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Summary
The important trial against David Castillo, one of the accused co-authors of indigenous activist Berta Cáceres’ murder, is underway in Honduras. Before her murder, Cáceres faced several attempts to silence her resistance. Many of the same repressive tactics used against Cáceres – criminalization, imprisonment, threats, and murder – are still employed regularly against land defenders, human rights activists, lawyers, journalists, women, and several other targeted groups in the country. Karen provides an overview of what these strategies are and what impact they have on the people that experience them.
** Correction: Berta Cáceres won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015, NOT in 2016 as stated in the podcast
Check out the show notes at: hondurasnow.org and follow us on Instagram: @hondurasnow
For daily summaries about the trial against David Castillo, see: aquiabajo.com/blog
Transcript
Karen Spring:
Often criminalization will be the first thing that they do to you. They’ll press trumped-up charges against you, you’ll have to fight the charges, you might go to prison. And then if you go back and you keep resisting, and you keep putting your voice out there, then they might threaten your family, they might kill somebody in your family, they might start sending you death threats, and then they might even actually kill you.
Welcome to the Honduras Now podcast. This podcast shares human rights stories from Honduras and connects them with global issues and North American policy. I’m your host Karen Spring, a longtime human rights activist that has lived in Honduras for over a decade. Thanks so much for listening.
Welcome, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning into the episode today. As many of you might know, there is a pretty important trial going on in Honduras at the moment, the trial against David Castillo, who is the president of the company Desa, is underway in the capital city, and Castillo is accused of being involved in the murder of Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres.
Now this case may be arguably the first time that the Honduran judicial system has brought a case to trial involving someone that is believed to be part of the planning and coordination of a crime. And not just people that are involved in committing the actual crime, such as the material authors, as they’re called in Spanish, or the actual hitmen. So without doubt, this is an important trial for Berta’s family, for COPINH, the Indigenous organization that has provided the backing and strong political advocacy about the case, and the Honduran social movement and human rights community.
And, internationally, the Berta Cáceres case, and this trial, specifically, has gotten a lot of attention. There’s a piece of legislation called the Berta Cáceres Act, or HR 1574, that was recently presented in the US Congress again, because it’s been presented many times, that focuses on human rights issues in Honduras, and that spotlights this specific case, and uses it to raise concerns about the dangers that are faced by activists in Honduras, like Berta.
So Castillo, like I mentioned, was the president of the hydroelectric dam company called Desa. But the Honduran Attorney General’s office has still not investigated or indicted members of the powerful and wealthy Atala Zablah family that are also invested in Desa, and that played a very key role in decisions about Desa, and about Berta Cáceres’s resistance to their hydroelectric dam. So this trial might expose in greater depth the role that the Atala Zablah family played in the murder, as Desa’s executives. And this will be a challenge for the lawyers representing Berta Cáceres’s family and something that we, the human rights community, are watching very closely.
For those interested in hearing more about David Castillo, who he is, and also the Berta Cáceres case, you can check out Episode 16 of this podcast. But I mentioned this trial because it’s been such an intense process. It started earlier this week for the second time. And the trial starts up some days at 8:30 in the morning, and it’s suspended for a few hours here and there, sometimes 10, 15 minutes throughout the day. And it often continues until really late into the evening, sometimes up until 10 o’clock at night. So it’s a really super intense process.
And I’ve been posting summaries as well as the details of everything that is being discussed in the case, for those that want to follow the trial very closely. You can find these summaries and details on my blog aquiabajo.com.
So, since I’ve been busy with the trial, I’ve decided to share with you today an interview I did about attacks and criminalization processes against human rights defenders, like Berta Cáceres, land defenders, journalists, lawyers, and other targeted groups in Honduras. I even mention a little bit about my partner’s case and his imprisonment after the post-electoral crisis in 2017. The interview was on the show “The Grass Is Greener” on WXRW radio with hosts Gary Grass and Babette Grunow. This radio is located in Milwaukee Wisconsin, and they have kindly allowed me to share it with you today. So here it is. Check it out.
Gary Grass:
This is “The Grass Is Greener” on WXRS 104.1 FM in Milwaukee. I’m Gary Grass, I host the show. And with me is my co host, as usual, Babette Grunow.
