Who Killed Berta Caceres? by Nina Lakhani

Author:Nina Lakhani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

US Footprints

In the decade following the coup, the US gave Honduras at least $230m in security aid, according to Security Assistance Monitor, a Washington DC-based group. Honduras became the country in the western hemisphere most visited by US special forces,30 with twenty-one US missions between 2008 and 2014 – a period when Honduran security forces faced allegations of murder, torture, rape and extortion which went uninvestigated and unpunished. The role of American agents on foreign soil is perhaps the most divisive aspect of its calamitous war on drugs. No doubt that’s why the DEA repeatedly lied about its role in a bungled anti-narcotics operation in Honduras that left four innocent villagers dead; it then misled Congress, the Justice Department and the public as it tried to cover its tracks. This was the massacre in La Mosquitia Berta mentioned in Buenos Aires. It took place before my time in the region, but I knew about it from Annie Bird, who documented the eyewitness testimonies that helped expose the DEA’s lies in an extraordinary bipartisan investigation.31

What happened was this: at 2 a.m. on 11 May 2012, Honduran police officers under DEA command fired at sixteen poor unarmed Miskito passengers on a taxi boat on the Patuca River in the municipality of Ahuás, near the Nicaraguan border. The shooting took place after the passenger boat accidentally collided with a disabled vessel carrying law enforcement officers and large quantities of seized cocaine.32 The DEA claimed that two Honduran officers on the disabled boat fired at the river taxi in self-defence after coming under gun attack. Not true. The officers shot first, and even aimed at passengers who had jumped or fallen into the water. At least one DEA agent in a circling State Department helicopter ordered a Honduran door gunner to fire at the travellers. There is no evidence to suggest any shots were fired from the taxi boat, or that the victims were involved in drug trafficking. The self-defence motive claimed by the DEA was based, at least in part, on fabricated testimony from a confidential informant and suspected human smuggler who later admitted lying. After the incident, the US-led mission rescued the cocaine and its agents and returned to base. It took community members two days to recover the victims: Candelaria Trapp Nelson, a forty-eight-year-old pregnant mother of six; Juana Jackson Ambrosia, twenty-eight, a pregnant mother of two; fourteen-year-old Hasked Brooks Wood; and a twenty-one-year-old former soldier, Emerson Martínez.

The DEA lied about almost every detail, brazenly claiming that its agents acted purely as mentors and advisers. Honduran agents did not have direct access to intelligence information or the necessary equipment to command such an operation. They received orders from the DEA, they did not give the orders. The man giving them was Richard Dobrich, who went on to mislead Congress about the events – before being promoted to DEA chief in Colombia, arguably the highest-profile post in Latin America.33 Dobrich’s lies were exposed by the damning report, published in May 2017, which lambasted almost every aspect of the DEA’s actions before, during and after the incident.

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