On the night of March 2-3, 2016, the indigenous human rights defender Berta Cáceres was murdered in her home in La Esperanza, Honduras. Together with indigenous Lenca communities, she had fought against the illegal construction of the Agua Zarca hydropower plant, which is operated by Desarollos Energéticos SA (Desa), which is backed by influential people from business and politics. In 2018, several contract killers and middlemen were sentenced to long prison terms. The verdict against one of the perpetrators of the murder is still pending, and investigations into other alleged perpetrators from the powerful Atala family are pending. amerika21 spoke to Victor Fernández, lawyer for the Cáceres family and the Civil Council for Indigenous and Popular Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), about current developments.
In July 2021, the managing director of the Desa company, David Castillo, was convicted as one of the clients (co-authors) of the murder of Berta Cáceres. It has now been six months and the court has still not published a written judgment including the reasons for the judgment. Why is it taking so long for this judgment to become final?
One of the reasons given by the court could be that the evaluation of the evidence takes a lot of time. There are thousands upon thousands of text messages, plus a lot of reports and documents. Still, it shouldn’t take that long, because the case against David Castillo for the murder of Berta Cáceres is an emblematic case for the Honduran judiciary. In addition to the purely rational, well-founded analysis, the immediacy, the temporal proximity to the negotiation, is an important rule of law principle. Six months later there is no longer the same experience, the impressions no longer have the same freshness. The delay is unfortunate for the case and for our judicial system, which is presenting itself to the world in this way. And above all, the victims are still waiting for certainty. Ultimately, we don’t really know why there is still no judgment. I can only say: Because the dish has not yet gone down well. There could be all kinds of machinations behind this.
Desa CFO Daniel Atala was summoned as a witness in the trial of David Castillo. He refused to testify because the prosecutor was investigating him. So far, Daniel Atala has not been charged. What is known about the investigation?
The Special Prosecutor’s Office against Corruption (UFERCO) is investigating Daniel Atala in the case of “Fraud on the Gualcarque River”. We have requested the extraction of the information from his computers, which was confiscated in May 2016, two months after Berta Cáceres’ murder. That was now, in December 2021, ordered by the anti-corruption court, before which the case is being heard. The information on the computers will certainly contain other references that could be relevant to the Berta Cáceres case.
The murder prosecution has requested further investigation from the national judiciary to obtain information from telephones that were confiscated from David Castillo at the time of his arrest. During the trial against Castillo, it emerged that the prosecution did not have sufficient technology to extract the information from his phones. The hearing ended without being made up for.
Subsequently, as part of the investigation against Daniel Atala, the public prosecutor’s office suggested that the court send the telephones seized from David Castillo to the USA in order to have them read out and analyzed there. Daniel Atala’s defense appeals against this. She justifies this with the violation of international conventions. There will be a hearing on this at the beginning of January 2022.
The investigations into the “Fraud at Gualcarque” have shown that there were agreements between business people and government employees and that the approval procedures for the concession obtained by Desa for the construction of the Agua Zarca hydropower station were not in order. Necessary expert opinions were not submitted and essential requirements for the granting of the license were not met. It was a success that COPINH could fight to be represented as a joint plaintiff in the proceedings in 2021. What happens now?
A preliminary negotiation has taken place so far. We campaigned for all 16 accused persons to be quoted, but this was rejected. The main hearing before the anti-corruption court is now only against six people. We have appealed against this. In 2022 the process is sure to begin.
Who are the six people?
The most important are the former manager of the state energy company (ENEE), Roberto Martínez Lozano, the former technical assistant to the management of ENEE and Desa managing directors David Castillo and Carolina Castillo, who was then chairwoman of the ENEE union. The others are low-to-mid-level officials in the Department of Environment’s environmental review and control.