Babette Grunow:
Hi. So we decided to invite Karen Spring. She’s the Honduras coordinator for HSN, the Honduras Solidarity Network. And she has a podcast called Honduras Now. This time, however, we will be focusing more on the human rights situation, and some of the political prisoners who have been persecuted for their involvement in protests or their work on the environment. So with that, I’d like to welcome Karen Spring.
Karen Spring:
Hi Babette, hi Gary, thanks so much for having me back. So I guess a good place to start for me is to tell a personal story about my experiences here with human rights issues that, you know, for years, I’ve worked on human rights issues in the country. I’m Canadian, but I’ve lived here for 12 years.
And three years ago, in 2018, there was an electoral process, and there was widespread protests around the country when it became known that there was a whole bunch of fraud in the electoral process. And thousands and thousands of people in Honduras took to the streets to protest. The Organization of American States said, this is really concerning. There’s a lot of fraud, there’s questionable irregularities. And so there was hundreds of people that were arrested, and over 30 people were shot dead in the streets from the protests. But one of the things that hit home really closely is that my partner, Edwin Espinal, became a political prisoner for a significant period of time, after the electoral process, as a result of going out on the streets with thousands of Hondurans to denounce the fraud.
And so I found myself for a year and a half as his partner and as his voice outside of a prison, basically trying to fight along with other Honduran families, trying to get our loved ones out of maximum security prisons. And so I found myself for a year and a half, every single week driving to a US-style, maximum security prison that’s run by the Honduran military here in the country. And there’s actually three US-style prisons It’s like they picked up some prisons from the United States, and just dumped them here in rural Honduras. And that is what the Honduran government, that is where the Honduran government is sending a lot of people that are speaking out against the government, and that are not in agreement with what he’s doing, or what the government is doing.
And so the conditions inside these prisons, and I had to go frequently to visit my partner, but the conditions are just like in US prisons. But I think here, it’s probably worse, because there’s absolutely absolutely no institutional support. There’s a lot of corruption. There’s a lot of organized criminal, very powerful, organized criminal gangs that go all the way up into the Honduran state and that coordinate with the Honduran state that run those jails, or that have sort of de facto power inside the jails. And so I found myself going into these prisons, and learning all about these conditions that Hondurans were facing as a result of the exportation of the US prison model.
Babette Grunow:
Are these prisons designed by, or in some way run by, US corporations? Or are they just taken off a US model and run by the Honduran government?
Karen Spring:
So there’s no doubt that there is US role in building these prisons. Prison reform became something that the United States government got very much involved in, in 2013, 2014, if not before. And, for example, the same phone company that runs a lot of the phones inside US prisons are the same phone companies that were in charge of the phones inside the maximum security prisons here before they decided to cut the phone system, and cut the phone lines. And so there’s no phones inside these prisons anymore.
And also, when Edwin was inside the prison, he, we came to understand more of the ways that United States corporations were involved. So for example, we believe that a private security company based in the US is responsible for surveillance of the cameras inside the prisons.
So it’s very much US companies are getting contracts, it’s not known publicly, still, because it’s all secret. And this is what happens when you are dealing with this kind of government is that it’s all sort of secret information. And it’s really hard to get access to that information here. But there’s no doubt that there is a huge US role in running these prisons and funding these prisons.
Babette Grunow:
So it’s privatized.
Karen Spring:
It’s run by the Honduran government, and the state security forces that are in our military run, public-private partnership that built the prisons, but it’s very much run by, like there are some contracts, it’s partially private, there are some contracts that are given out to private companies.
Gary Grass:
Right, it seems like our prisons where they hire a private company to provide the food service, they hire a private company to provide the phones, and they have some staff, medical, but they also use private medical that comes in, because they only have like one or two doctors on staff for like tens of thousands of prisoners. So yeah, it’s just odd to me that they’d call that prison reform, and they’d reform it to exactly what we have in the United States that we want to reform from.
Karen Spring:
Right. But what’s interesting about these prisons, the reason that they’re building them is to handle organized crime and drug trafficking. But what we’re seeing is that, especially since 2018, people that are defending land, defending water, from, for example, contamination from US-linked mining companies, and people that are protesting the government, that is US-backed government, are being sent to these prisons, and so as they were erected for “prison reform,” and also to handle organized crime, crackdown on organized crime in the country, we’re seeing they’re being used against the opposition to the government, to silence anybody that’s in opposition.
