Berta Caceres Part One

0:10 Hi everyone. This is Carmen and Christina and this is Estodia's Unknown, the podcast where we talk about Latin American history. Sometimes it's torible and just so typy topics like racism, corruption, and genocide. But more than that, it's also about resistance, power and community and today it's kind of a little bit of everything. Right. This is going to be part one of a series. Okay, I love a series. Well I'm digging two to three episodes total, so okay, it depends where we get in part two anyway. Yes, so yeah, let's just jump right into today's topic. Berta Casset is okay finally, Yeah, this has been another one that we've called or I've called our What is the term people use white whale, big whale? I think it's white. Well the magnus magnum opus, I've heard that too. Why was I gonna say opus? Day? Dude? Oh? Another topic? And anyway, yes, so, I'm sure a lot of people know who she is, but maybe a lot of people don't. So. Berta Casseres was an indigenous leader and environmental activist, and ten years ago she was gunned down in her own home and the rot to justice was a rocky one and to this day there are still unanswered questions. Damn. But before we can get to the day she was killed, we

1:42 have to talk about her early life. Berta Isabelle Casseres Flores was born March fourth, nineteen seventy one. And I didn't say the day but she died. I want to say March third, twenty sixteen, so like I know it was in March, and it was the day before day. I remember seeing it was the other day before, the day after, So just how I don't know. Yeah, horrible anyway, Sorry, I'm already like wavering from my notes. Berta Isabel Casseres Florius was born March fourth, nineteen seventy one in La Esperanza, Hodurras. She was the youngest of twelve siblings. And you could say that she was born to be revolutionary. Okay, because I know this episode is about her. But before we can even like begin to talk about her and to understand why she was the way that she was, we had to talk about her family. Revolution was in her blood.

2:43 Her mom, Alustra Berta Flores Lopez, is described as the most important role model in Bertha's life, like by her Dounia Austra was a nurse, midwife, activist, and politician. Oh she was everything, Yes, she like Berta was born and raised in La Speranza, which is one hundred and twenty miles west of the Usigalpa, the capital of Houras. Laesperanza and the town of Intibuka are split by a single street, but each one has their own municipal government. They are twin cities. Oh, but Intibuka is older and Lenca and the Lenca are an indigenous group in Hoduras parts of Ben sal Vador. And I want to say mala to I think so the Lenca people of Intibuka could not enter the Mestizo schools or churches of La Speranza, and Alstra could clearly see as a child the difference between the two and though she didn't have like the words yet, it was an apartheid like situation. Oh, because yeah, they couldn't enter the schools and stuff. Alstra had to travel on horse to visit her father, Berta's grandfather in Ennsalvador because he had been exiled from Manduras during the dictatorship of Tiburzio Crias Andino. Oh wow, mm hmm. And like any other Latin American dictatorships of the time. Yes, there

4:17 was repression and human rights violations and a lot of caterine to us. I want to say this, in this case, it was US, British and Canadian company's interests, you know, selling the land for a capitalism prophet. And so she had to ride two days on horse with her mom to reach her dad. Alstra Flories became a widow at age fifteen after a marriage of three years to a much older man. Oh my god, she became a widow at age fifteen. Fifteen? Yeah, when did she get married?

4:58 I don't know? Wow? Oh oh sorry, sorry, a marriage of three years. I just said at age fifteen, after a marriage of three years. And I was like, I couldn't find that information. Oh, I thought you said after Actually I don't know what then I think I didn't I missed it. Also, yes, I get it, okay. But then then she got married, which was twelve to an older man. That's so disgusting. Yeah, so Berta Berta and her two siblings older than her, the two like that are right? Oh my god, he say this to you already said the two older siblings. No, she had she was the youngest of twelve siblings, so her and the other two the last three siblings. Yeah, I have a different father than the rest of them. Oh okay, so the other ones are from the old disgusting man I think so, yeah, okay, from what I can tell. But after she became a widow at age fifteen, and there might be two more. I'm not sure there might be anyway, after she became a widow, she was trained as a nurse and then a midwife, and back then she was usually the only health professional in town, and people would walk miles to her house and then wait at the bench that was there to be seen by her, and they would pay Austra with firewood mais or even like a hen barter type, yes, and she would say like

