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How to Make This Moment the Turning Point for Real Change |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54572"><span class="small">Barack Obama, Medium</span></a>
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Wednesday, 03 June 2020 08:25 |
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Obama writes: "As millions of people across the country take to the streets and raise their voices in response to the killing of George Floyd and the ongoing problem of unequal justice, many people have reached out asking how we can sustain momentum to bring about real change."
Barack Obama. (photo: Getty Images)
How to Make This Moment the Turning Point for Real Change
By Barack Obama, Medium
03 June 20
 s millions of people across the country take to the streets and raise their voices in response to the killing of George Floyd and the ongoing problem of unequal justice, many people have reached out asking how we can sustain momentum to bring about real change.
Ultimately, it’s going to be up to a new generation of activists to shape strategies that best fit the times. But I believe there are some basic lessons to draw from past efforts that are worth remembering.
First, the waves of protests across the country represent a genuine and legitimate frustration over a decades-long failure to reform police practices and the broader criminal justice system in the United States. The overwhelming majority of participants have been peaceful, courageous, responsible, and inspiring. They deserve our respect and support, not condemnation — something that police in cities like Camden and Flint have commendably understood.
On the other hand, the small minority of folks who’ve resorted to violence in various forms, whether out of genuine anger or mere opportunism, are putting innocent people at risk, compounding the destruction of neighborhoods that are often already short on services and investment and detracting from the larger cause. I saw an elderly black woman being interviewed today in tears because the only grocery store in her neighborhood had been trashed. If history is any guide, that store may take years to come back. So let’s not excuse violence, or rationalize it, or participate in it. If we want our criminal justice system, and American society at large, to operate on a higher ethical code, then we have to model that code ourselves.
Second, I’ve heard some suggest that the recurrent problem of racial bias in our criminal justice system proves that only protests and direct action can bring about change, and that voting and participation in electoral politics is a waste of time. I couldn’t disagree more. The point of protest is to raise public awareness, to put a spotlight on injustice, and to make the powers that be uncomfortable; in fact, throughout American history, it’s often only been in response to protests and civil disobedience that the political system has even paid attention to marginalized communities. But eventually, aspirations have to be translated into specific laws and institutional practices — and in a democracy, that only happens when we elect government officials who are responsive to our demands.
Moreover, it’s important for us to understand which levels of government have the biggest impact on our criminal justice system and police practices. When we think about politics, a lot of us focus only on the presidency and the federal government. And yes, we should be fighting to make sure that we have a president, a Congress, a U.S. Justice Department, and a federal judiciary that actually recognize the ongoing, corrosive role that racism plays in our society and want to do something about it. But the elected officials who matter most in reforming police departments and the criminal justice system work at the state and local levels.
It’s mayors and county executives that appoint most police chiefs and negotiate collective bargaining agreements with police unions. It’s district attorneys and state’s attorneys that decide whether or not to investigate and ultimately charge those involved in police misconduct. Those are all elected positions. In some places, police review boards with the power to monitor police conduct are elected as well. Unfortunately, voter turnout in these local races is usually pitifully low, especially among young people — which makes no sense given the direct impact these offices have on social justice issues, not to mention the fact that who wins and who loses those seats is often determined by just a few thousand, or even a few hundred, votes.
So the bottom line is this: if we want to bring about real change, then the choice isn’t between protest and politics. We have to do both. We have to mobilize to raise awareness, and we have to organize and cast our ballots to make sure that we elect candidates who will act on reform.
Finally, the more specific we can make demands for criminal justice and police reform, the harder it will be for elected officials to just offer lip service to the cause and then fall back into business as usual once protests have gone away. The content of that reform agenda will be different for various communities. A big city may need one set of reforms; a rural community may need another. Some agencies will require wholesale rehabilitation; others should make minor improvements. Every law enforcement agency should have clear policies, including an independent body that conducts investigations of alleged misconduct. Tailoring reforms for each community will require local activists and organizations to do their research and educate fellow citizens in their community on what strategies work best.
But as a starting point, here’s a report and toolkit developed by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and based on the work of the Task Force on 21st Century Policing that I formed when I was in the White House. And if you’re interested in taking concrete action, we’ve also created a dedicated site at the Obama Foundation to aggregate and direct you to useful resources and organizations who’ve been fighting the good fight at the local and national levels for years.
I recognize that these past few months have been hard and dispiriting — that the fear, sorrow, uncertainty, and hardship of a pandemic have been compounded by tragic reminders that prejudice and inequality still shape so much of American life. But watching the heightened activism of young people in recent weeks, of every race and every station, makes me hopeful. If, going forward, we can channel our justifiable anger into peaceful, sustained, and effective action, then this moment can be a real turning point in our nation’s long journey to live up to our highest ideals.
