According to Zelaya, the envelope contained a list of nine ministries, the important ones like defence, security, foreign affairs and finance, each alongside three names of potential ministers whom the US would find acceptable.6 ‘He gave me three options for each ministry, letting me pick one was the democratic part … In Honduras, a recommendation by the US is a thinly veiled order.’ I asked Zelaya what he had done with the list. ‘I threw it away.’ Whether fully or partly true, this incident was the beginning of the end of Zelaya’s relationship with Ford.7
Two years later, Ford sent a notably hostile cable. ‘Zelaya remains very much a rebellious teenager, anxious to show his lack of respect for authority figures … There also exists a sinister Zelaya, surrounded by a few close advisers with ties to both Venezuela and Cuba and organized crime.’ He continued,
Unlike most other Honduran leaders in recent times, Zelaya’s view of a trip to the big city means Tegucigalpa and not Miami or New Orleans … I have found Zelaya’s real views of the United States hidden not too very deeply below the surface. In a word, he is not a friend. His views are shaped not by ideology or personal ambitions but by an old-fashioned nationalism where he holds the United States accountable for Honduras’ current state of poverty and dependency … The last year and a half of the Zelaya Administration will be, in my view, extraordinarily difficult for our bilateral relationship … Honduran institutions and friendly governments will need to be prepared to act privately and in public to help move Honduras forward.
Just over a year later, Zelaya was deposed. What had gone wrong?
The two most popular theories on the coup are that it was to prevent Zelaya from amending the constitution in order to stay in power, and that it was orchestrated by the US, who feared he was going rogue and could become the next Hugo Chávez. The truth is more straightforward: it was about protecting the wealth and privilege enjoyed by the country’s elites. ‘The coup reminded us that the Honduran oligarchy won’t tolerate even minor reforms if these changes affect their profits,’ said sociologist Eugenio Sosa.
Or, as the former finance minister Hugo Noé Pino put it: ‘The economic elites claimed Honduras was moving towards twenty-first-century socialism, but Zelaya’s fiscal policies were modest, never radical. What they actually feared was losing their absolute grip over the country, that a few state contracts and concessions could slip out of their hands.’ This is perhaps what the US, too, feared most – losing its absolute influence over a country it had dominated economically and politically for over a century. And what could be worse than losing it to the number one enemy, Hugo Chávez?
But Zelaya’s alleged transformation from capitalist landowner to socialist was unlikely, and untrue.8 At best he shifted somewhat to the left, partly because a close circle of progressive advisers encouraged him to listen to and form alliances with civil society groups and Chávez, and partly because the US and its Honduran allies refused to concede on a single issue.
Oil
At the top of Zelaya’s presidential to-do list was energy.9 He convened a meeting with the Honduran who’s who of oil requesting them to abandon or reduce the ‘fuel formula’, a shady tariff which enabled industrialists (distributors, importers, petrol station dealerships) to fix prices and overcharge the state by 4 or 5 Lempiras per gallon. No deal, we won’t give up a penny, came the response. Soon after, Mel opened a bidding war and approached Chávez about buying cheap oil from Venezuela, which was already extending its net across Latin America through the Petrocaribe agreement.10 Zelaya’s search for cheaper oil started a political war. Ford warned Zelaya that the proposed deal with Chávez ‘was changing the rules of the game’ and could jeopardize a pending US aid package. Business leaders, those with oil interests and others, also warned against picking a fight with the US, the country’s principal trading partner. But Zelaya is visceral and combative by nature, and his mind was made up. Soon after, in June 2006, Zelaya met with President George W. Bush.
Bush presided over a two-hour meeting at the Oval Office, also attended by Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador Ford. I’ve heard several versions regarding the exact words that were uttered at that meeting. Arístides Mejía, then defence minister, remembers it as follows: ‘Look, Mr President,’ said Bush, ‘I know you’ve got an oil problem but listen to me, my family is in the oil business, so I know what I’m talking about, the market sets the price. Chávez can’t give you a better price, he’s just going to bring you problems.’
He went on about Chávez for ten minutes or so, according to Mejía, before finishing in Spanish with ‘Cuidado con Chávez’ (Careful with Chávez). Mel responded smoothly: ‘Mira, señor presidente, a famous French philosopher once said that great men are measured by the problems they solve. But Chávez is a small problem, there’s no need to spend so much time worrying about him.’ Bush smiled and the tension was broken. ‘Who’s the French thinker you pulled out of the bag?’ Mejía asked after the meeting. ‘No idea, I made him up,’ said Zelaya. Honduras joined Petrocaribe in December 2007.11
Zelaya’s allies were more perturbed about joining Chávez’s other regional trade project, ALBA.12 He signed up anyway, with Chávez at his side, promising cheap oil for a hundred years and free tractors for campesinos to boost food production. Love him or hate him, Chávez had a flair for name-calling, and he took the opportunity to rub up the country’s businessmen and media moguls, calling them pitiyanquis. The catchy insult made headlines, as did calling Cardinal Rodríguez a parrot of the empire. Yet despite the anti-US posturing and public displays of affection, Chávez and Zelaya were not especially close, personally or politically. ‘Chávez was a military man who never took Mel seriously, saw him as a cowboy in politician’s clothes,’ said the academic Víctor Meza, Zelaya’s interior minister. ‘The relationship was pragmatic and opportunistic, never ideologically driven,’ said economist Hugo Noé Pino. ‘Both were populists and provocateurs, but that’s where the similarity ends.’
Berta backed Zelaya’s alliance with Petrocaribe and ALBA, and respected Chávez, though she was privately very critical of the imposition of energy and petrol projects on indigenous territories in Venezuela. ‘My mum didn’t blindly follow. She taught us never to idealize anyone, including her,’ said daughter Bertita. Still, the Comandante Chávez was for a while Berta’s online profile picture.
Energy
In 2006, ENEE, the national electricity company, was on the verge of bankruptcy after years of mismanagement, corruption and perverse contracts favouring a tiny handful of suppliers and distributors. Prices were high, defaults mounting, and blackouts long and frequent.13 The energy matrix was dominated by oil- and coal-fired plants controlled by two of the country’s richest industrialists: Fredy Násser, son-in-law of Miguel Facussé, and Schucry Kafie. They boasted lucrative contracts, negotiated in the early 1990s during a regional energy crisis, in which ENEE paid fixed prices and remained responsible for repairs and maintenance. The energy magnates were furious when these and other inflated contracts were sent to Congress for revision.14 But ENEE was haemorrhaging money, so in 2007 Zelaya sent in the big guns, the defence and finance ministers, to stop the rot. (The finance aspect makes sense, but deploying the armed forces seems like a retrograde step in a fragile democracy.)15 Mejía asked General Romeo Vásquez to put together a management team to run ENEE. Two of its members are important to Berta’s story.
Julián Pacheco Tinoco, then a colonel and head of military protocol, was assigned to manage human resources at ENEE. An SOA-trained counterinsurgency and intelligence specialist, Pacheco went on to become security minister under Juan Orlando Hernández (president since 2014), with overall responsibility for policing COPINH protests against Agua Zarca and for providing protection to Berta,16 as well as to hundreds of other threatened defenders and journalists – a position
