Part 1: The Witness

Gunmen burst into the bedroom of Berta Caceres, shooting her dead. But they leave something important behind: a houseguest, in a bedroom down the hall.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Congratulations to the winners of the two thousand fifteen Goldman Prize.
It's the biggest prize and environmental activists can get, and
this is the awards ceremony. Thousands of people are packed
into San Francisco's Grand Opera House, and in the middle
of the front row, tonight's big winner is waiting for

(00:26):
her name to be called. Berta Casarengs from Honduras. It's April,
and Berta Cassras is being honored for her fight against
a proposed hydro electric dam in western Honduras. Foreign investors,
the Honduran government, and some of the wealthiest business leaders

(00:48):
in the country have backed the project. Barta has worked
with a native community known as the Linka to oppose it.
They've filed legal complaints arguing the damn will destroy aid
their way of life. They've stacked logs and stones on roads,
blocking construction equipment from reaching the work site, and Berta

(01:09):
has been credited with driving the world's largest hydro electric contractor,
China's Sino Hydro Corporation, to pull out of the project.
It's been a grizzly battle. Protesters and security guards have clashed.
A couple of people have been killed. A few more
have been wounded and scarred. Bart To herself says she's

(01:32):
been constantly harassed. Threatening text messages have popped up on
her phone. Strangers have followed her, mysterious vehicles have tried
to drive her off the road. But on this night,
as she walks onto the opera house stage, none of
that seems to rattle her. She unfolds her speech at

(01:52):
the podium and adjust the mic when I'm familiar on
her closest friends have never seen her like this. The
bear To, they know, wears jeans and T shirts. Tonight
she's wearing a sparkling, pale rose gown, but her smiles

(02:12):
the same. And that smile is something her friends and
colleagues have always talked about, how the smile has a
way of making people feel comfortable, and how as soon
as that happens, there to switch his things up tries
to make those same people feel a little uncomfortable. Agitation, disruption, provocation,
that's what she's going for, despertemos temple. It's a call

(02:44):
to action, she says. The world needs to wake up.
It's running out of time, she says. Greed, racism, and
old patriarchal systems are destroying us. Racis theatre art has
been delivering that message in different ways for decades. As

(03:09):
a kid, she tag along with her mom to protests.
She co founded her own human rights organization when she
was just twenty two. Now, at forty four years old,
she's reached the pinnacle of her career, the request Premio

(03:29):
al Puelo linca Ario Lenco alcop. She closes the speech
by dedicating the award to all the rebels out there,
to her mother, to the Linka indigenous community, and lastly
to all the martyrs who have lost their lives defending
natural resources. In a lot of stories, this would be

(03:58):
the end a grassroot environmental activists achieves international acclaim after
years of struggling for her cause. But this isn't one
of those stories. Tonight's award puts a spotlight on Barton.
The anger and resentment she's inspired over the years, intensified

(04:18):
under its glare. Barton will go back to Honduras after this.
She'll continue to speak out against the dawn, but in
less than a year she'll be silenced. A prominent environmental
rights activists was shot dead in Honduras on Thursday. She

(04:39):
was killed like well the one hundred other activists. It's
two thousand and ten and what's become the deadliest country
in the world for environmental defenders. My name is Monte Real,
an investigative journalist for Bloomberg Green. This is Blood River.
It's the story of a murder, a murder her in

(05:00):
a place where murderers thrive. We're about of all killings
are left unsolved and unpunished, where environmental activists have become
irresistible targets. The homicide investigation was full of surprises from

(05:38):
day one. Now, more than four years on, it keeps
revealing new twists. We think it's quite possible that there's
more to this crime then has been exposed so far.
I always felt like the government wouldn't dare to touch her.
I always felt that she would be threatened and she

(05:59):
would be famed, and they try and sender to prison.
But I never actually thought that the government would dare
kill her. We'll dive into those accusations, will follow strands
of evidence on a zig zagging path that will lead
towards some of the most powerful institutions in Honduras. Before long,

(06:20):
foreign governments and international investors will have to confront the
same question, who in the end is really responsible for
the death of Bear to Cassarus, And as more people
get drawn into that mystery, more blood will be shed.
It's not a good situation when people can literally get

(06:41):
away with murder. Convicting people previously thought to be untouchable
of serious crimes and having them pay the consequences can
send a very very important message. This is a test case. Yeah,
this is so important. This. I'm walking up to the

(07:12):
house where Berta was killed. It's early, almost four years
after her murder. She had bought this place with some
of the one and seventy dollars she was awarded for
winning the Goldman Prize. At the time of her murder,
she hadn't fully moved in yet, She was only staying
here a couple of days a week. The subdivision sits

(07:34):
at the far south end of the city of La Speranza.
It's a new development, flat, treeless, with plenty of lots
that remain empty. Her house is small and simple, a
green stucco exterior, white trim red metal roof. A six
ft high chain link fence surrounds it. From the front door,

(07:57):
you look across a dirt road and over a Aaron Fields.
It's a subdivision that's very isolated and abandoned, with very
few houses. That was Gustavo Castro's first impression of the place.