Let’s get to work.
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Capitalism Is Not the Solution to Urban America's Problems - Capitalism Itself Is the Problem |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54570"><span class="small">David Harvey, Jacobin</span></a>
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Wednesday, 03 June 2020 08:25 |
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Excerpt: "The COVID-19 crisis has triggered a fresh round of soul-searching in establishment media outlets about the problems of urban America. Unless we address the root cause of those problems in the structure of our economic system, we'll never be able to solve them."
New York governor Andrew Cuomo is joined by Rosie Perez and Chris Rock at a press conference where the two performers helped to promote coronavirus testing, social distancing, and the use of a face mask on May 28, 2020 in New York City. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Capitalism Is Not the Solution to Urban America's Problems - Capitalism Itself Is the Problem
By David Harvey, Jacobin
03 June 20
The COVID-19 crisis has triggered a fresh round of soul-searching in establishment media outlets about the problems of urban America. Unless we address the root cause of those problems in the structure of our economic system, we’ll never be able to solve them.
 t is quite possible that if and when we collectively emerge from the torments being inflicted by COVID-19, we will find ourselves in a political landscape where the reform of capitalism is very much upon the agenda. Even before the virus struck, there were minor hints of such a transition. Major business leaders who were gathered at Davos, for example, heard that their obsession with profits and market value and neglect of social and environmental impacts was becoming counterproductive. They were advised to take shelter from rising public wrath in some form of “conscience” or “eco-capitalism.”
The lamentable state of society’s public-health defenses against the onslaught of the virus, after forty years of neoliberal politics in many parts of the world, has increased the degree of public agitation. Austerity on anything other than military expenditures or subsidies to supposedly needy — though often filthy rich — corporations left behind a bitter taste, increasingly so after the bank bailout of 2008. In contrast, the collective and state-led measures to address the pandemic that did seem to work have generated more favorable public attitudes towards government.
In his remarkable daily news conferences, New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo insists that the eventual exit from the current crisis will not only require a reimagining of the economic, social, and political landscape, but will also rest on what he sees as a unique reconciliation between expressions of the popular will and government powers. For those of us who have lived through the recent New York nightmare, this declaration of confidence in the value of state intervention makes some sense.
Unfortunately, Cuomo’s preparatory moves for his reimagining exercise have so far involved recruiting a billionaire’s club of Michael Bloomberg (to organize testing), Bill Gates (to coordinate education initiatives) and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt (to re-calibrate communications and governmental functions). The ground-up democratic surge that has become more prominent at street level has yet to make much of a mark on political power. In the Cuomo imagination, the reimaginings and reconstructions required will be tailored to the needs of capital and people as defined by a progressive capitalist elite.
The Cities We Need
Throughout the long history of bourgeois governance, there have been some remarkable phases of radical reform in the United States, such as the Progressive era at the turn of the twentieth century, the New Deal of the 1930s, and the Great Society of the 1960s. The consensus seems to be building that we are overdue another one.
It is in such a context that a head of steam is building to reconstruct urban life in particular, and to revitalize urban processes so as to promote not only more rational — and more eco-friendly — forms of economic development, but also more adequate ways of organizing daily life. As well as wreaking untold direct damage upon the quality of everyday life for most New Yorkers, the virus has also revealed the huge amount of rot beneath the surface glitter of conspicuous consumerism, indulgent individualism, and flamboyant architectural interventions.
It is in this spirit that the recent New York Times Editorial Board reflections on “The Cities We Need” — supplemented by several invited expert op-eds — invite some commentary. The central theme is simple enough. Once upon a time, “cities worked. Now they don’t.” We need to get them working again.
Behind this lies a somewhat nostalgic reconstruction of an era when “American cities were the hammering engines of the nation’s economic progress, the showcase of its wealth and culture, the objects of global fascination, admiration and aspiration.” In those good old days, “cities supplied the keys for unlocking human potential; an infrastructure of public schools and colleges, public libraries and parks, public-transit systems and clean, safe drinking water,” even though they were “deformed by racism, bled by the profiteering of elites and fouled by pollution and disease.” But above it all, those cities “offered opportunity.”
The problem now — and this is what the virus has revealed in such gut-wrenching detail — is that “our urban areas are laced by invisible [?] but increasingly impermeable boundaries separating enclaves of wealth and privilege from the gap-toothed blocks of aging buildings and vacant lots where jobs are scarce and where life is hard and all too often short.” Life-expectancy rates in the poorest neighborhoods are just sixty years, compared to ninety years in the affluent suburbs. To hammer home this point, the Times later published elaborate maps of differential life expectancies in US cities.
