years of marriage to a much older man. Then she trained as a nurse, and later as a midwife. In those days she was often the only health professional in town, so patients would walk miles to the house and wait on benches lined up on the shaded front porch and back patio. Many were impoverished campesinos who brought a hen, some firewood or a sack of maize as payment in kind. ‘We didn’t have much money, but there was always enough to eat,’ said Doña Austra, who even now keeps her leather medical bag handy for when patients turn up. Some still walk miles, and they still wait on the very same wooden benches.
By the mid-70s, student rebellions were part of a burgeoning human rights scene in which Berta’s older brother Carlos Alberto, Austra’s fifth child, from a different relationship, played a role. Elected student leader of the La Esperanza teacher training college, the Escuela Normal Occidente, he led a hunger strike to oust the abusive and ineffective director. When he was shot in the left shoulder by soldiers deployed to evict striking students at the college, Doña Austra rushed him to Tegucigalpa for surgery.
The injury inspired Carlos to be more than a local student activist. He led nationwide strikes forcing a string of rotten head teachers to resign, and convoked clandestine meetings at the family home to organize hands-on support for leftist guerrilla groups in neighbouring El Salvador and Nicaragua. His belligerent leadership was noted, and the family became targets for the feared state intelligence service, the Dirección Nacional de Investigación (DNI).
‘The house would be surrounded by orejas [Spanish for ears, meaning informants], it was always under surveillance and we’d hear boots on the roof. Soldiers and DNI men would come in and search the house, but they never looked in there,’ said Austra, showing me the wooden wardrobe in the bedroom where they once hid books and pamphlets considered subversive. ‘If the DNI had found those, we would have been taken away to the 10th Battalion base [located in nearby Marcala] where Salvadorans looking for supplies or safety were locked up and disappeared.’
Several of Carlos’s friends, other student leaders, were disappeared during the 1970s, by which time Austra’s house was the de facto socialist (with a small ‘s’) headquarters, used to store medicines and food for the Salvadoran guerrillas and hide their commanders. She also hid young men, boys really, seeking to avoid the military conscription that wasn’t abandoned until 1995. Francisco Alexis, her eighth child, was jailed, starved and tortured at the 10th Battalion base after he too tried to escape military service. ‘Francisco was so traumatized by the barbarities inflicted on him, we sent him to live in the US,’ said Austra. He was smuggled out using fake ID.
After graduating as a teacher, Carlos joined the Communist Party and moved north to the Bajo Aguán region, to work with campesino banana cooperatives campaigning for land redistribution. According to Doña Austra, he got involved in the armed student guerrilla group Los Cinchoneros, also known as the Popular Liberation Movement, founded in rebellious Olancho in eastern Honduras. Carlos moved to Russia with a scholarship to study history and political science. He was later in Nicaragua, defending the Sandinista revolution against the US-armed Contras. For Berta, Carlos was a real-life revolutionary idol.
Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores was born on 4 March 1971, a chubby, placid baby Doña Austra’s twelfth and last child. Her father José Cáceres Molina (biological father of the four youngest siblings), from the nearby coffee-growing town of Marcala, was an abrasive ex-infantry sergeant from a staunchly nationalist family.2 José Cáceres walked out when Berta was five, after imposing years of what many family members called ‘alcohol-fuelled misery’ on them, and she had little contact with him while growing up. Berta was a sparkling little girl with thick curly hair and a wide smile. By the age of seven or eight she was a regular competitor on the local beauty pageant circuit, picking up prizes as the best-dressed Mayan princess and Señorita Maize. She liked to play football, choreograph dances and put on plays, showing a notable flair for organizing and bossing the other children. But she also grew up running in and out of secretive, politically charged meetings, and from a young age was spellbound by the fiery debates centred on injustices in her corner of the world. By then, in the early to mid-1980s, Austra was involved in fledgling rights groups like the women’s collective, Movimiento de Mujeres por la Paz ‘Visitación Padilla’,3 and helping to organize against the US-backed death squads operating across Central America. Thanks to Austra’s dedication as a community midwife, Berta also saw first hand the miserable conditions endured by neglected hill communities.
Aged twelve or thirteen, she would walk miles with her mother to reach pregnant women in isolated rural cantons with no electricity or running water. Berta assisted: she would fetch hot water and towels, hold candles for light, and sometimes even cut the umbilical cord. Many women spent hours each day collecting clean water and firewood as well as working in the fields and raising children, with no access to contraception or antenatal care, and no escape from violent partners. The grim plight of rural women left its mark on both mother and daughter. Later, Berta came to understand these harsh realities as a local consequence of global rules, a vision which would define her.
Sometimes they travelled to the Colomoncagua refugee camp, forty miles south of La Esperanza, to help pregnant Salvadoran civil war refugees living in concentration camp conditions. These mother–daughter medical missions provided good cover, allowing them to deliver food and medicines, and then sneak out messages for Salvadoran rebel commanders lying low at the family home. The first refugee camps in Honduras opened in early 1981, just as the US (with the aid of military dictatorships) started rolling out the counterinsurgency doctrine, in what Ronald Reagan called ‘drawing the line’ in Central America.4 From this point forward, any Honduran suspected of sympathizing with neighbouring communist revolutionaries risked being murdered or disappeared by US-trained elite soldiers. This disposition to fight American enemies was established as a core characteristic of Honduran military ethos.
It’s worth noting that anti-communist fervour was not a Cold War invention. In the first half of the twentieth century, Central America’s elite landowning families – who enjoyed absolute economic and political power in their regional fiefdoms – were more than comfortable branding popular uprisings as communist threats. Any sniff of a political, social or labour movement demanding even modest reforms to tackle the stark inequalities was crushed, often brutally, to protect the interests of these elites.
In neighbouring El Salvador, the 1932 peasant uprising was ruthlessly quelled, leaving around 30,000 mainly indigenous Pipil people dead.5 In Honduras, the 1975 Los Horcones massacre in rebellious Olancho was one of the worst to be documented. By then, the north coast had been devastated by Hurricane Fifi,6 and campesinos on the brink of starvation squatted on unused arable land in the hope of forcing agrarian reforms. The crackdown was prompt. At least fourteen campesinos, sympathetic clergy and students were rounded up, tortured and killed by soldiers and armed guards on the orders of local landlords unwilling to relinquish a single plot. The dismembered bodies were found buried on land belonging to local rancher José Manuel Zelaya Ordóñez,7 father of the future (subsequently deposed) president, Mel Zelaya Rosales. Thus when the US entered into full-fledged Cold War paranoia, the anti-communist brigade found it easy to sell its counterinsurgency doctrine to Central American elites who were already versed in dirty war tactics, albeit at a more amateur level. The doctrine identified certain social actors – student and peasant leaders, journalists, union organizers and liberation theology priests – as part of the ideological enemy, equating them with violent guerrillas. With this enemy, normal rules of engagement didn’t apply, and the US, with its psychological warfare handbooks,8 torture manuals and death squads, turned Central American armies into well-organized killing machines trained to detect and destroy anyone suspected of even thinking about insurgency.
Sovereignty for Sale
Anti-communist rhetoric wasn’t new, nor was the US peddling influence in Honduras. In fact, while many countries like to boast of a special relationship with the US, Honduras actually has one. Honduras was always connected to international markets via American