(08:18):
He's an environmental activist from Mexico. Barta invited him to
Las Baranza in March to speak at a conference she organized.
She told me, no, don't worry because anyway, I don't
sleep here all the time. It's not like it's my
permanent fixed address lexio Ica Tempo. That didn't put him

(08:43):
at ease, especially when Berta started telling him how nasty
her fight against the Awazarka Damn Project had gotten at
one protest. Security guards for the Damn shot and killed
a demonstrator. They claimed self defense. Bear To herself had
recently been getting threats, cryptic messages saying she should watch

(09:06):
her back, that sort of thing. She filed a complaint
to the Organization of American States. It's sort of like
the United Nations for the Americans. That organization declared that
the Honduran government had a responsibility to provide security for
bart To. She chatted a lot about the attention she

(09:29):
was getting the threats, about the complaint she had filed
and how about how sometimes the police officers that were
supposed to be protectively weren't protecting. During that conference in
La Esperanza, Gustavo had planned to stay at the house
of another activist, one who lived in the center of

(09:51):
the city, but when he saw Barta's place and how
vulnerable she seemed there, his plans changed. Barta said he'd
be well come to stay with her, so Gustavo lugged
his suitcase into the house and settled into the spare bedroom.
The next evening, they grabbed dinner in a restaurant in town.

(10:14):
It was about ten o'clock when bear To drove them
back to the house. She passed a little security booth
in front of the subdivision. A guard watched them pull
up an older man in his seventies. Maybe he raised
the crossbar that blocked the entrance road. The man nodded
at Barta as she passed. After that, upon arriving at

(10:39):
the house, we grabbed chairs and sat out on the
front porch to talk. I had a drink and smoked
a cigarette, and we stayed out there talking until maybe
eleven o'clock or so. Mostly it was small talk. Mostly
it had been a long day, and she was very hired,

(11:00):
and she said, okay, let's get some rest. I'll show
you to your room, and so we went in for
the night. I did a little work on my room
in the computer. You. Yes, I don't know if she
was already asleep, but I heard some noises coming from
around the house or inside the house, and I thought
maybe she was doing something like Yeah. By now, it

(11:28):
must have been a little past eleven thirty. That's when
he heard a much louder noise, good a bag, very loud.
I thought maybe Bait had dropped something in the kitchen,
and I was getting ready to get up to go
help because it sounded very loud. But immediately the door

(11:49):
of my room was kicked open, and at the same time,
bit yells from her room, who's out there? Everything happened
at once. Gustavo her gunshots coming from bear To's room,
and when he looked up, a man was standing in
his room, no more than six or seven feet away.
He looked young, nineteen twenty years old, a thin guy,

(12:12):
dark complexion, black hair, wide eyes, and he was holding
a gun. Nquist told Mann, I threw myself towards the
side of the bed, in my room to protect myself,
and the gunman shot me in the head side. I

(12:43):
think it was a miracle because when I saw his
eyes and saw his decision to shoot me, I instinctively moved,
and the gunman evidently thought that the shot had caused
that scar. Gustavo had thrown his hand up in front
of his face a protective reflex. The bullet tore through

(13:07):
the skin of his hand, then it buzzed the side
of his head, clipping a piece of his ear. Gustavo
fell to the floor, stunned, bleeding and still betoas okay.
He evidently thought that I was already dead. Gustavo sprawled

(13:28):
on the floor, heard footsteps retreat down the hallway, then silence.
No more than a minute passed, maybe as I was
down on the floor and be yelled for me. So

(13:52):
I realized that she was alive and got up to
go to the room to help her. She was there
on the ground bleeding. I couldn't tell where the gunshots were,
only a lot of blood. Little by little, she was
drowning over the thing. Gustavo was kneeling over bear to

(14:16):
in shock. Somehow, just before beart to faded out. She
managed to mouth the final message to him, call Salvador.
She said that was her ex husband. They'd split years before,
but he's the father of her four children and he
remained a major presence in their lives. Gustavo was searched

(14:38):
for bear to cell phone and found it on a table. Yeah,
I also had a lot of It was a very
modern phone, one that I didn't know how to use
very well. And with all the nerves and and and
the tension, I was trying to search for familiar telephone numbers,
but nobody was answering. Gustavo look back at Barton. She

(15:02):
was gone. Now he was alone, terrified that the killers
might come back. He grabbed his own phone to make
the calls. Sometimes he left voicemail messages, and sometimes he
didn't wait. He just punched in another number from his room.

