were already emerging about the Plan Panama Puebla (PPP), a US-inspired Mexican brainchild, soon to be launched as the missing development piece of the neo-liberal jigsaw puzzle. It was extolled as the mother of all development projects, tackling poverty by opening up the ‘backward’ Mesoamerican region to the global market. The two central pillars of PPP were transport infrastructure – a network of highways, dry canals and ports to speed up the movement of freely traded products – and energy liberalization: specifically, an increased capacity to generate energy by constructing dozens of dams and gas and oil pipelines, and then transport it further and faster by connecting the region’s energy grids from North America to Colombia (a sort of NAFTA–CAFTA energy grid).
The multibillion-dollar, mainly publicly funded, project promoted and depended on a momentous shift of the region’s economy, from small-scale farming to agro-industry and manufacturing, and expanding private control over natural resources. It included the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor which sounds like a good thing – a mammoth protected nature reserve – but in reality involved patenting the genetic codes of plants and animals in the second biggest bank of bio-genetic resources in the world. Why? To provide essential raw material for biotechnologies that could revolutionize medicines and food production, but without sharing economic benefits with local people. You could call it corporate bio-piracy.
PPP enthusiasts such as the Mexican president, Vicente Fox, considered this the only way to lift rural communities out of entrenched poverty.2 However, the Zapatistas and the Convergence of Movements of the Peoples of the Americas (COMPA) – the fledgling regional coalition where Berta and Gustavo first met – saw PPP as a poverty plan masquerading as development, which would force thousands of rural families to migrate to overcrowded cities or north to the US. Auctioning off rivers, seabeds, fertile plains and forests to the private sector threatened to raze or prohibit access to vast swathes of the ancestral land and natural resources that define the economic, social and cultural survival of countless rural and indigenous peoples. Looking back, nowhere has this played out more flagrantly than in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a narrow, richly biodiverse strip of Mexican territory connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, which is home to Huave, Mixe, Zapotec, Zoque and Chontal communities. Its abundance of natural resources – oil, timber, rivers and minerals (silver, copper, iron, crystalline graphite, coal, gypsum and travertine) – has favoured scores of mining, infrastructure and energy projects including oil refineries, electricity substations, dams and massive wind farms. Communities complain that many of these megaprojects provide inadequate information, consultation and compensation, fuelling social opposition, military repression, environmental damage, evictions and forced migration.3 In Honduras, Berta warned back in 2001 that PPP would be a death sentence for the Lenca people, and the Agua Zarca dam turned out to be a perfect example of this.
Berta was right: it was the PPP that killed her, according to Annie Bird.
At the anti-capitalist gathering in downtown Quebec City, people had had enough of talking. It was time for direct action. But the summit organizers were determined to shield political leaders from the deafening crowds branded as anarchists by Canadian intelligence. A three-metre-high concrete and wire partition was erected around Parliament Hill as a first line of defence. Hundreds of riot cops unleashed a wave of brutality the protesters weren’t prepared for. Tear gas engulfed the city in dense, eye-stinging smoke. So much of it was fired that it seeped into the summit hall, forcing delegates to take cover. Berta and Gustavo stood in front of parliament facing the impenetrable chain of riot cops, among protesters drumming and singing. It struck Berta that the demonstration was too far back. ‘¡Hermano! Let’s get closer. Vamos,’ she shouted, grinning at Gustavo, grabbing one end of the blue and white Honduran flag. Gustavo seized the other end and they rushed forward into a cold jet of water from a cannon behind police lines. They were pushed back and soaked, the flag went flying. But Berta jumped up and yelled, ‘Let’s go again.’ This time, blinding tear gas forced the pair back. But they surged forward again and again, recalled Gustavo. ‘That was Berta. Always tenacious and always willing to put herself in the middle of every act of resistance. She never lost that energy.’
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COPINH, founded as a grassroots organization, managed to stay true to its roots partly because Berta was never power-hungry. Whenever possible, everywhere she went, busloads of COPINH members went with her, meaning she and the organization evolved together. At one anti-FTAA meeting in Cuba, Gustavo and Berta were invited as speakers and put up in a fancy Havana hotel. Berta preferred the cheaper digs with the rest of the COPINH faction. ‘COPINH was never a closed shop,’ recalls Alba Marconi, who worked alongside Berta for over a decade. ‘For Berta, sharing ideas and experiences was fundamental to ensure COPINH was a true grass-roots organization where the power and energy came from its base.’
Berta’s early years were filled with Cold War drama and meeting the guerrillas seeking sanctuary at her family home. She grew up looking beyond borders, and in COPINH connected the dots between far-flung boardrooms and parliaments and everyday struggles in Lenca communities. Berta wasn’t an avid reader or particularly academic: bearing four children at a young age and launching a new organization made university impossible, and her children agree that studying wasn’t her thing. But she was an avid learner, an insatiable sponge, who evolved through experiences and through the people she met and debated with late into the night. Her ability to cite community struggles in Kurdistan, Brazil, Guatemala or Canada to explain big issues like capitalism, militarization and patriarchy was impressive. ‘I always remember Berta,’ said Gustavo, ‘with an open notebook under her arm and a pen in her hand, taking constant notes, absorbing everything, and encouraging COPINH colleagues to learn and grow alongside her.’
Convergence of Movements of the Peoples of the Americas (COMPA)
Berta first met Gustavo Castro in 2000, at a three-day event in San Cristóbal de las Casas, a colonial city in the Mexican state of Chiapas (site of the Zapatista uprising that six years earlier had inspired COPINH). It was a ground-breaking confluence of diverse movements from across the Americas and Caribbean, with the aim of formulating a unified political strategy. No easy task, but COMPA united as an anti-capitalist coalition at a time when identifying as such still carried the risk of being branded as communist.4 Berta, then twenty-nine, was assigned a high-profile role alongside Gustavo to draft the coalition’s message of intent. The six agreed objectives were struggle for gender equality, indigenous rights and sustainable rural development, and against the FTAA, militarization, and external debt and structural adjustment policies imposed by international banks under the Washington Consensus.
Berta demonstrated intelligence, sharp analysis and political know-how beyond her years, alongside an indomitable ‘yes we can’ attitude. ‘Berta helped make Honduras visible,’ said Gustavo. ‘Until then, its social movements, political struggles and resistance were largely unknown to the rest of the region.’
COMPA served as a bridge connecting communities across the continent during six intense years of resistance. The collective produced educational radio soaps, worksheets, books, and videos about PPP, biodiversity and free trade which Berta took back to her base in Honduras. COPINH travelled to Guatemala, where Canadian mines were already polluting water sources and displacing communities; Guatemalans gave workshops in La Esperanza on genetic modification and crop diversity. This fluid exchange of ideas and experiences across borders was pioneering. Over time, the central themes evolved through spin-offs such as the COMPA women’s collective where gender equality developed into a broader anti-patriarchal model that Berta sought to integrate into COPINH.
Berta and Salvador separated around 2000, but continued to lead the organization together. In its second decade, COPINH’s national profile declined as the indigenous struggle consolidated on the back of important wins. But its international profile grew as it evolved into an organization whose struggle identified with the anti-globalization movement opposed to the neo-liberal economic model. Berta’s involvement in COMPA