And so my partner was one of 22 people that were held in political, in maximum security prison. He was the longest held political prisoner after the electoral crisis. And then we saw, in 2019 we saw water defenders, people that are defending their water from a mining company that is backed by Nucor Corporation, a very large US steel corporation, they were sent to a maximum security prison as well, the same one that my partner was in.
And the conditions in these prisons are horrendous. They only have access to water for two hours a day. They can only flush the toilet when there’s water. And so there was a lot of conflict over bathroom breaks, and when and how long people were able to use the toilet because of the limited water. They fed them next to nothing. And there was no phones, they weren’t allowed books, pens, anything, they were locked in, they got one hour of sun every two weeks. And so the conditions are absolutely atrocious. And probably even worse than in US prisons.
Babette Grunow:
And probably even worse now with COVID.
Karen Spring:
Yes, definitely. And, in fact, one of the water defenders that’s in prison, who was criminalized for trying to protect their river, the Guapinol River in northern Honduras, eight of those people, leaders of their community, were sent to prison, and they’re still in prison, and one of them contracted COVID-19 in prison. And so that’s been part of our demand is like letting these Guapinol water defenders out. They’re not criminals. These are people that are resisting a US-backed mining company, and that are just simply saying, we don’t want to migrate. We want to protect our water source for irrigation, the water that comes out of our taps in our homes, the water we use to wash our clothes. And so we’re not criminals, and we want to be released. And so that’s been an ongoing process. But we’re finding that since the electoral crisis in 2017 – 2018, the government keeps sending more and more people to prison.
Gary Grass:
I’m curious how this is legally constructed or justified. Or I presume they don’t say, we don’t like your views, therefore, we’re putting you in prison. There’s probably a charge, is it violating curfew, they declare assemblies unlawful at some point, kind of like the way they do under US law? You know, are water defenders, does some private ownership claim the land and then they say all these people are trespassing? What is the justification, please?
Karen Spring:
Yeah, you’re right. This is something that is crafted in a very clever manner by the Attorney General’s office, and all the state institutions that are part of it, the police, the Attorney General’s office, the judicial system.
And so what they generally do, for example, the water defenders in the community of Guapinol in northern Honduras. They began to say, okay, fine, if you’re going to let mining in this natural reserve that the Honduran government declared a protected area, then we are going to block the road and we’re not going to let any machinery in to, you know, mow down the mountain, basically.
So they set up a road blockade, and it lasted over 80 days, and then the military and police come in and start evicting. And then they start laying on layers of charges, criminal association, illegal obstruction of a public way, property damage, if a sign is destroyed, or anything like that, any sort of charge, and we find that there’s a handful of charges that they have come to use in their playbook against these people.
And so if they’re not sent to prison, then they are, there’s thousands of people around the country, whether they’re small farmers, environmentalists, land defenders, lawyers, anyone that’s in opposition to the government or the policies of the government, they’re slapped with criminal charges as well, illegal possession of land, for example, for Indigenous people, they give them illegal possession of land. And so they have these ongoing criminalization processes against them.
And for Hondurans, what that means is that, not only do they have to pay for legal defense, which is extremely difficult in the economic situation that many people are in here, but also they have to go and sign before a judge every week, if they’re not being held in pretrial detention. My partner’s case is over three years old, and he still has to go and sign before a judge every week. That means he can’t leave the city for over for over a period of a week, he can’t go to any protests. And, economically, he can’t, his life can’t move on, because he has this sort of dark cloud of this criminalization process over his head. Some people have to travel hours to be able to sign before a judge every week. And that’s next to impossible if they can’t even buy food and put food on the table for their families.
So they’ve crafted these criminalization processes, with trumped up charges, but also an entire strategy to silence and basically null any of the resistance and the strong opposition, the voices that are the strongest in opposition to the government.
Babette Grunow:
So if they need to find a lawyer, how many lawyers are willing to take on these cases? I mean, you mentioned that some of the lawyers have themselves been prosecuted.
Gary Grass:
Well, let me just first say, in Wisconsin, if you get charged with a criminal offense, if you don’t have a lot of money, you’re eligible for a public defender. Those are provided to basically for free. So I assume there’s no legal guarantee of a right to counsel the way we have in the United States?
Karen Spring:
There is that. The problem is that there’s no, if the state is criminalizing you, then the state is also the one that is overseeing the office of the public defenders that would be named to defend you. So you might as well just go and defend yourself. You probably have a better chance of defending yourself than getting a public defender to do that for you.
