"Endless Coup, Permanent Struggle: On Nina Lakhani’s “Who Killed Berta Cáceres?”", 3rd December 2020

...Nina Lakhani’s Who Killed Berta Cáceres is, at its core, a story of aggressions against the Lenca people, the ravaging of the Bajo Aguán for profit, and the impunity that reigns supreme in a place wholly surrendered to global capital, the United States, and to institutions like the World Bank. Adding to a growing literature on contemporary Honduras like Dana Frank’s The Long Honduran Night, Lakhani’s text highlights the country’s role as a counterrevolutionary base of US power, one whose legacies continue to be of lethal consequence. Historically, Honduran power has been the inheritance of a few families that are representative of deep political and transnational business interests — all aligned with US regional aims. Desarrollos Energéticos S.A. (DESA), for example, the very dam builder who ordered hired guns to murder Cáceres, is both a continuation of the country’s captured reality and of wider development patterns in Central America. DESA’s Agua Zarca hydroelectric project, like similar megaprojects, effectively reconfigures communities into sacrifice zones for insatiable energy needs. In the end, these development schemes all end identically: they destroy indigenous ways of living by seizing territory, defacing sacred entities like the Río Gualcarque — in short, alienating people from ancestral land...