Review of Who Killed Berta Caceres at LARB:
Nina Lakhani’s Who Killed Berta Cáceres is, at its core, a story of aggressions against the Lenca people, the ravaging of the Bajo Aguán for profit, and the impunity that reigns supreme in a place wholly surrendered to global capital, the United States, and to institutions like the World Bank. Adding to a growing literature on contemporary Honduras like Dana Frank’s The Long Honduran Night, Lakhani’s text highlights the country’s role as a counterrevolutionary base of US power, one whose legacies continue to be of lethal consequence. Historically, Honduran power has been the inheritance of a few families that are representative of deep political and transnational business interests — all aligned with US regional aims. Desarrollos Energéticos S.A. (DESA), for example, the very dam builder who ordered hired guns to murder Cáceres, is both a continuation of the country’s captured reality and of wider development patterns in Central America. DESA’s Agua Zarca hydroelectric project, like similar megaprojects, effectively reconfigures communities into sacrifice zones for insatiable energy needs. In the end, these development schemes all end identically: they destroy indigenous ways of living by seizing territory, defacing sacred entities like the Río Gualcarque — in short, alienating people from ancestral land.
Examining how Honduras’s political classes came to be allied with US and global capitalist needs, Lakhani captures the insatiate growth of a decrepit politico-economic system — a plutocracy by definition — where as long as US objectives are met, commerce stays active and elites are given free rein. To ensure smoothness to this corrupted form of order that allows for limitless impunity, the Honduran state engages in intimidation, executions, bribes, forced disappearances, and arbitrary jailing, much of which directly affected Cáceres and her colleagues. Her visibility with the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), which she co-founded, made Berta and her colleagues impediments for projects like DESA, defined as the opposition to business as usual. Alongside sister groups like the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras anchored by the Garifuna leader Miriam Miranda, the two mounted an impressive resistance, generating collective power across indigenous and Black communities to push against energy and land grabbing. Thus, beyond an exposé of the state, corporate, and US power that shaped Honduras into one of the most violent places on earth, there is an important subtext here about popular power, a blueprint on how resistance was forged with allied groups such as the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán Valley (MUCA) to secure victories in the most hostile of conditions.
While the book focuses on the state-corporate apparatus that led to Cáceres’s murder, there is an important core to the text that underscores her activism and organizational strategy — her family and colleagues, noting their capacities to engage in politics in adverse climates. This aspect makes Lakhani’s account read like an activist travelogue as we move through the varied environs of a crumbling Honduras, vigilant to threats against COPINH, reminded of others who fell in defense of their lands, like Lenca leader Tomás García in 2013. Lakhani captures the stress of midnight moves from safehouse to safehouse, the overwhelming conditions that kept Cáceres away from her children, and through it all, a foreboding dread.
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