ex-special forces soldier who blew the whistle on a military hitlist of human rights defenders with Berta’s name at the top. And we learn how misogyny made Berta’s brave leadership even less tolerable to powerful, machista men. Berta’s friend, the indomitable Garifuna leader Miriam Miranda, called the crime “political feminicide”.
The Dutch and Finnish development banks finally announced their withdrawal from Agua Zarca more than a year after Berta’s death. Globally, too much money continues to flow through too many financiers into projects linked to environmental destruction and human rights abuses.
Nobody has yet faced justice for ordering the hit.
Compulsory reading
Who Killed Berta Cáceres? offers the inside track on a case that is not only emblematic of the struggle for rights and representation in Honduras, but of the global battle for rights and the environment in the face of corrupt governments and irresponsible business.
Those impassioned by the front line struggle for climate justice or intrigued by the geopolitics of Latin America will surely find the book engrossing. But for those seeking to understand how a nexus of powers can conspire — by act or omission — to brutally silence those standing up for their rights, this is compulsory reading.
“I’m not free to walk alone, or to swim in the sacred Gualcarque”, Berta had told Lakhani in November 2013, before going on to describe the life of all too many of those who dare to speak out for their rights.
“I’m separated from my children. I cannot live in peace. I am always thinking about being killed or kidnapped. I am a human rights defender. I will not give up the struggle. I love my country, it doesn’t have to be like this.”
Who Killed Berta Cáceres: Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet by Nina Lakhani (Verso, 2020), was published on 2 June.
Global Witness’s in-depth investigation into the corruption and international financing associated with threats and attacks against land and environmental defenders in Honduras is available here.
Ben Leather is a Senior Campaigner at Global Witness. Follow him on Twitter at @BenLeather1.
Nina Lakhani, a journalist reporting on environmental justice, can be found at @ninalakhani.
DESA has repeatedly denied any involvement in Bera Cáceres’ death.