All Together Now?
It is unarguable that life chances depend upon the zip code of one’s birth. The litany of current failures is long (and far from invisible). As the Times observes:
Over the last half century their infrastructure of opportunity has badly decayed. Their public schools no longer prepare students to succeed. Their subways are reliably unreliable. Their water runs with lead.
The lack of affordable housing in good locations means long and tedious commutes for low-wage workers on failing public-transit systems. It means thousands of homeless camping on the streets, on the buses, and in the subways. Educational opportunities map onto local differentials in income and wealth, serving to solidify and deepen class and racial divides.
The Editorial Board’s conclusion is that “the rich need labor; the poor need capital. And the city needs both.” We all need to pull together to make for ourselves a more satisfying and more equitable form of urbanization. This is an astonishing conclusion. It simply reasserts the primacy of the structures that lie at the root of most of the problems of contemporary urban life.
To be sure, the rich need labor because it is labor that makes them rich. But it is capital that has taken the lion’s share of wealth produced during these last forty years. It is also capital that has reduced labor to a fragment of itself through precarity, technological displacements, deindustrialization, and all the other ills that leave cities with a population that lives from paycheck to paycheck, unable to survive without resorting to charity at the food banks and free meals. It produces a population largely unable to afford the rent, let alone a mortgage payment, when unemployment or some personal tragedy or illness strikes.
Ronald Reagan famously remarked that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Until we realize that “capital is not the solution to our problem, capital is the problem,” we will be lost. Capital builds Hudson Yards and not affordable housing for those who are trying to live on less than $40,000 a year. Until capital can do the latter, all attempts at reform, however well-meaning, are sure to be coopted into the cycles of endless capital accumulation for the benefit of the few. Capital will continue to function in this way irrespective of the social and ecological consequences, while leaving the mass of the population to scrimp and save — if that is even possible — just to get by.
A Familiar Tune
The Editorial Board leaves us solely with hopeful exhortations to our superior moral instincts, our supposedly better angels, to solve a problem that calls for root-and-branch structural reform. “Reducing segregation requires affluent Americans to share but not necessarily to sacrifice,” they say. Heaven forbid that the affluent might have to sacrifice! “Building more diverse neighborhoods, and disconnecting public institutions from private wealth,” they hopefully claim, “will ultimately enrich the lives of all Americans — and make the cities in which they live and work a model again for the whole world.”
I am eighty-four years old, and I have heard this sort of thing too many times before to take it seriously. In 1969, I moved to a segregated Baltimore a year after much of the city was burned down in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. It did not take long for me back then to grow weary of heart-felt moralizing — the kind the Editorial Board resurrects — and the do-gooder spirit of those who genuinely (but alas so naively) believed it would all work out, if only those of us with good will (supplemented, presumably, by an empathy pill specially designed for reluctant subjects) would recognize that all of our fates are intertwined, that all of us are in this city together.
I wrote a book about the whole experience, Social Justice and the City, in which I sought to address the long-term continuity of capitalism’s urban problem. And here it is fifty years later and we seem set for a repeat performance, making exactly the same mistakes. It was abundantly clear back then that the market mechanism — which requires the production of scarcity to function — was the main culprit in a sordid drama. Thinking in these terms helped explain why almost all policies devised for the relief of urban inequality end up being crucified on an underlying contradiction.
If we engage in “urban renewal,” we merely move the poverty around (Engels, in his 1872 essay on the housing question, suggested that this was the only solution the bourgeoisie had to its urban problems). If we don’t, we merely sit by and watch as continuous decay takes place. “Gilding the ghetto” — as it was then called — plainly did not work, so the dispersal of impacted populations across urban space must be the answer. That also did not really work. The latter approach may have dispersed the ghetto somewhat, but it did not reduce levels of poverty or diminish racial discrimination.
Frustration with such failed outcomes led to the conclusion that the poor must bear the blame for their parlous condition, locked away as they were in their own distinctive “cultures of poverty.” The only proper response, said Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the time, was one of “benign neglect.” This presaged the neoliberal trope of personal responsibility and entrepreneurialism of the self, which justified blaming the victims, and in turn helped evade the kind of awkward questions which continuous policy failures inevitably posed. Few commentators scrutinized the forces which govern the very heart of our economic system. (Moynihan just happens, incidentally, to be Cuomo’s political mentor and role model.)