In connection with the Agua Zarca hydropower project, corruption and a criminal network that had Berta murdered were uncovered in Honduras. However, there is also an international dimension. Funding from the Dutch development bank FMO and, to a lesser extent, Finnfund was even crucial for Desa to be able to advance the Agua Zarca project at all. In May 2021, presumably because of pressure from numerous international NGOs, the FMO refused to grant the Honduran bank Ficohsa a loan of over 60 million US dollars. A few months later, the Dutch press wrote that FMO had also discreetly sold its shares in Ficohsa. Ficohsa belongs to the Atala family. The bank is suspected of also having financed Agua Zarca, but denies this. For its part, the FMO has significant problems in the Netherlands: It had to close for six weeks in the summer of 2021 because it turned out that anti-money laundering regulations were not being complied with. How do you see the role of international development banks in supposed development projects like Agua Zarca in Honduras?
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The logic of the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (BCIE), FMO and Finnfund, which financed the Agua Zarca project, is a logic of enforcing their policies together with other economic actors against the population. Once a decision is made, everything else is allowed and the banks no longer even follow their own internal rules.
For example, there were several companies involved in the Agua Zarca concession, from the construction company of the project, to the power generation company that benefits from the project, to the companies that are conducting some kind of audit of these projects. All of these companies should be independently controlled and segregated from one another. But I am almost certain that everyone was under the control of Desa executives.
In other words, this was the place where smurfing was going on, everything was broken up into small, seemingly independent, one-man businesses. They make arrangements, split up between one bank and the other, but ultimately it’s the same business, even from the same families. And the Dutch bank knew that, or at least should have known it. Berta Cáceres has repeatedly denounced these machinations. But they have been underestimated, they have been made fun of: the behavior of whites towards indigenous communities.
The Dutch Development Bank is 51 percent owned by the state. But the citizens have lost all control over it. I don’t think the Dutch or the Finns would agree that their banks should get involved in projects that corrupt, violate human rights and destroy the fabric of society. But financial aid has become an integral part of the robbery of the commons. It is clear to me that the financial system is a member of the mafia, which is plundering our peoples behind a façade of correctness.
The atalas are not small fish, but belong to the richest families in all of Central America. And funding for so-called “development” has made the greats in Honduras even bigger.
In Honduras we have a poverty rate of over 70 percent, extreme poverty is 50 percent. Investing in projects like Agua Zarca increases inequality and injustice and kills people. They finance the police and the army, destabilize groups that resist, and pay contract killers.
In den “Pandora Papers” (amerika21 reported) Ficohsa Financial Group and Ficohsa International Financial Company also emerge with dozens of offshore firms. In addition to the banks and the Desa company, members of the Atala family do business in real estate and hotels. Jacobo Atala Zablah, member of the Desa board of directors, is also said to have founded an offshore company and transferred it to the former Honduran President Porfirio Lobo. Camilo Atala, loudly Forbes Magazine, the richest man in Honduras, was Minister for Investment. What are the links between the banking family and the state?
In Honduras there is a pact between political, economic and state actors who have control over the institutions. And that is why it is so difficult for the state to function at all. This is not about an ideological discussion as to which state model would be better. It is about the functioning of the foundations of the liberal state, liberal democracy. Influential families in the country have always been a problem in this regard, but more recently they have made a qualitative leap. They are no longer just about speculation, about maneuvers that increase their own wealth at any price, but are now also associated with criminal practices such as drug trafficking and money laundering.
The head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office against Corruption, Luis Santos, said that all dirty money in this country inevitably flows through the financial system.
I find it unacceptable that this has not yet been a priority in the state’s criminal policy. For us as a legal team, one thing is clear: if there is one case that we have to work on now, it is a case of corruption in the financial system. Through which we really get to all the bankers.
In a text message from one of the confiscated telephones, one of the holders of the Gualcarque River concession said: “If Libre wins, they will take the concession away from me”. Xiomara Castro from the left-wing party Libre (Libertad y Refundación) has now won the 2021 presidential election. What do you expect from the new government in terms of the illegally awarded concessions?
That all these concessions will be withdrawn!
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