in Honduras (Spanish acronym COFADEH); for years, decomposed bodies were dug up on isolated riverbanks or in citrus groves. The 1981 forced disappearance of Ángel Manfredo Velásquez Rodríguez was the first such case ruled on by an international tribunal. The university student vanished after being interrogated and tortured at a police station and 1st Battalion military base by the DNI and G-2 (intelligence wing). The Honduran government denied any knowledge or involvement, told the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACrtHR) that he’d gone off with Salvadoran guerrillas, and refused to hear the family’s case in domestic courts. The case changed international law, and forced disappearances were designated a crime without statute of limitations.17
Special Forces: ‘Whatever, Whenever and Wherever’
To understand counterinsurgency, it is necessary to understand the role of special forces – an elite corps created by the US in the 1950s to combat the occupying forces in Western Europe, using unconventional warfare. Under John F. Kennedy their numbers and role expanded to include preemptive strikes and terror tactics against the international menace that was communism. The time to act was now, according to the field manuals, in order to neutralize popular leaders before they became violently militant. In Honduras the Special Forces were created in 1979, a few months after the Sandinista victory, and were touted as an urban anti-subversive ground force to liquidate guerrilla groups.
What’s so special about the Special Forces? Special means irregular, super-soldiers trained to bend the rules and operate outside normal parameters because, they are told, the end justifies the means. When there are no limits, killing is the ultimate way to neutralize a threat. This threat might be real, like an armed guerrilla fighter, or imagined, like the children of campesinos slaughtered lest they grow into guerrillas. But before this ultimate penalty, a range of tried and tested techniques from the counterinsurgency spectrum – smear campaigns, blackmail, bribery, threats against loved ones, jail, torture and disappearance – can be deployed to neutralize the target. Informants, infiltrators and surveillance are key tools to gathering intelligence to divide, dominate and conquer communities. That’s why to understand counterinsurgency, you need to understand Special Forces and military intelligence. Both are secret because both bend the law, McClintock told me.
US-backed special forces perpetrated some of the worst atrocities and most emblematic executions in the region, including the assassinations of Archbishop Óscar Romero and Bishop Juan Gerardi.18 The crème de la crème from each country were sent for training to the School of the Americas (SOA) in Georgia, and its satellite centre in Panama. In Honduras, at least nineteen members of Battalion 3-16 graduated from the infamous Fort Benning military school.19 A much larger number were trained at home at the US regional training centre (Centro Regional Entrenamiento Militar, CREM), close to the Caribbean port city of Trujillo in the Bajo Aguán. ‘The Americans trained the region’s elite death squads at the CREM,’ said Padre Melo, who in the early 1980s was posted at a church near the base. ‘I would be stopped on my motorbike by American soldiers demanding to see my ID – they were authorized to do that!’
After the Cold War ended, these repressive security structures were not dismantled. Instead, they morphed into powerful criminal networks linked to corruption and the trafficking of arms and drugs, with clandestine parallel security structures that as part of their remit would target social justice activists labelled anti-development or terrorists. Modern enemies for modern times.
The implementation of US national security policies through the counterinsurgency doctrine marked a watershed in Honduras, and played a major role in Berta’s life and death. In the months after the April 2013 community meeting at El Roble, under the eponymous old oak tree, a systematic campaign to crush opposition to the Agua Zarca dam was rolled out, using a classic sliding scale of counterinsurgency tactics: slurs, repression, inducements, infiltrators, informants, criminalization. A Guatemalan lawyer, with years of experience investigating civil war crimes, told me that Berta’s murder bore the hallmarks of a military intelligence-backed special operation. That’s why to understand who she was and why she was murdered, you have to understand the past.
The Corporate Campaign against the Agua Zarca Dam Opponents
The military background of senior DESA managers frightened Berta. Bustillo was openly aggressive towards her and community leaders, but it was David Castillo’s intelligence past that troubled her most.
Years later, in text messages uncovered during the discovery phase of the murder trial, DESA’s financial manager, Daniel Atala Midence, is shown using his political influence to press false charges against COPINH leaders, whom he referred to as criminals and even murderers. The texts also show how he authorized regular cash payments to informants in the community, including members of COPINH, who spied on Berta and the organization before reporting back to Bustillo and Rodríguez. It’s a business practice that the company felt was justified in order to protect their investment from protests that delayed construction. Atala ran the day-to-day business with David Castillo, who offered Berta incentives such as money for local projects if she would support the dam and end hostilities between the company and the community.
Rebel with a Cause
By 1983, the twelve-year-old Berta was rebellious and outspoken, according to Ivy Luz Orellana who met her on their first day in 7th grade. ‘She was very studious, learned quickly and was a natural leader who hated following pointless rules and would speak out against unfairness,’ said Ivy, who shared with me a splendid collection of school photos that show a youthfully frivolous side of Berta. In one, Berta is fifteen and strutting along some sort of pageant catwalk wearing a fancy white dress, make-up and kitten heels, beaming happily. The picture appeared in the local paper.
By then she’d met her future husband, Salvador Zúñiga, a student activist six years older who was regularly invited by Doña Austra to the family home. Zúñiga had co-founded the radical Patriotic Student Organization of Lempira (Organización Patriótica Estudiantil de Lempira – OPEL), whose main objective was to purge Honduras of foreign armies. This made Salvador a target, and in 1984 rumours circulated that he was on a military hit list. With friends and colleagues already dead or disappeared, the nineteen-year-old crossed the border into El Salvador where he helped move the sick and injured to relative safety in Honduras.
After middle school, Berta, like most of her siblings, trained as a primary school teacher at the La Esperanza normal, mainly because it was the only free secondary education available. She started the three-year training course in 1986, aged fifteen, and immediately joined OPEL. When the radical student group’s president was killed, Berta was elected to succeed him. In one of her first acts as president, she organized strikes to protest the unfair exclusion of a student, which saved him and got the teacher behind it thrown out. ‘By the time we entered the normal, Berta’s ideals were very clear: she was a leader and wanted to be free, do other things, rather than get married and have kids,’ said her old schoolfriend Ivy.
This didn’t stop Berta having fun, and her friends remember her as witty, outgoing and happy to break the rules. Ivy recalls that ‘Berta was beautiful and had lots of boyfriends … She loved to dance, we were great dancers, but our mothers were strict so we’d sneak off to the Paraíso disco in the afternoons. We danced to merengue and 80s American pop music like Michael Jackson, songs in English we didn’t even understand. Berta was popular, happy and loved life, and that never changed in the thirty-plus years we were friends, even when things got so difficult at the end.’ In later years, Berta would jokingly call old schoolmates, like Ivy, who became National Party voters, capitalistas de mierda (fucking capitalists). She never lost her playfulness, nor avoided people with opposing views.
Outside the normal, Berta got serious with like-minded new friends. Like her brother Carlos and his friends a decade earlier, the youngsters met in secret to read banned books on the Cuban revolution and