6:33 the there was no money, but we were never like hungry. There was like even when she was interviewed. I want to say. The book that is my main source, Who Killed Berta Cassides came out in twenty twenty, and so probably some time after twenty sixteen is when Nina Lacani, the author, talked to Alstra. But when she in her book, she's right that Austra kept her leather medical bag with her as she was interviewing her. And she carried this back then and she still probably carries it, and she was already like eighty something. Oh wow. Still treating people, damn yeah, and helping the marginalize and standing against oppression is something that Austra's parents instilled in her, and her family was labeled as Communists for caring about people. Yes, during the Andino dictatorship, and again her father had been exiled.

7:30 This fighting spirit was also instilled in Austra's own kids. But again, before talking about Berta, we had to also talk about her brother, her older brother. Oops. I thought I was moving on to that, but no, one more thing about Alstra okay. Austra led a political movement to secure the right for women to run for office in Honduras. About this, she said, it wasn't easy to break the glass ceiling and end the extreme policy that only men could run for office. I ran against nine men the first time, and it was hard. With the help of other women, we organized and asked other women, why keep voting for men if they're going to deny us our rights?

8:11 That part m hm, oh. This might have been the nineteen seventies because Austra or Nostra Berta was already born. She was born in seventy one. Oh. During this campaign, Berta Cassades and her two older siblings, like the closest at age to her, were always with Austra, and they witnessed her fight for these rights. And then they saw when she won the race to become mayor of La Speranza. Wow, not just once, but three times damn. And after her third mayoral term was up, she ran for Congress and won. Wow. Her first goal in Congress was to ensure that Ondudas would ratify Convention one sixty nine of the International Labor Organization to provide rights and ricka ignition to the country's indigenous people, and it passed in nineteen ninety five. Wow. Yes.

9:09 By the time that Austra was interviewed in twenty eighteen, she was eighty five and had delivered at least six thousand babies damn, many who were named after Bertha. She said in that interview that there are so many Bertha's in the world now. And oh, I almost forgot to say, but she was also the governor of Indibuga at some point, so mayor governor, congressperson midwife. What could she not do? Yeah, okay, And so that being their mom, it's no surprise that Alberta's older brother, Carlos Alberto would also become one of Bertha's biggest role models and inactivit. By the mid nineteen seventies, Ondudas was once again in political turmoil. There was a coup in nineteen sixty three, and then Ondudas went under military rule until nineteen sixty eight. Then there was war with then Salvador in nineteen sixty nine, but then when that war was over, there was still more conflict and then another military rule until nineteen seventy eight, and then one more to get Onduda's from military rule to civilian rule.

10:32 That was the last one, and you can guess that with like back to back to back military rule, there was a lot of repression and again a lot of human rights violations, and so that's the context in which Carlos Alberto grew into his activism. In the mid nineteen seventies, student rebellions were on the rise, and at the time, Carlo Alberto was a student at the Esperanza teacher training college called Escuola Normal Occidente. There he was elected student leader, and he went on to lead a hunger strike that was calling for the austine of an abusive school director.

11:15 And when they were doing this hunger strike slash protests, soldiers were deployed to quell the student activists and in this Carlos was shot in the shoulder. Oh wow. And this didn't stop him. It did the opposite. It like fueled him to keep going, go even harder. Yeah. He then led nationwide strikes to force out more ineffective, bad and abusive head teachers. Then he organized meetings at the family home to offer support to the leftist Geia groups in Salvador and Nicaragua, both in our own civil wars. I love that. Mm hmm. This made well not in the fighting that would lead to the civil war, but like he was basically helping organize, yes, support them. Yeah, And this made the family targets of the d N I the Investiga, which was like, uh, I've heard of them, Oh you have? Yes, the intelligence group that do I know?

