O
n November 22, 2018, a tribunal of judges convicted seven of the nine suspects on trial for the murder of Berta Cáceres. The eighth suspect was acquitted and the ninth is awaiting trial.
Cáceres, an activist who advocated for indigenous and environmental rights worldwide, was murdered in her home on March 2, 2016.
The convictions rested heavily on telephone evidence extracted and analyzed by agents of the Technical Agency of Criminal Investigation (ATIC) under the Attorney General’s office.
Berta Cáceres murder trial
Honduran human rights lawyer of the Alliance for Peace and Justice, Mario Cañas, states that, although there were weaknesses in the investigation, the telephone evidence was key to uncovering the culprits involved.
This case could form a model for managing complex cases with high component of technical evidence,” says Cañas. “It allows the investigation to depend less on witnesses and physical evidence.”
ATIC agents began their investigation in the days following the murder by requesting a list of phone calls that had been made around Cáceres’s neighborhood the night of the crime. From that starting point, the investigators uncovered a network of hitmen, military middle-men, and employees of the company DESA, whose hydroelectric dam Cáceres had opposed.
Cell Phone Locations
ATIC Investigators found little information at the crime scene to lead them to the team of hitmen that killed Cáceres. The agents turned to the local cell phone towers for help.
The city of Intibucá, where Cáceres lived, had five towers from the cell phone company Claro and seven from the company Tigo, the two prominent cell phone services in Honduras. Agents then requested a list of all of the calls made through the 12 towers on the day of the murder and the following day.
Berta Cáceres house, barrio El Líbano.
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They analyzed the list and interviewed local residents to separate the phone numbers of locals from phone numbers that were unknown to the area. Five suspicious phone numbers emerged. Those numbers only showed activity in Intibucá the night of the murder.
Through the registrations of the telephone numbers and interviews with acquaintances of the suspects, agents identified four users of the phone numbers: Henry Hernández, the organizer of the murder who was linked to two of the suspicious numbers; Elvin Rápalo who confessed to a friend of having shot and killed Cáceres; Oscar Torres who allegedly shot at a guest in Cáceres’s home; and Edilson Duarte, who is believed to have driven the getaway vehicle.
The four men’s phone calls provided investigators with their movements on the day of the murder, which amounted a cross-country trek from La Ceiba on the northern coast of Honduras to Cáceres’s hometown of Intibucá, over eight hours south and west. The group had returned north by the following afternoon.
On March 2, 2016, Rápalo, Torres, and Duarte began their day in the department of Atlántida, according to calls made between 5:00 a.m and 8:00 a.m. Hernández started in the department of Colón and travelled to Atlántida by 7:27 a.m. According to the public prosecutors’ version of events, Hernández presumably met up with the others in La Ceiba.
A few hours later, the group passed through El Progreso, a city on route to the southwestern part of the country. Duarte and Hernández made phone calls from El Progreso at around 11:00 a.m.
Their next destination was Lake Yajoa, a common stop between the north and south regions of the country, where all four men made phone calls between 12:38 p.m. and 1:15 p.m.
Hernández was in Cáceres’s home city of Intibucá just before 4:00 p.m., and calls by Duarte, Rápalo and Torres locate all of the men in the city by 6:28 p.m., where they remained for the rest of the night.
At 10:27 p.m., Duarte placed a call that located him in El Líbano, the neighborhood in Intibucá where Cáceres lived and again around 11:30 p.m., the time of the murder.
The phone calls place Duarte in the area of the crime in the same time-frame that security footage shows a pickup truck driving around the neighborhood. The footage was extracted from a camera facing the neighborhood’s entrance.
In the video, a truck passes the entrance, stopping briefly, at 9:01 p.m. and again at 9:06 p.m. and 9:13 p.m. An hour later, an unidentifiable vehicle again stops for a few seconds in front of the entrance and then drives on.
At 11:15 p.m., a vehicle can be seen driving passed El Líbano towards the hills away from the city center of Intibucá. The vehicle returns at 11:24 p.m., right around the time of the murder, and drives toward the city.
Meanwhile, Torres called Duarte from El Líbano at 11:34 p.m. Then Hernández called Duarte again at 11:38 p.m. Exactly at that moment, the security footage caught three people running into the headlights of a vehicle on the road outside of the neighborhood’s entrance. The sweep of the headlights show that the vehicle then turned around and headed back towards the city center.
Cell phone activity of three of the men stops for the most part after the murder, but Hernández’s phone can be traced to Comayagua, less than two hours east of Intibucá, at 1:14 a.m. and then back to the department of Yoro by 6:20 a.m. on March 3, where Rápalo was also located at 7:29 a.m.
Instrucciones: clic en la esquina superior izquierda, selecciona uno o más nombres de los implicados en el asesinato, ahora podrás ver reflejado en el mapa algunos puntos con un resumen de las llamadas que realizaron.
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Network of Phone Calls
ATIC agents expanded the investigation of telephone evidence to calls made by the suspects in 2015 and 2016. Their calls uncovered a network of communication between the four material authors and the intellectual authors.
The main link between the material and intellectual authors was Hernández, a former soldier who is thought to have planned the logistics of the murder. Hernández was in communication with Rápalo and Duarte and also maintained frequent contact with middle-men Douglas Bustillo, a former military officer and former Chief of Security for DESA, and Mariano Díaz, an active military major, both of whom he had met in the military, according the testimonies of ATIC agents. Hernández had also worked with Bustillo for a short time in 2015 at a security company in San Pedro Sula.