(15:25):
He also sent emails to friends and colleagues in Mexico,
begging them to contact anyone in Honduras who might be
able to come to the house and help him out.
I was lying in my bed at one in the
morning on March three, and I was into Goosey Galpa,
and I received a phone call from Ann number. Karen

(15:50):
Spring is a Canadian human rights activist who lives into
Goosey Galpa, the Honduran capital. It's about a four hour
drive from Las Beranza. So I was alone in the
house and I received this phone call and then I
was like, okay, well that's weird. I wonder who's calling me.
And then somebody else called me again, and so I
was like, okay, that's weird. I'm gonna listen to the voicemail.

(16:12):
That first call had been Gustavo. He didn't leave a voicemail.
The second caller was an activist in Mexico who had
received a panicked message from Gustavo. The activist called Karen
to see if Karen might be able to help him.
And so when I listened to the voicemail, my friend,
who is very active in the you know, mining networks

(16:36):
in Mexico, was just saying Berto is dead and Gustavo
is in her house and he shot and he really
needs help. And I was like, holy shit. I listened
to the voicemail and I was like, oh my god,
Oh my god. And I just picked up the phone
and called Bert to phone number, not even you know,
thinking thinking twice about it and and I was just

(16:58):
Gustavo like like, are you okay? It is Bertha dead? Yeah,
she's dead. I'm like, are you sure? You know? Are
you are you sure? And he's like, yeah, she's she's dead.
Karen was the first person to speak directly with Gustavo
that night. She could hear that he was crying, and
I asked him if he was okay, and he said,
that is dead, and um, she's and and I'm I'm okay,

(17:22):
but I'm bleeding and can you please find help. I've
been calling people and nobody's been picking up, and you know,
can you send people to the house. I don't know
what to do. And then he asked me if he
should call the police, and I said, don't call the police. Um,
you know, because calling the police and Honduras is like
calling the mafia to a crime scene and you can't
trust them. It might sound kind of crazy you witness

(17:51):
a murder, you're alone with the body, and then you
go out of your way to avoid calling the police
for help, But in Honduras it's not that crazy. A
few months before Berta was killed, a survey funded by
the US government suggested that a solid majority of Hondurans

(18:11):
simply assumed the police officers were on the payrolls of
assassins and other bad guys. Almost no one trusted the cops.
These institutions were not at the service of the people.
They were at the service of some other interest, uh
financial or criminal. James Neilon was appointed US Ambassador to
Honduras in his priorities had been clearly outlined for him well.

(18:37):
I arrived in Honduras in August of two thousand and fourteen,
and if you'll recall, that was the height of the
of the first so called unaccompanied miners crisis, when there
were New York Times headlines and and cable news reports
of huge numbers of Central Americans unaccompanied children streaming across

(18:59):
our Southwest order and my marching orders as I headed
down to Honduras or to or to do something about that.
He believed the driving force behind the migration was violence.
In Honduras set a world record. This was the deadliest
place ever if you didn't count countries at war for

(19:19):
several years in a row. The country's murder rate was
about sixteen times higher than in the United States. Honduras
wasn't only the murder capital of the world at that time.
But I guess you could also label at the impunity
capital of the world at that time, because very few
murders were actually successfully investigated to a conclusion. In other words,

(19:41):
it was very rare for someone to actually go to
jail for committing murder. In Honduras, everyone knew the Honduran
National Police had a corruption problem. Local newspapers were full
of stories about uniformed officers getting tangled up in drug deals,
or stealing cars, or even committing murders. Calls for reform

(20:03):
were gathering steam both inside and outside of Honduras. Just
before Berta was killed in twenty sixteen, the U. S
Embassy threw its weight behind an effort to purge the
Honduran Police of its dirty cops. The Honduran government called
it the Special Commission for the Purge and Transformation of

(20:24):
the Honduran National Police. The Commission met for the first
time after Berta's murder. Over the next two years, from
twenty sixteen to twenty eighteen, the Honduran government ended up
firing almost half of its national force. More than five
thousand officers out of about thirteen thousand were expelled. Most

(20:47):
were accused of corruption or ties to criminal groups. It
wasn't just the rank and file. Of the nine top
officers in the National Police, six were pushed out. Forty
seven active police commissioners, about half were fired. Today there's
still a lot of controversy over that purge, but it's