Emotional Tourism
The upshot is that all manner of solutions were devised and explored in those days, except ones that might challenge the continuation of the capitalist market economy. Yet this is the economy which, left to its own devices, inevitably produces spiraling impoverishment of the sort that the current pandemic has so starkly revealed.
When 40 percent of the thirty million people who are now unemployed had been earning less than $40,000 a year, surely we have to recognize the bankruptcy of contemporary capitalism in terms of providing for basic human needs. The neoliberal line of personal responsibility and human capital formation that developed back in the 1970s proved to be a convenient way for the capitalist class and the corporations to escape from the failures of the 1960s reform wave, while endlessly filling their own pockets.
It is vital, therefore, to subject the very basis of our society to a rigorous and critical examination. This is an immediate task. But let me say first what this task does not entail. As I concluded back in the early ‘70s, it does not mean yet another empirical investigation of the social conditions in our cities. In fact, mapping even more evidence of man’s patent inhumanity to man is actually counterproductive, in the sense that it allows the bleeding-heart liberal in us to pretend that we are contributing to a solution when in fact we are not. This kind of empiricism is irrelevant, even though it may earn us a Nobel Prize.
There is already enough information available to provide us with all the evidence we need. Our task does not lie in this field. Nor does it lie in what can only be termed “moral masturbation,” of the sort that accompanies the masochistic assemblage of some huge dossier on the daily injustices to which the urban populace are subjected, over which we can beat our breasts and commiserate with each other before retiring to our fireside comforts. This, too, is counterrevolutionary, for it merely serves to expiate guilt without ever forcing us to face the fundamental issues, let alone do anything about them.
Nor is it a solution to indulge in the kind of emotional tourism which attracts us to live and work with the poor “for a while,” in the hope that we can really help them improve their lot by volunteering at a soup kitchen or donating to a food bank (helpful though that may be in the short run). So what if we help a community win a playground in one summer of work, only to find that the school deteriorates in the fall? These are the paths we should not take. They merely serve to divert us from the essential task at hand.
A New Framework
This immediate task is nothing more nor less than the self-conscious construction of a new political framework for approaching the question of inequality, through a deep and profound critique of our economic and social system. We need to collectively mobilize our powers of thought to formulate concepts and categories, theories and arguments, that we can apply to the task of bringing about a humanizing social transformation.
These concepts and categories cannot be formulated in abstraction from social reality. They must be forged realistically with respect to the events and actions as they unfold around us. Empirical evidence, the already assembled dossiers, and the experiences gained in the community can and must be used here. And the surging wave of political empathy that is cresting in appreciation for all those who have lived their lives in the face of evident dangers must be taken at the flood. That wave will come to nothing if it is not consolidated by long-term, deep-rooted reforms.
The virus, it is said, does not discriminate. Well no! Like the New York Times Editorial Board, I live comfortably isolated at home drawing my salary, dependent upon a segregated workforce that has to grapple with the existential choice between eviction and starvation through unemployment on the one hand, or keeping the city and its networks of care and comfort running for a measly wage on the other. And they also have to confront a potentially deadly virus on a daily basis. In what zip code do those workers reside? And what proportion of them are people of color, recent immigrants, Latinos and Latinas? How many laptops do the kids possess?
There is a distressing continuity to all this over the past century and a half. Surely it is time to break with this long and well-rehearsed history. We need to make a break for it, and plot the creation of more democratic and socially just forms of urbanization, animated by a different political economy and a different structure of social relations.
The disparities that underpinned the urban uprisings of the 1960s are still with us. In fact, they are deeper than ever. A few more months of lockdown and capitalist collapse, and the uprisings will almost certainly begin. But remember: “capital is the problem, not the solution.”
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RSN: Fightin' in the Streets |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54565"><span class="small">Stephen Eric Bronner, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 02 June 2020 13:20 |
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Bronner writes: "Violence is not a symbol, but a reality: people get hurt, businesses get destroyed, kids get arrested, and catharsis is always momentary. Always it is the most vulnerable - people of color - who get hurt, watch their businesses burn, get arrested, and then have their catharsis with tears in their eyes."
Protester stands on a burning police vehicle during a protest over the death of George Floyd, a handcuffed black man in police custody in Minneapolis, in Los Angeles, CA, on May 30th, 2020. (photo: Ringo H W Chiu/AP/Shutterstock)
Fightin' in the Streets
By Stephen Eric Bronner, Reader Supported News
02 June 20
 iolence is not a symbol, but a reality: people get hurt, businesses get destroyed, kids get arrested, and catharsis is always momentary. Always it is the most vulnerable — people of color — who get hurt, watch their businesses burn, get arrested, and then have their catharsis with tears in their eyes. I was told of some Twitter message describing a woman trying to restrain a few young white guys from inciting violence outside Baltimore Hall. She yelled at them that they were putting African-Americans at risk and, supposedly, the white guy responded: “They’re going to kill you anyway!”
