Who Killed Berta Cáceres?. Nina Lakhani

people didn’t exist. The pre-Hispanic communities were considered living fossils, the stuff of history and folklore, not an ancestral community with rights. In response, COPINH hit upon a simple idea that turned out to be a stroke of genius.

       The Pilgrim Marches

      In June 1994, thousands of Lencas descended from the mountains in western Honduras and marched on the capital Tegucigalpa, to present the Liberal government of Carlos Roberto Reina Idiáquez with a list of demands including schools, clinics, better roads and, most importantly, recuperation and protection of ancestral territory. Scores of men, women and children from other indigenous communities – Maya, Chorti, Misquitu, Tolupan, Tawahka and Pech – joined the peregrination along the way. From the north coast came the colourfully dressed, drumming Garifunas: Afro-Hondurans who descend from West and Central African, Caribbean, European and Arawak people exiled to Central America by the British after a slave revolt in the late eighteenth century.

      Honduras had never seen anything like it. Curious crowds from the mixed Spanish and indigenous mestizo majority came to help the marchers with food, clothes and bedding during the six days it took to walk over 200 km. The pilgrims were even warmly greeted in the capital, where indio was a common racist term for those with suspected indigenous roots who mainly worked in low-paid jobs. Nobody expected this. Berta and the Lencas marched under a giant banner celebrating a great chieftain: ‘Lempira viene con nosotros de los confines de la historia’ (Lempira comes with us from the confines of history).

      When the Spanish invaded in 1524, the Lencas were the largest ethnic group in number and territory, and it was Lempira who united 200 tribes in battle against the invaders. After Lempira was killed in 1537, the Lenca believed a mystical woman would rescue them and restore the defeated nation, or so the myth went.² In front of huge crowds and TV cameras, Berta and Salvador impressed with their rousing speeches. So did Pascuala Vásquez, a petite Lenca elder known to everyone as Pascualita. ‘We’re not here because we love the capital city where there are bridges but no rivers, we’re here because we have many needs in the communities, and we have rights, and we demand that the government sits down with us and listens,’ she said. The energy and purpose conveyed by this wizened woman with her clarion voice earned her the nickname primera dama, first lady. It was the start of something, like a coming-out parade, which promoted the indigenous people of Honduras from fossils to citizens.

      Diverse indigenous communities joined forces to create a national movement demanding recognition and rights through hunger strikes, roadblocks and several more pilgrimages – in turn emboldening even bigger multitudes from isolated mountain and coastal villages to march on the capital. In this jubilant atmosphere, Berta connected the dots from local to global.

      One Garifuna leader, Miriam Miranda,³ recalls Berta pausing the march to paint anti-imperial murals on the walls of the US airbase, Palmerola.⁴ Militarization and repression, Berta explained as she wielded her paintbrush, go hand in hand with the neo-liberalism pushed by President Reina’s predecessor, Rafael Leonardo Callejas, because it is an economic and political model which must destroy some of us in order to thrive.⁵ For the first few years, victories came thick and fast. The most important was the ratification of the 1989 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention of the International Labour Organization, known as ILO 169, a binding accord guaranteeing the right to self-determination. Honduras signed up in 1995, in part thanks to pressure by Liberal congresswoman Doña Austra who promoted indigenous and women’s rights demanded by COPINH, OFRANEH and others, which Reina’s more progressive government was open to. It was the first time Honduras was legally recognized to be a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual society.

      San Francisco de Opalaca, the birthplace of Pascualita, was declared an indigenous municipality – a landmark post-colonial triumph. A specialist prosecutor for indigenous issues was created to tackle crimes such as violating the right of indigenous communities under ILO 169 to free, prior and informed consultations for projects which could impact on their land, culture or way of life.⁶ ILO 169 played a crucial role in the recuperation of small but significant territories lost after colonization: over the next few years, COPINH helped more than 200 Lenca communities acquire land titles across five departments. The treaty was the precursor to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which Honduras adopted in 2007. Both international tools deal with the mandatory rights of indigenous peoples to their cultural and spiritual identity, habitat, food, water, self-government, control over territories and natural assets, respect and inclusion. Of course, these instruments didn’t put an end to the violation of ancestral and community land rights. But they set the legal battleground for Agua Zarca and hundreds of other projects sanctioned for indigenous territories with blatant disregard for ILO 169.

       Old Tactics Die Hard

      The new indigenous movement injected energy and optimism into the country’s flagging social movement, sociologist Eugenio Sosa told me over coffee in Tegucigalpa. In the mid-1990s, banana workers’ and campesino unions were in crisis, having grown rather too cosy with the government and the United States after the 1954 strike. Meanwhile, new exploitative industries such as the maquilas or assembly factories strongly discouraged unionization;⁷ student and socialist groups had been decimated in the dirty war, leaving only the teachers and fledgling human rights groups battling to find the disappeared, demilitarize the country and promote women’s rights. The indigenous movement with its dynamic leadership worried the ruling elites – and Uncle Sam. Despite no sniff of armed insurgency, rumours spread that Honduras could become the next Chiapas, and the response was predictable. More counterinsurgency – but this time with a softer face, the so-called battle for hearts and minds.

      World Vision, the American evangelical aid charity with an anti-communist vocation, appeared in neglected Lenca communities alongside USAID, offering maize, medicines and housing. US soldiers helped construct schools and hospitals. ‘It was a clear reaction to the uprising by indigenous people in a strategically important zone for the US,’ said Salvador Zúñiga. ‘There was constant scaremongering about armed insurgency, but the real fear was that people were starting to understand and demand their rights, and COPINH was achieving victories through unarmed mobilizations.’

       Global to Local

      The hard-won government pledges on ancestral land rights were at odds with aggressive development programmes being pushed across Latin America by international financiers like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and US Treasury. Honduras, like many other countries, was pressured to introduce market-based land reforms, which included allowing the sale and mortgage of ejido (collectively owned) land for the first time. This, it was claimed, would unlock the wealth of the poor as the capital raised could be invested to make the land more productive. This economic thinking was part of the Washington Consensus – a set of free-market policies including free trade, floating exchange rates, deregulation and privatization of state enterprises like roads, health and education.

      President Rafael Callejas promoted programmes to break up collective land rights of indigenous and campesino communities in favour of multinational conglomerates. This is what ignited the modern-day land conflicts in Honduras, by pitting rural communities opposed to environmentally destructive projects (like the Agua Zarca and Los Encinos dams in Lenca territory, the Jilamito and Pajuiles dams in the northern region of Atlántida, and African palm plantations in the Bajo Aguán) against the country’s elites and international financiers invested in so-called green energy projects. Although Berta would be mostly remembered as an environmentalist who defended rivers, she was much more than that, because she always understood local struggles in political and geopolitical terms. Marvin Barahona, a modern historian at the National School of Fine Arts in Tegucigalpa, said that the introduction of neo-liberal policies in Honduras made the environment a double-edged sword. ‘For Berta, the environment became an instrument of struggle, while for the government and international investors it represented a development policy with profit potential.’

       Spiritual Awakening

      Berta was raised in a staunch Catholic churchgoing family, her husband Salvador as an Evangelical Christian. Back in the 1960s and 70s most people