It’s astonishing. I’ve been in many cases where very poor farmers are criminalized and they can’t pay for a lawyer and no human rights organizations are able to get to the hearing. And the public defender is awful. I mean, they make absolutely no effort to defend their clients or even give the idea that it’s a fair system, or that you are equal before the law and have a right to a defense before the law.
And so if the lawyers that do step up, and that are paid, or step up from human rights organizations or organizations that are willing to put forward a lawyer for these folks, they’re in tremendous amount of danger. I mean, in the last four months in Honduras, four lawyers have been killed. Lawyers are one of the targeted groups, actually. So there are lawyers, but the problem is that when you’re going up against a government that is criminalizing your client, as a lawyer, you know that that puts a target on your back.
Gary Grass:
If you’re going down there as a foreign lawyer, are you a little safer than you would be as a domestic lawyer?
Karen Spring:
Yeah, I think having a foreign passport always protects you more. The problem is that you won’t know what you’re doing, because you have to be part of the bar in Honduras and understand Honduran laws. So, really, US or Canadian lawyers have no ability to practice law here. So that’s the problem with that. So it has to be a Honduran lawyer.
And so often lawyers are bought off, too, and they don’t end up even serving the interests of their clients. Instead, they serve the interests of the people that are pressing the charges. And so, while we’re on the topic of lawyers, if people are not criminalized and charges aren’t pressed against you, I mean, there’s a whole sort of like tactic that the government uses against human rights defenders, land defenders, environmentalists lawyers, journalists to silence any sort of opposition. And all of this silencing happens in a state of impunity.
Most crimes go totally unpunished, and corruption, extreme corruption, often criminalization will be the first thing that they do to you, they’ll press trumped-up charges against you, you’ll have to fight the charges, you might go to prison. And then if you go back and you keep resisting, and you keep putting your voice out there, then they might threaten your family, they might kill somebody in your family, they might start sending you death threats, and then they might even actually kill you, which has been the case of 42 journalists have been murdered in Honduras, you know, since the 2009 coup d’etat.
Last year, Afro-indigenous land defenders were literally forced out of their home at gunpoint by individuals dressed in police uniforms and disappeared. They have no idea where they are, they were just put into the back of a patrol car. Their families did not know it was the last time they would ever see them, and we have no idea what happened to them. So these are the things, there’s criminalization goes hand in hand with murders and assassinations and threats against lawyers, and then, once again, fueling the whole sort of social crisis that’s unfolding in the country.
Babette Grunow:
I know that someone else faced a similar attack, first being accused of a crime and then when she fought that, being murdered, was Berta Cáceres.
Karen Spring:
Yeah, Berta Cáceres is probably the most well-known activist. People call her an environmentalist, but she was much more than just an environmentalist. She was a feminist. She was an indigenous activist, social movement activist, very, very well-known, nationally and internationally. She received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2016 for her activism, and trying to stop an internationally financed hydroelectric dam that threatened the livelihood of several Indigenous communities here in Honduras.
And so what they did with Berta Cáceres was they first tried to put her in jail, and they pressed trumped-up charges against her. They charged her with illegal possession of firearms and property damage. Then she went into hiding, she refused to go to prison, because she knew what going to prison would mean. She went into hiding, the charges were eventually dropped, which is usually what happens. But, again, it creates a crisis for the person that’s facing these charges, for their families and for themselves. She had to go into hiding for several months.
And then when she kept going, and she would not let these threats stop her, she started receiving very serious death threats. She was up against a hydroelectric dam project that, the owners of the project are a very powerful Honduran family that receives international financing, like I mentioned. So a very, very powerful family. And she just kept receiving all these death threats. And, several months leading up to her murder, she was very fearful, and she suspected that they were planning something and were planning to kill her. And she tried to take measures, she was supposed to be protected by the Honduran state, who have this, you know, half-assed system to so-called protect human rights defenders and lawyers and journalists. They never protected her, and then hit men broke into her home, entered her home, and shot her in her bedroom.
And she was one of the most well-known activists in the country. And it’s chilling to even talk about her murder, because March 29, the exact same thing happened to another environmentalist trying to stop a hydroelectric dam in northern Honduras. They broke into his home and they shot and killed him right in front of his family. And so it’s these patterns are repeating themselves and repeating themselves. And so once criminalization starts, we know that a whole series of actions can start that all aim to silence people.
Babette Grunow:
I wonder if they target people on those dates, just to kind of bring home the point even more. But, you know, we’ll get you guys type of thing.