I’m sure that there are many types in “Antifa” (anti-fascists), but I never met a member or anyone in the anarchist “Black Bloc” who wasn’t white and (usually) privileged. Nor have I ever met one who knew that the Antifa slogan, “smash the fascist where he stands,” derives from the German Communist Party in 1929. I could be wrong, but I don’t think that it had the desired impact. It is the same regarding another old, failed ultra-left slogan, “the worse the better.” Even the most cursory look at history suggests that the worse doesn’t beget the better, it only begets what is even worse.
A significant minority among the black protestors participated in the rioting and looting, just as in the riots of 1967, and they share responsibility for what happened to any number of black neighborhoods. That white nationalists acted as provocateurs doesn’t change matters; they are not worth talking about. It is different with other groups, though. Legitimate rage is no excuse for illegitimate violence, especially since “law and order” bigots will use it to confirm their worst prejudices. Spontaneous violence is not an expression of power, but of weakness, hopelessness, and frustration with the procedures for resolving grievances. Violence makes it easier for protestors to define themselves by the white-racist tactics that the black community has courageously opposed. That our wannabe fascist president wishes to label a completely decentralized Antifa as a “professional terrorist organization” should not blind progressives to their irresponsible tactics and sectarian politics. Their violence will undoubtedly serve as a pretext for Trump to introduce more sweeping programs to constrict civil liberties, voting rights, and welfare programs. Perhaps he will also use his call for law and order as the precedent for an authoritarian response to an electoral loss in November of 2020.
Indiscriminate rioting is “red meat” not only for his base but also for those “secret racists” who won’t publicly admit to their choices in the voting booth. “Our” president ignores reality: Antifa and the Black Bloc, the looters and the petty thieves, speak only for themselves. The vast majority of those racially diverse young protestors are neither terrorists nor revolutionaries. They seek justice for their brothers and sisters. Witnessing the horrifying murder of George Floyd online, they remember other murders of other blacks by other cops, and they are infuriated by a systemically racist police apparatus and a government whose multi-trillion-dollar response to the coronavirus never dripped down to the working class and the poor. The old adage remains as true as ever that “when America catches a cold, the black community catches pneumonia.”
Violence is tempting under these circumstances, and only a fool would argue that people of color should trust or preoccupy themselves with the sensibilities of white liberals and moderates. But those who surrender to the temptation confuse the momentary rush with political power, social media sites with real organization, and ugly graffiti with an authentic agenda. Violence is sometimes justified — but only very rarely, and only as a last resort, which this is not. If employed, moreover, it must serve an explicit communal end rather than that of quasi-criminal individuals. Violence is never a cause for celebration. One reaps what one sows: the greater the violence, the greater the unfocused rage, the greater the probability that rebellion will generate counter-revolt.
I approach all this as an outsider — I can’t be anything else. But I know that violence should always be mourned as a tragic deviation from the practices of a righteous cause; it doesn’t contribute to the solidarity of a real movement, especially one concerned with civil rights and the rule of law. Too often, in fact, brash talk about violence is used as an excuse to avoid engaging in real political activism such as that being developed by Reverend William Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign and a host of other organizations. Working with them, however, is not as dramatic as throwing a Molotov cocktail; real change requires discipline and long-term commitment.
A pressing need exists for positive proposals, whether speculative or not, which can improve the transparency and accountability of law enforcement agencies. Suggestions might include demanding new and more thorough audits, eliminating their insular self-policing, seeking input from the most decorated cops on the ground, especially women, and — yes! — raising their wages and benefits to attract better-grade applicants. Other proposals might substitute national for local civilian review boards and call for the creation of a new cabinet post concerned specifically with police-community relations. Such proposals are worth considering, and that is true of many others. What I have written should be taken in the spirit of constructive criticism and solidarity with the exploited and the insulted. Precisely at a moment when our lying, megalomaniacal commander ‘n’ chief is aligning himself with the most retrograde forces of “law and order,” all protestors today must, just as did Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela in their time, link the means they use to the ends that they wish to realize: justice, equality, and peace.
Stephen Eric Bronner is Board of Governors Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Rutgers University and Co-Director of the International Council for Diplomacy and Dialogue. Author of more than twenty works, his latest is The Sovereign (Routledge)
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54561"><span class="small">Nina Lakhani, Jacobin</span></a>
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Tuesday, 02 June 2020 13:19 |
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Excerpt: "Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was murdered in 2016 during a fight against a hydroelectric megaproject."