(21:09):
not that the commission went too far. It's that they
might have been too easy on the police. Each of
the three top ranking police commanders appointed after the purge
would later be accused of meeting with drug traffickers who
paid the officers to protect their shipping routes. However you

(21:30):
interpret the end result of that purge, remember it hadn't
even really begun when Barta was killed. All of those
thousands of corrupt cops that would soon lose their jobs,
they were still on the force. So Karen Spring wasn't
being paranoid when she told Gustavo Castro not to call

(21:50):
the police for help. She was using common sense. When
Karen hung up on that first call with Gustavo, she
could tell he was terrified. He was alone with a
murdered friend inside a house that now felt more isolated

(22:11):
and vulnerable than it ever had. I was repeatedly calling
Gustavo to make sure he was okay, because you know,
he was really scared that the assassins were going to
come back and finished the job, and that they if
they knew that he was alive. And so I also
told him that we need to be very careful about
who knew that he was still alive at that time
until he was, you know, in a safe place. Karen

(22:33):
started calling members of Copeine Barrett's organization in La Speranza.
One was a man named Thomas Gomez. He agreed to
drive to Berta's and get Gustavo to safety in case
the killers returned. Yes, Emilia, it's something like two thirty
in the morning when Tomas from Gulping arrives to get me.

(22:58):
I heard the horn from the Gulping pickup truck and
I told myself, that's Tomas coming from me. This is
Gustavo stepped out of the bedroom to meet him. The
back door of the house connected to the kitchen was open.
The killers had busted through it. That must have been
the first loud noise he'd heard. I went out through

(23:21):
the front door. The gate to the fence was locked,
so I decided to jump the fence and I left
with Domas. It was around this time when Tomas called
the police to tell them about the murder. Then he
and Gustavo drove to the guard station at the entrance
of the subdivision. Gustavo recognized the old man from earlier

(23:44):
when he and Bartsa had passed him. Tomas asked the
guard if he'd seen anything out of the ordinary. He
said he hadn't. Tomas drove towards the center of town.
On the side of the road, they spotted a cluster
of people walking. They were members of Berta's indigenous rights
organization Copeine. They'd heard about what happened. They didn't have cars,

(24:07):
but they wanted to help somehow, so Moss told them
to hop in the truck and he gave them a
lift back to Berta's house. He told them to guard
the place to make sure it wasn't disrupted before the
police got there. We dropped the people off and we
took off to leave again. The crossbar was now raised

(24:31):
and the old man, we don't know what happened to him.
So Mass and Gustavo found two more groups of Copeine
members walking along the road and offered them rides. When
they returned to the house with the last group, they
saw that the police had now arrived inspecting the house.

(24:52):
Many of the Copine members were also inside with them.
Gustavo couldn't believe it. People were walking through the blood,
leaving fingerprints everywhere agreement. Obviously the whole scene of the
crime had been altered. That's when Berta's lawyer arrived. He

(25:16):
told Gustavo that a prosecutor wanted to speak to him
and that he should just wait in the truck. Gustava's
ear in hand were still bleeding and throbbing with pain.
More police and army soldiers were now streaming into the
crime scene. The media soon arrived. They too were walking
into the house, but no one could see Gustavo behind

(25:40):
the tinted windows of the trucks matros a few meters away.
I could hear them giving the news reports, saying there
was one Gustavo Castro and he's wounded because there was
a lot of blood in my room. But I wasn't there.
I just I couldn't be okay. They must have found

(26:02):
his suitcase in the spare room. His name was printed
on the luggage tack back into Gooseagalpa. Karen Spring was
racing to get to the crime scene. I put out
a communicate that Berta had been killed, and I got

(26:23):
in my car at I think like three o'clock in
the morning, and I drove to Lesperanza. And when I
got there, her body had been taken from the crime scene,
and it was in the back of a pickup truck
outside of the public Prosecutor's office in Lesperansa. It was
about eight o'clock in the morning. Now crowds were gathering
around that truck, people trying to get a glimpse of

(26:45):
Berta's body. Berta was probably less Speranza's most well known citizen.
People were mourning. They carried pictures of her. They spray
painted her name on walls and sidewalks, and their sadness
was edged with anger. It had been more than seven
hours since the murder, and her body was right there

(27:05):
in the back of a truck in the middle of
a public square, covered only with a dingy gray blanket.
To Karen, this was an insult heaped on top of
a tragedy. She started looking for Gustavo. Someone said he'd
been taken to a local priest's house where the police
were guarding him, and I insisted with the police that