12:19 We talked about like a similar intelligence group in Chile we did that had very similar initials Dina, Yes, M that's what it was. Wait wait if that's what I'm thinking, I heard of but they're very similar and they function the same do the same thing. Yeah, and so yeah, this made of the family targets and the dn I began to pay their neighbors to become informants and spy on them, and so they were being spied on twenty over seven. This I don't know, I just did such fascist behavior everywhere, like the same playbook over and over again. We also had to remember that, like there's a lot of stuff I'm leaving out, but like the health and inequity, the income gaps, they were like huge, just like they were in sandbl in the time period. So people were like hungry and they needed money, and they were using this against the people to make them become sniches basically. Yeah.

13:16 And while some people can themselves be like no, I'm not doing this, other people can't and that happens. But some people do this for free. So yeah, calling calling the hotlines on their neighbors and stuff. Mm hmm that I cannot excuse. Yeah, this I understand a little more. It was a very poor area. However, if they weren't poor and they were taking that money, that's when I'm like, bitch, all right, So the family would hear soldier's boots walking down the roof at random hours of the day at night. Oh my god. And of course this wasn't something Carlos Alberto was doing alone. Alstra also helping treat wounded FML and members, and the family was also offering them food and a place to rest and also medicine. They had all those things available to them. But yeah, it just reminds me when we talked about Argentina and all the leftist students and organizers that were disappeared. A lot of them were like some of them were doctors helping people that were hurt, but they were targeted because they were helping in some way exactly. And other student leaders were disappeared during this time close friends to Carlos Alberto, and at this point their house became like a small headquarters for both Garilla members in Enzerelo and Nicara Wa Wow.

14:49 Alstra also helped hide boys who were avoiding being taken by the Salvadoran army and forced to fight. They would go there to hide, because yeah, this a thing which we've talked about in our many episodes about uh yeah. When Carlos Alberto graduated as a teacher, he joined the Communist Party and then moved to north Onras, where he worked with Campecino banana cooperatives fighting for land registribution. He then became involved with Los Sincho Neros the Popular Liberation Movement is their official name, an armed student guerilla group. In later Carlos moved to Russia with the scholarship to study history in political science. After that, he went to Nicaragua to fight with the Sandinistas against the US armed and funded contras. I never say that in Spanish, but contrast anyway, this is where the Iran contra affair that everyone has heard this term, but I think for the longest time nobody understood what it meant, at least like I didn't for years. But yeah, the US was selling funds to Iran. Funds. They were selling funds. They were selling arms weapons, yeah, to Iran from funds. They were selling weapons to Iran to fund the contrasts, right, right, Okay, yes, okay, we got there, We got there. Sorry. I was like

16:21 trying to guess what you're gonna say because you were taking so long. Oh my bad. And this is especially audacious because then the US would go on to deploy troops in the Middle East, and when they were funding these same people right right, right, all to fund the Contrasts who were part of the right wing government who was committing a lot of human rights violations, something they commonly did. Also side note, I think this gets missed by a lot of people. So this is during the regular administration, right, he was also giving the contrast money with the crack that he was flooding into the cities.

17:01 That's the other part of where that money came from. Yeah, because I think a lot of people focus on the part of part of it. Yes, but also he was flooding black communities with crack cocaine and then using that to fund on the operation. Yes, all in the name of fighting communism. Yeah, and so yeah, Berta watched her brother do all of this and she saw him as a revolutionary idol. I would too, damn honestly. And yeah, now we can start talking about Bertha. Like I said, she was born in nineteen seventy one and she was austrassed twelve and last child. Her father, Jose walked out on them when she was five and she had little contact with him after that, but he was described as imposing years of quote alcohol filled the misery in the family.

18:00 So not a good time. Good riddance Manila. Right. Yes, when she was around seven or eight, she began competing in local beauty pageants and winning. Oh my god, I think she's a beauty queen. Actually, no, I think I did hear that before. No, And honestly, looking at pictures of her throughout all her lifetime, like her smile, Oh, she was matchal. She was beautiful, and you could just like, I don't know, the kindness like radiator off of her, Like you look at me and you're like, that's a fucking bit right there, you know what I mean. But some people are the opposite of that. But that was, like, you can just see she just has such a natural, compassionate smile that I can't achieve in my pictures because I don't have that. Yes, she began competing in local beauty pageants and winning. She also loved soccer, dancing, especially choreographed dancing. She loves oh wow, and she would put on plays. During this age, she was described as organizing and bossing other kids. That's fine, and of course she was out here doing that. Yeah. From her youngest years, she saw her older brother and her mom and what they were doing. She was born for this, she really was.