Berta Cáceres in the Rio Blanco region of western Honduras, where she, COPINH (the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras) and the people of Rio Blanco organized to halt construction on the Agua Zarca Hydroelectric project. (photo: Goldman Environmental Prize)
For Murdered Honduran Organizer Berta Cáceres, "Any Injustice Was Her Battle"
By Nina Lakhani, Jacobin
02 June 20
Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was murdered in 2016 during a fight against a hydroelectric megaproject. In a Honduras characterized by corruption and impunity after the 2009 US-backed coup, the murder was the grand finale of a campaign of terror and violence against activists like Cáceres.
 he March 2, 2016 assassination of venerated Honduran social movement leader Berta Cáceres sent shockwaves around the world. In her new book Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet, journalist Nina Lakhani describes the fraught process that led, two years later, to the conviction of seven men for the murder and the ongoing struggle for justice.
In this interview with Hilary Goodfriend, copublished by NACLA and Jacobin, Lakhani discusses the structural context for the violence in Honduras, the fight against impunity for Cáceres’s killers, and her legacy.
Hilary Goodfriend: Berta Cáceres is internationally celebrated as an environmental activist or an indigenous land defender. But as your book makes clear, Berta’s organizing extended into multiple spheres, from leadership in Honduras’s post-coup resistance to deconstructing patriarchal oppression within her organization, the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH).
Your research also reveals some fascinating, little-known episodes from Berta’s biography, including her service with the Salvadoran guerrillas during the 1989 Final Offensive. Can you tell us a little about who Berta Cáceres was?
Nina Lakhani: She would never have identified herself as an environmentalist, even though that’s how she became known. I think she first and foremost thought of herself as a social warrior — a luchadora social. She was first and foremost a human rights defender and understood that human rights and land rights and indigenous rights are all part and parcel of the same thing. She was a pioneer in the fight for equality and women’s rights and LGBT rights as well, but she always saw them under the umbrella of a much broader struggle for equality and human rights in general.
Hilary Goodfriend: At the time of her murder, Berta and COPINH were engaged in a struggle against the construction of a hydroelectric megaproject by the company DESA in Honduras’s Río Blanco community. At trial, the state prosecutors never presented a clear, comprehensive narrative of the conspiracy.
You lay out the available evidence in the book, but there are a lot of unanswered questions about her death. How would you answer your title question of who killed Berta Cáceres?
Nina Lakhani: I see [her murder] as sort of the grand finale of a campaign of terror and violence and threats to neutralize her and COPINH. A private business can’t repress a social movement or a social leader without that explicit involvement and say-so of political and social and security forces. All of those players were involved at different parts, whether before her murder, the murder itself, and after.
If she’d been murdered during the 1980s, it’d have been a stone-cold political, state-sponsored killing, because that was the lens [through] which we looked at all murders. I don’t think that it’s really any different. The murder was the last step, because the campaign to neutralize her failed at all the other previous steps: bribes didn’t work, discrediting her didn’t work, slandering her didn’t work, threatening her, they couldn’t put her in jail. It was the last act by these political and economic and security elements, working together in different ways.
Hilary Goodfriend: This was very much an unfolding story, even as your manuscript was being finalized — especially when it comes to what we call the “intellectual authors” of the crime. David Castillo, the only DESA executive charged for Berta’s murder, was still awaiting trial, and Berta’s family was still demanding justice. What developments have there been in this case since your book went to print?
Nina Lakhani: David Castillo continues to await trial. He was detained just over two years ago, so under Honduran law, his trial should begin by September. It keeps plodding along. What was clear to me when I started reporting and investigating her murder is that you couldn’t understand Berta’s murder without understanding who she was, nor could you understand her murder without putting it into a wider context of a criminal state propped up by national and international economic and political powers, including the US government and the World Bank.
All of that is still playing out in a grotesque way. The day after the president’s brother is convicted of being a major drug trafficker, and after the president himself is named as a coconspirator in this international drug-trafficking network, he appears at a public event with the acting US ambassador to Honduras. What we’re seeing now, during the pandemic, is an authoritarian who is in power not because he won an election, but because he won in 2013 using money that was clearly from illicit activities — drug activities — and stolen from the public purse, and in the second election, which was fraudulent. He’s emboldened to do what he wants.
You see this every day with the number of people that are leaving Honduras, who would rather risk having their kids taken away and being trapped at the US border than staying in their country. I see Berta’s case unfolding in that way as well.