Bustillo was the only one of those involved who had contact with Sergio Rodríguez, condemned intellectual author and DESA biological engineer, as well as David Castillo, accused intellectual author and DESA president.
The three communicated frequently prior to June 2015 when Bustillo worked at DESA. They continued to communicate, though less frequently, after Bustillo left the company. In his testimony at the murder trial, Rodríguez claimed that he continued to consult with Bustillo on security matters for other DESA projects.
Bustillo and Castillo exchanged a total of 17 calls and 11 messages in 2016, over six months after his employment with DESA had ended. He and Rodríguez only spoke once in 2016, on the morning after Cáceres was murdered. According to Rodríguez’s testimony, he called Bustillo with the news of Cáceres’s death after receiving the information from a colleague. He claimed that he thought to inform Bustillo because Bustillo had had more contact with Cáceres in his time at DESA.
Data source: Evidence presented in the trial. Instrucciones: haz clic en la foto de cada implicado para ver mas detalles.View network in full screen
Recorded Phone Calls and Messages
After seizing the suspects’ cell phones, ATIC agents extracted information from the phones including files, photographs, messages, and search histories.
Text and WhatsApp messages between Daniel Atala, a financial officer of DESA, Rodríguez, Bustillo and Castillo reveal that they had Cáceres under surveillance starting in 2012. All of their discussions revolved around Cáceres’s activism against the company. None refer to her murder.
However, the judges’ verdict against Rodríguez stated that he provided some information from his surveillance of Cáceres that directly involved him in the plot to kill her. The evidence they were referring to was not made public during the trial.
Messages show that Bustillo had multiple meetings with other material and intellectual authors before and after the murder. He and Castillo met on November 22, 2015, months after Bustillo had left DESA. Bustillo also met with Hernández on February 2, 2016 in Comayagua, and with Díaz on February 13 and March 18.
According to his internet history, during his February 2 meeting with Hernández, exactly one month before the murder, Bustillo searched the web for images of Cáceres.
In a lucky break, the Attorney General’s office tapped Díaz’s cell phone in 2016 for a suspected connection with drug trafficking and kidnapping. The tap provided investigators with recorded telephone conversations between Díaz, Hernández, and Bustillo in which they discuss the murder plans.
On February 5, Hernández called Díaz. In the recorded conversation, Hernández tells Díaz that everything is ready. Díaz replies, “Ready to hit the ground running” and asks Hernández to maintain radio silence. Hernández then tells Díaz that he needs a car. Díaz affirms that they need a vehicle that is “clean”, could refer to the vehicle being unregistered and/or with no traceable connection to Hernandez and company.
The next day, Bustillo sent a message to the accused Castillo stating “mission aborted”, which prosecutors understood to refer to a failed attempt against Cáceres’s life weeks before her murder.
After the failed mission, Díaz talked to both Bustillo and Hernandez about a gun that he had borrowed for the mission and had to return back to its owner.
The most incriminating conversation occurred on February 21, 2016, 10 days before the murder. Hernandéz called Díaz to talk about a job.
In the conversation, Díaz says that he does not want to “get involved it that mess” and claims that he has detached himself from the issue.
Hernández proceeds to push Díaz to go through with “grilling the meat” – a euphemism for murder. He tells Díaz that he needs to do the job because he is in trouble financially. He complains about his 40,000-lempira debt (approximately $1,640), pressure from the bank and the recent sale of his motorcycle.
Hernández assures Díaz that he would not put anyone at risk. He says that he had received photographs of “the skirt” – a term for a woman - and that “the others” are ready to do it at any time. However, they wanted to see the money first to be sure that the job was a serious one.
Díaz repeats his reluctance to get involved, but in the end, he offers to look for someone who could loan Hernández money for the job.
On February 24, 2016, three days later, Bustillo received photographs through Whatsapp of Berta Cáceres on the streets of Intibucá taken through a car window. He also received photographs of a truck and Cáceres’s house.
Suspicious activity continued on Bustillo’s phone after the murder took place. On March 12, 2016, Bustillo called a female friend to ask her if she would send Díaz a message on his behalf. The friend replied that she would do so if it was not going to come back to harm her. Bustillo said it was not that serious, and his friend replied that he was acting like an idiot.
Bustillo’s search history between March 4 and April 30 shows that he searched Cáceres’s murder nearly every other day between the crime and his arrest.
On the day that he, Díaz, Rodriguez, and Duarte were arrested, Rodríguez’s private defense attorneys called to warn him about the arrest. According to a conversation between Castillo and DESA board member Jacobo Atala, the lawyers also informed Castillo.
In the conversation, Atala asks Castillo, “What evidence can they have?” Castillo replies, “None.”
“He didn’t have anything to do with it, right?” asks Atala. “Nothing,” says Castillo.
From Cell Towers to Convictions
From the telephone evidence above and additional evidence from bank accounts, witnesses and home raids, the tribunal surmised that Duarte, Rápalo, Torres, Hernández, Díaz, Bustillo and Rodríguez were all guilty of murder.
In the verdict, the tribunal stated that Duarte, Rápalo, Torres and Herández were all at the scene of the crime that night and actively participated in the murder of Cáceres and the attempted murder against Gustavo Castro, Cáceres’s guest. The judges also decided that Díaz, Bustillo and Rodríguez played a necessary role in planning the murder, and were therefore coauthors of Cáceres’s killing.
Though the trial demonstrated that there is a need for improvements in ATIC, the Public Prosecutor’s office and the judicial system, the investigation conducted by ATIC provided a solid base on which the prosecution built its case that led to the conviction of seven murderers.