19:13 Around this time, the early to mid nineteen eighties, she watched as her mom for women's rights with groups like the Movimiento de Mocheres Borla pass and watched her organize against US bank death squads. Wow. When Berta was twelve, she would walk miles with her mom to isolated rural areas with no electricity or running water. There she helped her mom deliver babies. Wow. She would fetch hot water, she would hold candles for light, she even cut the umbilical cord. Damn. And she also saw how these rural areas. In these rural areas, women would spend hours collecting clean water and firewood on top of working the field and raising children. Mmmmmm, doing it all like always. Yes. The pair also traveled to the Cormontcagua refugee camp, which was forty miles south of La Speranza. This was a refugee camp for Southadoran civil war refugees. Okay, I was just going to ask who were the refugees, and they kind of guessed it was going to be that mm hmm.

20:23 They helped uh pregnant civil war refugees, and Beerta quickly noted the concentration camp like conditions that the refugees were living under, Oh wow, And they would bring food and medicine to them as well, but they would also deliver messages from the FML and Guetia members who were hiding at their house. By the time Beerta was twelve, she was described as rebellious and outspoken in the book and my main source who killed Berta Cassidez, a former friend and classmate, said, quote, she was very studious, learned quickly and was a natural leader who hated following pointless rules and would speak out against awareness end quote. Yeah, she was like this all through middle school. After middle school, at fifteen, she enrolled in the three year training course to become a teacher, like her brother did before her.

21:12 This was also one of the only free secondary education options available. It was also around this time that she met her future husband, Salvalor Suniga, who co founded the radical Patriotic Student Organization of Lempira, also called OPEL, and the main goal of OPEL was to red Honduras of foreign armies. That was their stated goal and right right many of at this point, many of Sarvallo's friends and colleagues were being disappeared or killed. And it was around this time that his name was rumored to be on a military hit list. Oh my god. And it's like those things were like rumors, but there were always some truth to them, like if you were on the list, you were got to be next. We'll talk about this obviously when we get to Berta Cassell's own murder. But she was on a hitless as well, and a rumored hitless. Yeah.

22:12 And so he fled to Salvor, to the mountains of En Salvador. Wow. There he helped move the sick and injured into Honduras. Like he wasn't done coming back to Honduras, and so they would take more injured, getting a members to the yeah house. And so now this is around nineteen eighty four, and it was in nineteen eighty six when Berta began the three year course to become a teacher, and she immediately joined Oppel, that same organization, and she was elected president of Oppel when the former elected student president was killed. Oh wow, it was very dangerous signed to organize. Yeah, Like it's always a risk, but in this time in Latin America, and I mean it was life or death. Yeah, yes, truly. As the president of Oppel, she continued hunger strikes and to fight injustices, but this didn't stop her from also having fun. Her friend said she was beautiful, had lots of boyfriends. They danced all the time together, and they were great dancers. They would go to the clubs without permission from their moms because they were both super strict Austra and the friend's mom, and they were sneaking to clubs and they were dance mettenge but also like to Michael Jackson, and she was like, we don't even know the words, but we were dancing to Michael Jackson. In nineteen eighty eight, she began to date Salavasuniga when she was seventeen and he was twenty three.

23:44 She was in her last year of future training and he was fully involved in the Salvadoran Civil War at this point, doing things like supporting units of information, logistics and intel. Bertha was enamored with his stories from En Salvador, and she wanted so bad to go to Weenn Salado and fight with him. During the movement, Yes, and they would talk about revolutionary text theory, but also poems and romantic novels. Wow. And their plan was to go off to Wenn Salvador together when she was done with her school, but then she got pregnant. I was just going to guess that. Yes, and Salaloda had planned one more return to Winns Salvador, and he had to beg Bertha to stay and he's like, he would tell her, war isn't romantic, it's cruel. It's like, it's no place for you to be now that you're with child, but Berta was persistent.