Yes, the fight for justice in her case goes on. Castillo is the only executive [charged]; there’s two other DESA employees who have been convicted. But those who paid for the crime, who ordered the crime — because it certainly wasn’t Castillo acting alone — have not even been interviewed. All the international pressure that was on the Honduran government in the first two or three years — with the current US administration, they don’t feel any pressure at all.
Hilary Goodfriend: One of the arguments at the heart of your book is that Berta’s murder, and the social and ecological destruction in resource-rich areas like the Bajo Aguán, is the consequence of the insatiable demand for energy in major economies like the United States and what we might call “green capitalism,” or the free market expansion into so-called renewable energy industries, whether it’s biofuels from African palm plantations or hydroelectric power from river dams like the Agua Zarca.
What is the role of these industries in the violence that plagues Honduras today?
Nina Lakhani: First of all, even thinking about them as energy projects is a myth. These aren’t projects to provide energy to people of that country. A lot of this energy is used to fuel mines and other extractive industries. Show me a community that has had its river taken away, its land taken away, campesinos killed, where now everybody has light — I haven’t ever come across one. Does some of this energy end up outside the country in people’s homes? Absolutely. But a lot of it doesn’t — a lot of it is used to fuel this insatiable drive to get resources out of the ground. We’re in this vicious cycle of extraction, extraction, extraction.
That’s why Berta opposed Plan Puebla Panamá, for example, from the very beginning. She knew these projects would be death sentences, literally and metaphorically: if you take away a community’s river, the community cannot survive. Río Blanco without a river is a dead community. People who had been living sustainable and self-sufficient lives, they are bullied, threatened, coerced, bribed, tricked into having these projects in their communities. This spells the end of their way of life. These energy projects are fueling forced migration not just from Honduras but from across the region, as are mines and other extractive projects.
Berta wasn’t against green energy projects. She was against having any project imposed on a community without consultation and without proper compensation. If you’re going to make millions of dollars out of a river by generating electricity, then the community needs to be adequately compensated, not a few cents here and there, or going to a local government and offering communities basic things like classrooms or even light or roads. That’s not payment, these are services that everyone has a right to, and it’s the state’s obligation to provide them.
It’s a myth on so many levels, this green energy myth. The Aguán is a perfect example — hundreds of campesinos forcibly evicted from their land, killed, communities and families split up, for what? For an inedible palm to make biofuels and junk food. The Aguán was the bread-basket of Central America. It exported grains and other produce for years, and now you can’t grow anything. This palm has made a few people very rich, and there’s been a lot of carbon credits trading done.
We’ve seen this not just in Latin America, but in Asia, in African countries. It’s so destructive. It can’t be a coincidence that there’s violence associated with the imposition of these projects everywhere in the world.
Hilary Goodfriend: Another thread that runs through your book has to do with the legacies of US imperialism, specifically US counterinsurgency training of Honduran security forces. How has the US government contributed to the creation and maintenance of what you call the “criminal state” or the narco-state that has consolidated in Honduras?
Nina Lakhani: Honduras and the United States have a special relationship — I know other countries claim that, but they really have. Honduras has depended on the United States first [with] bananas, then mining and other industries for foreign capital. That very unequal, dependent relationship starts way back. There were no national armed forces in Honduras until 1954; there were regional units. These were brought together under a National Armed Forces by a law written by the United States, which enabled it and continues to enable it to use Honduras as a military satellite. That’s where the coup in Guatemala was launched, which led to the insidious civil war. That also fueled this dependency of American dollars coming into the military.
In the late 1970s and early ’80s, there’s all of the anti-communist Cold War paranoia, and John Negroponte is named ambassador. Honduras is turned into the United States’ Cold War military satellite to train and fight its dirty wars in Central America. While there is no official civil war, it is where the worst death squads are trained, from El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua — they all come to Honduras, to the Bajo Aguán, to be trained. It’s where Chilean and Argentinian dirty forces, well trained previously by the United States in torture and disappearance, are invited to come to teach more of the same. There’s a massive injection of US personnel and military dollars and aid. The embassy becomes one of the highest staffed in the world, and the whole operation is run from there.
As the Berlin wall comes down and the Cold War comes to an end, there’s a lot of cleaning up that goes on, but that counterinsurgency and the special forces way of doing business just doesn’t disappear. Some of these units were disengaged, but some were just suspended and can be brought back to life whenever needed. Those same military powers are the ones that enter organized crime or form alliances with new forces. Emerging from the counterinsurgency state, you have the criminal state.