Karen Spring:
Oh, absolutely. You know, the country’s a small country, we’re not talking a big country. We’re not talking a country the size of the United States. There’s 9 million people in Honduras. Anything that happens in, a murder that happens, you know, of an environmentalist in northern Honduras, like six hours by car from me, everybody knows it’s it’s not something that is hidden or not known, it’s very well-known. And so there’s a chilling effect on the population, too, knowing another journalist was killed, another massacre just happened, more police or groups of police broke into this activist’s house and dragged them out and beat them up and threw them in prison. So people know, and so it’s probably, you know, if you put a sort of a cap on of a dictatorship, I mean, that’s a tactic to silence people, to deter people, to stop people from resisting and speaking out.
Babette Grunow:
So what effect has that had, has it had the effect that they want? Has resistance kind of toned down?
Karen Spring:
No, I don’t think the resistance has toned down. I think what we’re seeing now in Honduras in a specific moment, I mean, Hondurans have been on the streets and protesting in a very inspiring manner since the 2009 coup. And so, you know, just like in the United States, there’s waves of mass protests, and then they die down, and then they come up again, and they die down again. And so the resistance never ends, it doesn’t have the effect, it might have the effect, sort of, in the short term, but people keep going out on the streets and protesting. I think there’s a quote, and I don’t even know who said it, but it’s so true, that you can cut off the fruit, but you’re never gonna be able to destroy the roots, right? And so the roots of the resistance, you know, bloom and bloom again, and pop up again, regardless of how many times they try and silence them and try and stop it. So, you know, there’s moments, right, like in the United States, there’s moments where there’s not very many mass protests, and then there’s moments that there’s a huge outburst of protests, and it’s the same in Honduras.
Babette Grunow:
Now, with a new outrage comes more protests.
Gary Grass:
Their perspective, you might consider it effective because you think about if all this weren’t happening, if there weren’t all this repression, think about what you would have then, you might have much broader, more successful movements if you didn’t have all this weight of this additional repression on top of it.
Karen Spring:
Yeah, I think that, you know, one of the things that we’ve come to understand is that when something outrageous happens, you know, just like the killing of Afro-Americans in the United States, you know, there’s mass protests, and then they they died out, and they come back up again when something outrageous happens, which is happening more and more frequently in the US. And so it’s the same here, it continues to pop up, and it’ll continue for a long time.
Babette Grunow:
Am I correct in thinking that the trial for one of the fellows who ordered the killing of Berta is coming up?
Karen Spring:
Yep. So one of the co-authors, he’s actually a US-trained intelligence officer. He spent several years at West Point. He used his US training to come back to Honduras and get involved in a whole bunch of corruption in the private sector, including this dam project that Berta Cáceres was very vocal and outspoken against. And so he has been accused of being involved in her murder. The government is trying to say that he’s sort of the one that masterminded her murder, that sort of thought it up and found and paid for it. But he was just one of one of many.
There’s a very, very powerful family that was building the dam is very much involved in her murder as well. But this man, his name is Roberto David Castillo Mejía, he is going to trial and COPINH and social movements here in Honduras, as well as US senators and US congressional representatives are watching very closely what will happen with this case, because it’s such an important case, in terms of getting any sort of justice for people like Berta that resist and try and stop these types of projects on their territories.
Gary Grass:
Let me just ask, does the US administration, but whether it’s Trump or Biden, how much difference does that make? Is that a big factor, or a tiny factor, or somewhere in the middle?
Karen Spring:
I think that there is really no difference. I think one comes with more window dressing than the other. I think the way that they discuss the issues, obviously, the Democrats, like you know, just say nicer things or try and hide it more what they’re doing. But, ultimately, in Honduras, I mean, the coup happened under Obama. And so, you know, Obama supported the coup, and then Trump continued, and then now we just see a continuation of what Biden will do. So for Honduras, US foreign policy has not changed, maybe just the window dressing in the way that things are talked about, but really, it’s been the same, unfortunately.
Gary Grass:
Thank you.
Karen Spring:
So that was an interview on WXRW radio in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
As always, I’ll post the show notes at HondurasNow.org, where you can check out past episodes or make a donation to the podcast if you’re up for supporting us. Also, you can follow us on Instagram at Honduras Now. Thank you so much for listening today. I’m your host, Karen Spring, and, until next time, hasta pronto.
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