was Berta acting as if time was running out?
It was late morning when she left the workshop with Gasper Sánchez, COPINH’s young sexual diversity coordinator, heading for the central market. Berta had spent several nights with the vendors occupying the ramshackle ninety-year-old site, contesting the mayor’s plan to replace it with a shopping mall. ‘She was tired, but they called asking for her help, so we went, and Berta encouraged them to keep fighting,’ Gasper told me later.
They met Sotero and one of Berta’s brothers at the market, and together went for lunch at their mother’s house. Berta still didn’t tell Sotero what was so urgent, saying they’d talk later.
In the car on their way back to the workshop, Gasper interviewed Berta for COPINH’s community radio station. ‘Energy is not just a technical issue,’ she explained. ‘It’s a political issue to do with life, territories, sovereignty and the right to community self-determination. We believe this is the moment to profoundly debate capitalism and how energy is part of the domination of indigenous communities and violation of their rights … That’s what Lenca communities like Río Blanco are living through right now. In this forum we want to explain the impact of capitalism on Honduras, and work out a community proposal on how we’re going to fight this battle … to leave behind the logic of consumerism and privatization and think about alternative energy as a human right, part of the process of liberation and emancipation.’
It would be her last interview.
Berta then called her friend Ismael Moreno, a Jesuit priest known as Padre Melo, to confirm Gustavo would guest on his radio show. ‘She was scared, but it was Camilito she was most worried about,’ Melo said: Berta had recently received an anonymous message threatening to chop her only grandchild into pieces.
Back at the workshop, Berta messaged SOAW’s Brigitte Gynther at 4:44 p.m., asking when she’d be back from Colombia. ‘I never found out what she wanted to tell me,’ said Brigitte. ‘But I knew something was wrong. She only contacted me when something was seriously wrong.’
After the workshop, Berta messaged a Swiss journalist who was interested in mining struggles in Honduras. ‘We’ve not allowed mines to enter [Lenca territory], but there are communities under threat,’ she texted him at 7 p.m., promising they would speak the following day.
Berta and Gustavo then left Utopía, popping in to visit her mother again before heading to her favourite downtown eatery, El Fogón, for dinner and a beer. Just before 9:30 p.m., a black double-cabin Toyota Hilux with polarized windows and no number plates was seen by a neighbour outside her mother’s house. Berta and Gustavo arrived back at her place just after 9:30 p.m.
Berta’s green and gold bungalow stands amid a scattering of garishly painted houses, some still empty or under construction, enclosed by a mishmash of wire and white wooden fencing, with views of a lake and distant pine-forested hills. The bungalow is on an unsurfaced road about 150 metres from the security gate, which is operated by two guards working in twelve-hour shifts.
The layout is unusual, with the front door leading into the open-plan lounge and a flimsy wooden back door leading into the kitchen. She and Gustavo sat on the front patio talking for half an hour or so, enjoying the breeze. Then he smoked a cigarette, while Berta finished working on a document. A couple of cars drove past behind the wire perimeter fencing.
Gustavo retired to the guest bedroom nearest the lounge. Berta’s room was at the other end of the narrow hallway. After changing into an olive-green t-shirt and black shorts trimmed in red and white, she sat on her bed, legs stretched out, and kept working. At 11:25 she sent a message to Juan Carlos Juárez, the police liaison officer charged with overseeing her protection. ‘Wherever you are, I wish you well. Please be careful. Besos [kisses].’
At around 11:35, Gustavo heard a noise. Tap! Tap! Tap! He thought it was Berta cleaning or fetching something from the kitchen, and barely looked up from his laptop. A minute or less later there was a louder, duller sound. Thud! Gustavo assumed Berta had dropped something in the kitchen. Then he heard her call out: ‘Who’s there?’
‘It was then I realized that someone was in the house and something bad was going to happen,’ Gustavo recalled. Seconds later, a tall, dark-skinned youth with cropped hair, wearing a black top and white scarf, kicked open the bedroom door and aimed a gun at his head from about two metres away. He heard the fuzzy sound of a walkie-talkie. Seated on the bed, Gustavo was looking straight at the gunman, when he heard Berta’s bedroom door being forced open. It sounded as if she was struggling to push someone away. Then he heard three shots. Bang! Bang! Bang! Berta’s legs gave way and she fell backwards. She tried to defend herself and scratched at the gunman as he bent over her. But she was weak, and the killer stamped on her bleeding body until she could no longer resist.
Gustavo jumped up off the bed and in a split second lifted his left hand to protect his face as the gunman fired a single shot. Bang! The bullet grazed the back of his left hand and the top of his left ear. Gustavo lay completely still on the floor as blood oozed from the wounds. The gunman was convinced and left, but still Gustavo dared not move. He didn’t hear a car drive away – what if the assassins were still inside the house? Moments later he heard Berta’s voice. ‘Gustavo! Gustavo!’
He ran to her and saw his friend sprawled on her back between the bedroom door and the wooden closet, struggling to breathe. Her curly black hair was sticky with the blood from three bullet wounds, spreading across her shorts and t-shirt.
Gustavo squeezed through the small gap between the door and her shivering body. He knelt down and wrapped his arms around her, trying to keep her warm and alive. ‘Don’t go, Berta! Don’t die! Stay with me,’ he begged. But Berta Cáceres was bleeding to death.
‘Get my phone,’ she murmured. ‘On the table.’ At around a quarter to midnight Berta uttered her last words. ‘Call Salvador! Call Salvador!’
Then she was gone.
Berta Cáceres had been murdered. Killed in her bedroom less than a year after winning the foremost prize for environmental defenders.
Gustavo survived. But would his eyewitness evidence be enough to identify the gunmen? And who was behind this bold execution? Could there ever be justice for someone like Berta in a country like Honduras, where impunity reigns supreme?
Would we ever know who killed Berta Cáceres?
Río Blanco, April 2013
Dressed in her customary getup of slacks, plaid shirt and wide-rimmed sombrero, Berta Cáceres stood on top of a small grassy mound shaded by an ancient oak tree to address the crowd of men, women and children who’d walked miles from across Río Blanco to discuss the dam. ‘No one expected the Lenca people to stand up against this powerful monster,’ she proclaimed, ‘and yet we indigenous people have been resisting for over 520 years, ever since the Spanish invasion. Seventy million people were killed across the continent for our natural resources, and this colonialism isn’t over. But we have power, compañeros, and that is why we still exist.’
Río Blanco is a collection of thirteen campesino or subsistence farming
