M
aria Gomez walked out of the church service on Palm Sunday into the dry heat of the Honduran summer. Her family and neighbors began the trek back over the dirt roads through the steep hills of the surrounding indigenous Lenca communities that line the Gualcarque River.
Their peaceful walk was interrupted with breathless cries. Neighbors came running at them from the direction of Maria’s community.
“Fire!” they yelled. “Your crops are on fire!”
Maria and her neighbors ran to the hillside that, hours before, had been covered with corn stalks where each family cultivated a small plot of land.
Red flames licked the green and brown stalks, swallowing up the livelihood of the men and women who rushed to save their land.
It did not take long to realize that the plots of land on fire were those of the community members that opposed the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam, the controversial project that just a year before had been connected to the death of Honduran activist Berta Cáceres.
The Agua Zarca saga began in 2005 when men arrived in the quiet, rural communities around the Gualcarque River to take measurements of the land.
The Gualcaque River winds through the western part of Honduras near the Intibucá and Santa Barbara departments. The rural communities around the river are primarily inhabited by Lenca people, the largest indigenous people group in Honduras.
Around the site for the Agua Zarca project, the land is divided into a number of communities that include Barril, Los Robles, La Tijera, Santa Ana, Valle de Angeles, and Río Blanco, the community most often mentioned in reference to the dam.
There the people live off of the land by cultivating corn, beans, yucca, coffee, and other small crops. In the Lenca tradition, the land is considered communal.
“The land belongs to the community,” Maria explains. “They divide the plots between people, and everyone respects one another’s piece [of land].”
Maria remembers the first time foreign men came into the communities to measure the land. The locals did not know who they were or what company they were with. No one had approached them about any project that might be constructed in the area.
“The people saw it and were angry because they had not been consulted,” says Maria.
Incensed by the invasion, community members waited until the workers left, went back to the river, and took out the markers the workers had placed in the ground.
Maria claims that they later found out that the workers were from Synohydro, a construction company from China that was contracted by the Honduran company Desarrollos Energeticos (DESA) to build the Agua Zarca dam.
Later the workers returned and found their markers gone. They confronted the men of the community and threatened to have them arrested for tampering with the measurements.
That was the last the community heard about the Agua Zarca Project for another six years, until one day tractors rolled down their dirt roads carting construction materials for the dam.
The Battle of the Tractors
In 2011, tractors lumbered over plots of corn that had been cultivated by the Lenca community, tearing up the green stalks to a make a road for the machinery that was to come. Community members say that DESA never asked them for the use of their land, nor did the company ever compensate those whose plots were torn up to make the road.
The company did, however, compensate one family for land that, according to the communal understanding of the Lenca people, they did not own. The Madrid family happily campaigned for the Agua Zarca dam and held meetings in the community to promote the project. The family’s name came up frequently in the corruption trial against Intibucá mayor Martiniano Dominguez, who was accused, but acquitted, of illegally giving permission for the construction of the dam without prior consultation with the community.
At one meeting hosted by the Madrid family, a local leader in league with the Madrids bragged about a gift that DESA had given him, a brand new bus. The man owned the buses that traveled between the Río Blanco region and Santa Barbara, a large city about 80 kilometers north.
Maria says that, unfortunately for him, the gift was too large to travel down the community’s dirt road, and the man was forced to sell it.
People from Valle de Angeles and Santa Ana attended the Madrid family’s meetings and supported their efforts to cooperate with DESA. Others from the surrounding area, according to Maria, were kept away by fear.
“The people from these communities that were not in favor did not got get involved in the fight because they were afraid of threats from the […] family,” says Maria.
One of those threats was that the Madrid family would burn down the corn of anyone who opposed them. Maria claims that she later found out that neighbors had seen nephews of the family running from her plot as it went up in flames.
The First Martyr
Many people from the other communities voiced their opposition despite the threats. Their reason was that DESA began building the dam and tearing out their land without consulting them.
With the help of COPINH, a coalition of indigenous rights organizations, those opposed to the dam began to stage protests outside of the Agua Zarca facilities as construction continued over the next few years.
In 2013, the tension escalated. Early in the year, COPINH filed multiple reports stating that Honduran police aggressively removed peaceful protestors from the area. Shortly after, the protestors blocked the road so that the machinery for the dam could not get through.
Maria says that it was not until the protests started that the company finally began to hold meetings for the community, but by then those in opposition had made up their minds: They had not been consulted prior to construction, and therefore the dam was illegal.
