Who Killed Berta Cáceres?. Nina Lakhani

Salvador in November 1989. Berta was part of the health brigade, drawing on her childhood experiences with her mother to help treat wounded combatants as they advanced towards the capital. Back at camp after the nine-day offensive, Berta organized classes for the children and taught literacy to adults in the guerrilla-controlled areas, which tried to retain a sense of normality despite being under constant threat of attack. Her commitment to the Salvadoran cause impressed Chico.

      ‘Berta witnessed terrible atrocities, she saw the consequences of war on unarmed civilians and was visibly moved by the suffering. But she was a restless young woman, with a hardworking spirit and willingness to contribute to all sorts of activities with people trying keep their lives going in complex conflict zones. It’s clear that these experiences marked the rest of her life.’

      In late 1989, as Berta and Salvador prepared for the final offensive, a disarmament deal to end the Contra War in Nicaragua was signed in Honduras. The Tela Accord essentially marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

      That same year, the once feared general Gustavo Álvarez was killed, prompting Carlos, Berta’s big brother, to return home after more than a decade abroad.²⁰ In 1989, a few days after Álvarez was killed, human rights defender and physician Dr Juan Almendarez was in Bolivia at an anti-tobacco conference when he got word that his name was circulating on a military hit list. After Ambassador Negroponte had him sacked as university rector in 1982, Dr Almendarez had frequently been followed, photographed and harassed, so it came as no surprise. Before boarding the flight home, he told a friend: ‘If I don’t make it home, tell the world it was the military.’ This probably saved his life. Arriving in Honduras, Dr Almendarez was held at gunpoint in an airport taxi by agents from the Argentine Anti-communist Alliance (AAA), School of the Americas graduates operating in cells across Central America. He was taken to the DNI’s infamous torture centre in Tegucigalpa for interrogation. ‘The main interrogator knew every move I’d made for years, and named several compañeros who’d been disappeared and murdered …“How shall we kill you?” he asked me. “Peel your skin off, cut you in pieces, use a big hammer, or electric shocks, which would you prefer?” ’ Another interrogator demanded to know who killed General Álvarez. ‘I told him that it was probably the CIA, which is what I believed.’²¹

      Berta and Salvador returned in February 1990. Berta, almost nineteen, was pregnant with their second child and happy to be reunited with baby Olivia. But the couple remained committed to the cause and would secretly go in and out of the country with high-ranking fighters like Commander Fermán Cienfuegos, whom they escorted between Nicaragua and El Salvador, often via Doña Austra’s safe house.

      Bertita Isabel Zúñiga Cáceres was delivered at home in La Esperanza by her grandmother on 24 September 1990. But even then, the couple didn’t end their militancy. They went back several times, sometimes with both infants who served as the perfect camouflage to smuggle Salvadoran fighters across the border. Once, when Olivia was eighteen months old and just learning to talk, she called out ‘Pompa, pompa!’ to the soldiers on the border, confusing them with friendly guerrillas on the other side whom she knew as compas (short for compañeros).

       Enough Bloodshed

      In El Salvador, 80,000 people died, 1 million were displaced and 8,000 disappeared over twelve years of brutal conflict. In Guatemala, more than 200,000 mostly poor indigenous campesinos were killed in the thirty-six-year war, 93 per cent of them by US-backed forces.²² The decade-long Contra war in Nicaragua cost 50,000 lives. But no matter how many US tax dollars were funnelled to military dictatorship after military dictatorship, no matter how many weapons and planes America sent, there wasn’t a single battlefield victory. Every peace deal, however flawed, was signed thanks to dialogue and negotiations off the battlefield, almost certainly greased by economic interests. Berta and Salvador came home certain of one thing: armed struggle was not the way forward.‘We saw with our own eyes how war generates abuses on each side, and that the majority who died were young, poor men and women who took up arms because they were hungry or forcibly recruited, not because of ideology,’ said Salvador. ‘Times were changing, and we came home convinced of the need to launch an unarmed social movement. Whatever we did in Honduras, it would be without guns.’

2

       The Indigenous Awakening

       La Esperanza, 1 January 1994

      Berta is perched on the edge of the sofa, glued to the tiny television. It’s early and her husband Salvador Zúñiga is still asleep. The children, Olivia, Bertita and Laura, all under the age of five, are busy playing as Berta watches extraordinary events unfold in Chiapas, southern Mexico. This was the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico, Canada and the US came into effect.

      It was also the day of the Zapatista uprising. Wearing a black ski mask and army fatigues, Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, soon to be known as ‘Sub-comandante Marcos’ and the public face of the indigenous insurrection, declared war on the Mexican government on live television. ‘We, the Zapatistas, say that neo-liberal globalization is a world war, a war being waged by capitalism for global domination,’ Marcos said in a statement of intent, as 3,000 armed guerrillas took control of towns from the mountainous highlands to the tropical rain-forests across Chiapas. ‘That is why we are joining together to build a resistance struggle against neo-liberalism and for humanity,’ he exclaimed. A leader was born.

      ‘Salvador, wake up! You have to see this, indigenous people are revolting in Mexico,’ Berta urged her husband, trembling with excitement. ‘This is it. This is what we’ve been missing. We need to mobilize los pueblos indígenas, go on the offensive and demand our rights!’ The events in Mexico were a light-bulb moment for the twenty-four-year-old. Another leader was born.

      The newly-weds’ small house on the outskirts of La Esperanza was soon filled with members of COPINH, the organization they had founded in March 1993. They released a public statement in solidarity with the Zapatistas and Marcos’s demand for work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, liberty, democracy, justice and peace.

      COPINH was founded to revive Lenca fortunes in Honduras. It was, the couple believed, the right political moment to be talking about human rights, indigenous rights and demilitarization in the same breath. In 1992 (the year peace accords ending the civil war were signed in El Salvador) Rigoberta Menchú, a Guatemalan K’iche’ Maya feminist leader, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, while the UN declared 1993 the first International Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.

      The Zapatista uprising gave COPINH confidence, but, unlike the Zapatistas, COPINH was not about to engage in armed struggle. Berta and Salvador had returned from El Salvador weary of bloodshed. In the midst of its civil war, they had debated class, gender, socialism, and even the limits of armed struggle with guerrilla commanders such as Fermán Cienfuegos. The couple saw dirt-poor campesinos driven towards the guerrilla movement by hunger, not ideology, and were baffled by claims that El Salvador had no more natives while fighting alongside men and women who lamented their sacred lands. Berta and Salvador came home tired of war but excited by the democratic possibilities in Central America after decades of military rule, death squads and social repression.

      Still, the Zapatista discourse helped the fledgling group grasp how indigenous rights went hand in hand with the protection of land, forests and rivers.¹ Safeguarding indigenous communities meant defending their territories. Soon after COPINH unveiled a strategy of direct action by organizing roadblocks, sit-ins and continuous protests to stop illegal logging in the Lenca community of Yamaranguila, a few miles west of La Esperanza. They were loud, stubborn and successful, making instant enemies of local landowners but eventually forcing out over thirty logging projects from ancestral forests across three departments. Berta and Salvador understood that indigenous rights were human rights. However,