24:45 At the same time, Donia Austra wanted to ship Bertha overseas to have the baby to avoid a town scandal, and because of this, Bertha and Tarral hatched the plan. So the baby girl was born June twenty eighth, nineteen eighty nine, and three weeks after that they left for Canada so Carlos, her brother carl Salberto, could meet the baby. That's what they told Alstra in reality. In reality, they went to Salvador's sister's house, who lived near Siwatepeke, and they left the newborn baby with his sister under her care, and they went to Salvador Dang and joined the war. Effort.

25:34 They were specifically with the National Resistance, which is one of the carrier groups that made up the FMLN. And she was still weak from giving birth, but there she was on the move. Three weeks. Three weeks not enough time, Yeah, famously not enough time, not only personally but scientifically. Also, I think they recommend you to not go fight a civil war and be in the revolution. I guess it was in a civil war, but they don't recommend to go fire in the revolution three weeks after giving birth. Wait, at least twelve weeks, alice. They served in non combatant roles like monitoring the radio and putting together statements for leadership on what the outside world was saying about the war, so places like BBC and all those places of what they were saying. But sometimes they went onto pate missions.

26:28 And about this time, Salvador would say, quote Berta never cried. She was calm, strong and fearless. Even when our Unich came under attack. She ate and slept when she could, but showed great discipline even though she hadn't been trained. End quote. Another geyera named Vita Morales Serda Alberta seemed more reserved than Shin when Salabaldo was around, and that he would sometimes ridicule her in front of their comrades. I don't like that. I don't like that, but Thatberta was always up for any physical or psychological challenge. Both of them were part of one of the last offensives of the war, which their unit launched on San Salvador in November nineteen eighty nine. During this nine day offensive, she served as a medic. When they were back at camp and not actively fighting, she organized classes for the children and taught the children and adults who couldn't read.

27:26 She taught them how to read. And the leader of that group, Antonio Montez, said that Berta witnessed terrible atrocities. She saw the consequences of war on unarmed civilians and was visibly moved by the suffering. But she was a restless young woman with a heartbreaking spirit and willingness to contribute to all sorts of activities with people trying to keep their lives going in complex conflict zones. It's clear that these experiences marked the rest of her life. Berta and Salvador returned to Hodula in nineteen ninety and reunited with baby Olivia in September of that year, their second baby was delivered in La Speranza by her grandmother, Elstra Wow.

28:13 The couple was not done fighting, though, they went back and forth from Lasperanza into and Salvador, sometimes with both kids in tow. One of Olivia's first words was bompa bompa wow, which is how the Grriheros referred to themselves, except she was trying to say kompa. But yeah, that was one of her first words. And also like having the kids and then trying to get people into an andras, it was an easy way to disguise people as like we're just a family trying to leave. Yeah, so it worked. When the war was over, Berta and Salvador returned to La Speranza and they both felt the same way that was that armed struggle was not the way forward. Salvador was one who said this following quote. We saw with our own eyes how war generates abuses on each side, and that the majority who died were young, poor men and women who took up arms because they were hungry or forcibly recruited, not because of ideology. Times were changing, and we came home convinced of the need to launch an unarmed social movement. Whatever we did in on Duras, it would be without guns end quote. Wow. And this is what led them to create Copin the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of on Duras. And this is where we believe part one because Copin and her activism within Copin, it's another chapter in her life and this

29:44 activism with Copine is like ultimately led to her murder. So I'm hoping to make that part two. Okay, but yeah, I mean she did so much and her I didn't know about her involvement with the Solidari revolution neary Wars. Yeah, but yeah, that was part one. Well we hope this was part one of one Les's Historia Unknown for you, Yes, bye bye. Astoria Unknown is produced by Carmen and Christina, researched by Carmen and Christina, edited by Christina. You can find sources for every episode at Estoriasunknown dot com and in our show notes. Creating the podcast has a lot of work, so if you want to help us out financially, you can do so by supporting us on Patreon at Patreon dot com. Slash she studied as an own podcast