With the coup in 2009, it takes hold of every aspect of every institution — judges, businesses, prosecutors’ offices, security forces. Honduras was never a failed state, it was just the strengthening of the criminal state. You’ve got the economic elite with organized criminals at the top, and the political power is very much a second layer. There’s overlap: the Hernández and Lobo families are classic examples. But really, the power brokers are the money men.
In the case of Berta, two people convicted in her murder were trained by the United States at the School of the Americas, one of whom was special forces. He was on his way to becoming a colonel lieutenant. He had received US training; he had been in Iraq and had been a UN peacekeeper not a few years earlier. David Castillo did his whole military training at West Point, he’s a US-trained ex-military intelligence officer.
So broadly speaking, in terms of the techniques and strategies used against Berta and others, the United States’ tentacles are everywhere, but specifically, two people we know who are convicted of playing a role in her murder [were US trained].
Hilary Goodfriend: You are also a character in this story. While covering the investigation and trial, you faced threats from a fabricated campesino group and were even called out by name by Honduran authorities for exposing information linking top military brass to Berta’s murder. As a journalist, how did you navigate the risks of reporting in these circumstances?
Nina Lakhani: I come from a tradition of journalism where being a part of a story is not what we do. I find it really uncomfortable. The moment I first published the story about Berta’s name appearing on a hit list, that’s when high-level ministers and the armed forces chief of staff and the US ambassador launched this very dirty campaign to try to discredit me. The United States did it off the record, saying I had no idea what I was talking about, I was just some young journalist. [The Honduran military] called me out by name, with a picture, saying that I was trying to stain the good name of the Honduran armed forces.
All these fake materials were passed around, and from that moment on until the trial, I never published another story about Honduras while I was in the country.
I’ve never been back into Honduras by plane. I go in over land using different routes, because Honduras has an inglorious track record of stopping journalists, activists, and human rights monitors at the airport and turning them away on trumped-up immigration charges. Honduras has this criminal defamation law. They can charge me, arrest me if I’m entering the country, and force me to wait in jail. Criminal defamation is condemned by every freedom-of-speech organization because of its repressive impact on journalists and others.
I didn’t want to be bullied into leaving. I made as much noise politically, publicly, and diplomatically as I could. I put in place a series of measures to protect myself — a lawyer to act on my behalf in case I was detained. I made sure the message got to the US embassy, I spoke to the UK ambassador, I went to speak to the EU. There was a brilliant group of freedom-of-speech organizations, human rights organizations, and movements in Honduras and around the world; they made so much noise.
Hilary Goodfriend: Bringing it back to Berta, can you say a little about her legacy in Honduras in the contemporary social movements, and what justice would look like in this case?
Nina Lakhani: I don’t want to speak for the family, but how do you feel justice has been done in any crime? To me, that’s when no stone is left unturned, where investigators go wherever the evidence leads them, no matter how high, no matter who it touches. Until every line of inquiry is investigated, I don’t think anybody could claim that justice has been served. Even at the most simple level, there are dozens of phone numbers still not looked into properly — at least one other person who was there the night of the failed mission to kill her has still not been identified.
She wasn’t just anybody. They killed her because they knew the devastating impact it would have on the social movement in Honduras, and it has had that devastating effect. It’s still recovering.
I think her legacy is multifold. For lots of people, her leadership role and vision in recovering the Lenca identity, in retrieving that pride in identity and culture will be her greatest legacy. Her actions, in a society ruled by machismo and patriarchy, to call out and act toward equality was absolutely pioneering. I don’t know many indigenous organizations that have done that even today. She made LGBT rights a core principle of COPINH. For her, every battle was her battle. Any inequality, any injustice was her battle.
She understood local battles in regional and global terms, economic and political terms. There are few people that can do that as smartly and eloquently as she could. Her being remembered as an environmentalist is very narrow, but she understood that the battle for the Gualcarque River was emblematic. It was a battle in a much bigger war, because the imposition of that dam spoke to taxpayers’ money coming through development banks, it spoke to the militarism that had been greenlighted through the coup and afterward, it spoke to this green energy myth, it spoke to the repression of indigenous people and the right to self-determination, not just in her corner but everywhere. She obviously massively cared about that community and that river, but it was so emblematic of all these greater forces.
Fundamentally, what anyone who knew Berta would say is that she believed in change. She believed in a better world, that it doesn’t have to be like this. There is enough natural wealth and resources in Honduras for everybody. We don’t have to live in a country where tens of thousands of young people flee every year to work in horrible conditions and leave their children and their family. Always, she believed in a better Honduras. She could see that it had the potential as a country, and in every battle, I think that’s what she was fighting for.
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