NINA LAKHANI: When I interviewed her—and I only interviewed her once—she described herself as a luchadora social, a social warrior, and a defensora de derechos humanos, a human rights defender. She never saw herself or identified as an environmentalist, although that’s how she’s really sort of been labeled since her death. She wouldn’t have identified either as a feminist, though I think the anti-patriarchal thinking was very much part of who she was and what she did. You know, she was a complex character; and I think she was first and foremost a defender of indigenous people, her people, the Lenca people, and their rights. And what she was able to do very, very early on, at a very young age, is understand that indigenous rights are the same as land rights are the same as human rights—all of those things are tied together.

I’m Nina Lakhani. I’m a British journalist currently based in New York, where I’m the environmental justice reporter for the Guardian. And I am the author of the book Who Killed Berta Cáceres?: Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet.

I met Berta in November 2013, so it’s just after the first elections after the 2009 coup. She invited me to interview her at her home in La Esperanza, which is on the west side of Honduras, quite near the El Salvador border, and at that point she was on the lam. There was a military-backed coup that had been masterminded by a network of economic, military, religious, and political elites in June 2009, which had ousted a democratically elected president and really had just unleashed a wave of violence and corruption and criminality that continues today. The coup government basically sold off the country’s natural resources, and so they sold off concessions for a huge numbers of mines, of land for cash crops, for biofuels like sugar cane and African palms, and they sold off the rivers.

There was a arrest warrant out for her based on trumped up criminal charges, which had been initiated by the dam company DESA, behind the Agua Zarca dam, which had been sanctioned for the Gualcarque River, which is a sacred river to the Lenca people, without any consultation, without any proper environmental assessment. She had been leading the local Lenca people in opposition to this dam. And so as part of a campaign to try and stop her, the dam company had initiated criminal charges, and the state, the prosecutor’s office, the attorney general’s office, the court had enabled these illegal charges to proceed and issued an arrest warrant. So she was on the run, you know. I mean, she was staying in different places every night at that point. She wouldn’t give me a phone number, she didn’t give me an address. She just told me to make my way to La Esperanza and find that headquarters of COPINH, her organization, and someone would bring me to her. And so that’s what I did. And I spent an hour with her where she, you know, she described to me in no uncertain terms the stress and the difficulties in living this life. She’s had by this point multiple deaths rates. And I remember she said to me really clearly that, “Look, I’m taking lots of precautions. I want to live. But when they want to kill me, they’re going to kill me.” And that’s how it turned out.

When I had the idea to write the book, the idea was who killed Berta Cáceres? But the more I looked at it and the more I talked to people, it became really clear that to understand why she was killed, you had to understand who she was and where she came from. And really her life and her murder, it’s an emblematic sort of story of what’s happening in Honduras and in the region repeatedly.

Early experiences were really key. I mean, Berta was born in 1971, as the Dirty Wars were in full force in Central America, and her house and her family were sort of in the middle of that in many ways. Berta was the youngest of 12 children. She had all of these older brothers and sisters, some of whom were involved in student activism and other types of sort of social struggles. But her mom was, I think, really key. Her mom was a nurse and a midwife, and she would go with her mom, you know, walk for miles into, like, poor rural areas where indigenous women were giving birth at home, in really just quite terrible conditions. She then, when the El Salvador civil war was taking place, there were refugee camps along the El Salvador-Honduras border, and she would accompany her mom on these medical missions. But also they were sort of like taking messages in and out for guerrilla fighters in the camps to some that were staying at their house. I mean, her family home became a hub. And then as she went into teacher training, she just went full blown into student activism. That was like towards the mid-to-late Eighties. And then she met her husband-to-be Salvador Zúñiga. And despite them having their first child, very shortly afterwards she goes with Salvador across the border and they spent, on and off, the next 18 months, you know, with different guerrilla groups, participating in the final sorts of battles that took place before the peace accords were signed.

Her role was logistical, she helped with education, with propaganda, with health. But her and Salvador just saw this extreme violence, and they saw that actually the vast majority of people who had taken up arms weren’t motivated by ideology; they were motivated by hunger. And I think after the peace accords get signed and they come back home, they know they want to do something in Honduras within the context of an indigenous movement. But they are absolutely clear that it would be an unarmed peaceful struggle. They knew an armed struggle would end up costing the lives of innocent people, of civilians, more than anybody else. It was never going to get them what they were fighting for, which were rights, basic whites: healthcare, roads, education, land, and the recuperation of Linca identity. Because at this time, really, in Honduras, there was no recognition that indigenous people even existed anymore. Everyone just sort of thought that they had died out.

Berta had this really tremendous ability to understand local struggles in regional and global terms. Whether it be in her corner of Honduras, in Lenca territory, or a community struggling in Kurdistan, or first people in Western Canada, she would sit and listen. She was like a sponge. But not only that, depending on who she was talking to, she was able to explain them in a way people would not only understand, but be motivated and be impassioned by what she was saying. You know, so she could be speaking to indigenous farmers in Honduras or Guatemala, or Nancy Pelosi in Congress in the US, or, you know, world leaders, bankers, all sorts of people. She had a very clear bottom line. She never compromised this bottom line, but she knew who to talk to, when to talk to them, how to do deals. Her ability to unite and to fight and to really push for change—that’s why she was killed, and it had the desired impact. It left a huge gaping hole in the social movement in Honduras and much wider than that. You know, the number of people I’ve met over the years who have heard of Berta in places, you know, that I can’t imagine how they’d never heard of her. The moment she was killed, I remember thinking to myself, if they can kill Berta Cáceres, they can kill anyone.

So Bertha’s case is an exception. Because it triggered such widespread condemnation, because of who she was and how well known she was, the government, the state was really forced to have some sort of justice in the case. Eight people did go to trial at the end of 2018. Seven of those were found guilty of participating in her murder. Two of them had links to the dam company. One was a former security chief. One was the ongoing community environmental manager. And three of the people convicted had military ties. But you know, the key thing is, those who ordered and paid for her crime, the masterminds of her crime, have never been brought to justice. While one man, the president of the dam company, a US-trained former military intelligence officer, has been arrested and is awaiting trial, the evidence that I’ve found and the evidence that was uncovered in the trial absolutely leads above that. Her murder didn’t just happen out of the blue; it was the final end point. It was the grand finale of several years of terror unleashed against her and her organization by the company but enabled and supported by state forces, by security forces, by prosecutors, by judges, by politicians. It was really the grand finale of a long campaign to silence her.

Berta always saw Rio Blanco and the Agua Zarca dam as an emblematic battle in really what was happening all across the region: energy projects being imposed that were forcing communities to leave their sustainable ways of life in the name of so-called green energy. You know, this big green energy myth that hydroelectric dams, solar farms, wind farms are all just an absolute good thing. But if you are going to impose projects, especially on rural and indigenous land, you are going to wipe these communities out. Berta wasn’t against green energy. She wasn’t against hydroelectric power. What she was against was having these highly profitable megaprojects imposed on communities without any consultation and without any fair compensation. Environmental justice has to be thought of as a much bigger thing. Us being happy to get green energy without thinking about where it’s coming from and without thinking about the suffering and the consequences and the repression being unleashed on communities all through the Americas is not any kind of justice.