Minutes from COPINH provide a record of one such meeting hosted by Mayor Dominguéz of Intibucá. Domingúez acted a spokesperson for the company, informing the community of the benefits that the project would bring to the communities including jobs, electricity, better roads and school supplies for children.
According to reports filed by COPINH, DESA representatives held other meetings with the community that year. For some meetings, they only invited community members who were in favor of the dam. Opposing community members made a point to state that if their signatures appeared on any documents, they were faked.
It was after one meeting with dam supporters that the Agua Zarca conflict took its first victim, Maria’s niece Paula.
The government’s Minister for Ethnic Groups, Luis Green, was visiting the community at the time. Maria claims that Green was in favor of the dam construction project. After the meeting, he asked community members to show him the plots of land that had been torn up by DESA’s machinery. A group of men and women piled into the back of his truck as his driver wove them through hills across the damaged land. The group included Paula, a thirty-three-year-old mother of six who Maria remembers as her “sobrina trigeñita, gordita, y bonita” or her beautiful, chubby, dark-skinned niece (all terms of endearment in Honduras).
Green got out of the car before they reached their destination and decided to walk the rest of the way. The truck continued down the road with the community members piled in the bed. Just before they reached their destination, the truck turned a corner and came upon a crowd of people in the road. The driver swerved to avoid them. The car flipped over and rolled off of the road. The passengers spilled out of the truck down the grassy hillside. Six, including Paula, were injured. Paula later died from her injuries.
There was no foul play involved in the event, but the community saw her death as a result of the project’s unannounced arrival and the ensuing conflict. She was to be the first of three members of the Lenca community whom their peers would come to see as martyrs.
The Murder of Tomas Garcia
The second martyrdom occurred less than two months later on the doorstep of the Agua Zarca facilities.
By that time, a military battalion was set up around the grounds to protect the project from the protestors. One of the protest’s leaders was 49 year-old Tomás Garcia. Tomás was a leader in the local Indigenous council as well as a member of COPINH. A father of seven, he was known in the community to be an uncompromising defender of indigenous rights.
The community had continued to block the road so the tractors couldn’t get to the dam’s facilities. According to Maria, DESA representatives approached Tomas and offered him 20,000 lempiras (over $800) if we would get the protestors to move. Tomas turned down the offer and told the company that he was going to inform the community about the bribe.
Over one hundred community members arrived around the facilities early on the morning of June 15. The large group was gathering to stage a peaceful protest and express their frustrations. They stood in a line before the military battalion, and Tomas began to speak.
Maria’s friends went to the event, but she stayed home that morning with her daughter who had recently had a baby. At around nine in the morning, they heard gunshots.
“Did you hear that?” Maria asked her daughter. “You don’t think something happened at the dam?”
An hour later some neighborhood boys ran by the house. The boys yelled to them that someone had been injured in the protest. A little while later, more neighbors ran by. This time they told Maria that someone had been killed.
“They didn’t want to listen,” Maria explains. “The moment [Tomas] started to speak, a soldier lifted his gun and fired at Tomas and his son.”
The soldier, Kevin Saravia, fired multiple fatal shots at Tomas and his seventeen-year-old son Allan. Tomas was killed and his son was gravely injured, with shots to the chest and the arm.
The community was outraged.
People flooded out of their homes to join the mourning protestors at the site. Lead by Berta Cáceres, the crowd decided to drive to San Francisco de Ojuera to confront the mayor and demand justice for the cold-blooded murder of their friend and leader.
Hundreds of protestors loaded up buses and headed for the mayor’s office.
The mayor and DESA were tipped off. Agua Zarca workers used the dam’s tractors to dig a hole in the road so that the buses could not pass through. The protestors came to the hole and were determined to keep going.
“There were a lot of us with the kids and everyone. All of us collected rocks. We filled the hole rock by rock until the buses could pass,” says Maria, as a proud smile spreads across her face.
They arrived at the mayor’s office to confront mayor Raul Pineda. As they approached, men from the mayor’s office came out of the building armed with machetes and guns. They threatened to attack Berta.
“We were unarmed,” Maria says with frustration. “We told them, if you touch Berta, you touch all of us.”
The men left Berta alone that night.
Shortly after, the community staged another protest against the dam and the murder of Tomas. They started in San Francisco de Ojuera and loaded up buses to drive the 15 kilometers to the river.
Their buses were stopped as they left the city. The people, however, would not be detained.
“We all got down from the buses and walked five hours to the river,” says Maria.
Tomás’ murderer, Kevin Saravia, was declared guilty in 2015. His attorneys argued that Saravia killed the indigenous leader and his son in self-defense. However, testimonies by experts and witnesses proved that the men had not attacked him. They were shot down in cold blood. The defense team later appealed the guilty sentence. The appeal is still pending.
After the attack on Tomás, threats against the protestors intensified.
Those close to him were targeted first.
In March of 2014, Maria Santos, Tomas’s sister, was walking home from preparing meals for school children. Suddenly five people – three men and two women – emerged on the path in front of her with machetes swinging at their sides. The group charged her.
A sharp blow hit her head. Another cut her thigh. She held out her hand to defend herself. An attacker swiped at her body cutting Santos’s pointer finger clean off.
Her husband, who after months of threats was worried that she had not arrived home yet, came running down the road with their son. The attackers went after the husband and son with machetes and rocks before they left the family wounded and bleeding on the road.
COPINH filed a report on Santos’s behalf against the five assailants. In a rare stroke of justice, all five were tried for attempted harm and were found guilty.
Maria heard rumors from people living near the river that DESA had hired known hitmen to come to the area. Some claimed to have seen them driving around the community. Maria is sure the stories were true. Either way, the rumors successfully spread fear.
DESA’s president, David Castillo, began to visit the protests “to investigate”, Maria claims. The hostility of the soldiers stationed at the project continued.
One day in 2014, the protestors were camped outside of the facilities when the soldiers crashed through the crowd and grabbed their food and water. The soldiers walked to the edge of the steep hill and threw the protestors’ supplies over the side. The debris from their food and water littered the land and the river that they were fighting to protect.
Days later, after the protestors had restocked their supplies, the weather turned unusually hot. The same soldiers that maliciously laid waste to their food and water meekly approached the crowd and asked if they would share their water.
Maria smiles slyly as she remembers the event.
“We punished them and decided not to [share] because they threw away our water,” she says. “We decided they should be the ones to leave, not us, because we are the ones in charge of our community.”
The Death of the “Compañera”
Construction of the Agua Zarca dam pressed on and so did the faithful protests of COPINH and the community members opposed to the project. The threats also continued and grew worse, particularly against their leader Berta.
In March of 2016, COPINH members from Río Blanco travelled to the headquarters in La Esperanza, Intibucá, to attend a workshop ran by Berta and her friend Gustavo Castro, a Mexican activist.
Maria travelled to the workshop with around 100 others from the area.
“[Gustavo] trained us on protesting, on how to defend oneself in the protests,” Maria explains.
The workshop ended late that Monday night. Berta and Gustavo returned to her house to work more before they rested. The Río Blanco group stayed with others who had come to attend the workshop.
Early the next morning, on March third, they were awoken with shocking news. Their leader had been killed. Two gunmen had entered her house late the night before and shot Berta and Gustavo. Gustavo escaped with a flesh wound and was taken to Tegucigalpa by police. Berta had died in his arms minutes after receiving multiple shots to the chest.
Linea de tiempo - Asesinato
Just two years before, the protestors from Río Blanco had stood before armed men and cried, “If you touch Berta, you touch all of us.” Their enemies had touched Berta, and the community felt the stroke to its core, but they did not let it shake them.
Implicados en el asesinato de Berta Caceres //
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“When we heard about her murder, it made us stronger and more indignant toward the dam,” says Maria.
The protests continued until DESA closed the doors of Agua Zarca in July of 2017.
In May of 2018, some community members were able to speak at a trial against former mayor of Intibucá Martiniano Dominguez, who was charged with corrupt dealings with DESA. Dominguez had been charged for signing Agua Zarca’s construction permit even though the community had not been consulted as stipulated in ILO Convention 169. Dominguez was declared innocent of the charges.
Thirteen other public officials have been charged with similar accounts of corruption related to the Agua Zarca dam project, and nine men await trial for Berta’s murder. The dam is closed, but construction could legally begin again at any time, and dozens of similar projects are being erected throughout the country.
Supuestos funcionarios que aprobaron con muchas irregularidades el proceso de conceción de licencias para la represa Agua Zarca. // MORE
For the community, the fight goes on. They believe that they are joined in the fight by the spirits of their fallen warriors who now reside in the river.
As they march and protest, they cry, “Berta vive, la lucha sigue y sigue.” Berta lives, the fight goes on and on.