(27:27):
they let me in to see him. They wouldn't let
me right away, and then they finally allowed me in,
and Gustavo was in a room. He was bleeding from
his ear, and he was sitting with Berta's oldest daughter,
telling her what had happened. Gustavo's nerves were shot as
he told the story to bears his family, Karen recorded

(27:50):
everything on her cell phone. He said he didn't know
where to begin, but he went on to give them
a detailed account of the evening, where he and Berta
had gone out to eat, how they returned to the house,
sat on the porch, went to their rooms. As he spoke,

(28:10):
he kept his voice low, sometimes dipping into a whisper.
He didn't trust the government types hovering around him, the
ones who had been questioning him for hours. People kept
coming in and out of the room, interrupting. After about

(28:33):
twenty minutes, Gustavo got into the details of the murder itself,
how he had heard a very loud bang which he
thought might have come from the kitchen, and how seconds
later he heard three gunshots you. He then talked about

(28:58):
how Berta called his name after the gunman left, how
he found her on the floor, how he pleaded with
her note bias, don't go and okay, that they called
me go stay with me, and how she told him
to call Salvador, her ex husband. Can shows you how

(29:20):
you say that. Finally, he described how he struggled to
use her phone and find her contact list, and then

(29:42):
how he realized she was gone joy see that she
wanted to see. In the middle of all of this,

(30:24):
the police were still pressing Gustavo for more information, and
so in that the couple of hours that I was
with him, a person that was sent from the Public
Prosecutor's office who was like going to sketch the face
of the person that he could remember had shot him,
showed up. Gustavo would describe the gunmen, and the police

(30:45):
sketch artist would turn his words into an image said, Okay,
I don't know anything about these sort of things, but
I agreed to collapse, right, And so a person comes
in and everything was pre arranged, very well planned, and

(31:07):
the person the expert comes in who's going to do
the drawing, and they're trying to convince me that he's
really good, that he's an expert in these sort of things,
you know, So they're trying to convince me that what
he's going to draw was going to be good with
Gustavo started describing the guy, the young face, the short

(31:27):
dark hair that you know, the eyes, the lips. He
registered all of it, and he started to make the drawing,
and I told him, no, this isn't the person I saw.
So he erases a little bit and then he re
draws it more or less the same. That's why I say, no, no, no, no, no,

(31:49):
that wasn't his hair, so he erased it, and then
he went back to drawing essentially the same things. Gustavo
hadn't slept in two days, as someone finally bandaged his
ear in hand, but they still hurt. He hadn't eaten.
Hippo reality want to look at Getter, I mean, so

(32:12):
I was like, draw whatever you want, and so they
asked me, okay, well, what's the percentage of similarity between
this drawing and the person you saw? Eighty? I don't
know whatever, just put eighty. I don't remember what I said,
but obviously I approved it. I did not realize the

(32:34):
importance of that piece of evidence, you know, quill prop.
The police knew something that Gustavo didn't. A couple of
hours before he sat down to do the sketch. They'd
arrested someone in connection with the murder, but they withheld

(32:58):
this news from Gustavo. The man they'd detained was Berta's
ex boyfriend. His name was Aureliano Molina, but friends called
him by his nickname Lito. Gustavo had never met Lito,
but Lito had been one of the people he'd spoken
to on the phone after the murder when he was

(33:18):
calling everyone in Berta's contacts. When Gustavo eventually saw a
picture of Lito, it was a mug shot, and that
photo shocked him. That's because the police sketch he'd done,
the one that didn't really look like the gunman he'd seen,
well it looked a lot like Lito, So it was

(33:44):
all a set up on during authorities have always denied
any wrongdoing in the investigation, and police at the time
said that they were following several leads, but that's not
the way Gustavo saw it. To him, it seemed the
investigators were convinced the killer was someone close to Berta.

(34:09):
Like her ex boyfriend. Lito had been one of the
first people that Karen Spring had called after she spoke
with Gustavo. She had reached him at his house in
a town called San Francisco, Limpira, that's a three hour
drive from Berta's house in La Speranza. I called our

(34:29):
Liana Molina, you know, forty five minutes into my whole
slew of phone calls that I made in response to
the phone call I were received from Mexico, and I
called our Liona Molina and I the first thing I
asked him was where are you? And he said, I'm
in San Francisco. What happened? And Isa Berta was murdered?

(34:49):
And so I had I knew that he wasn't even
in La Speranza that night, so I knew too that
he wasn't involved at all in the murder. Lito had
called Gustavo at about two a on the night of
the murder. He told Gustavo that he'd heard what happened
from Karen. He said he'd drive to La Speranza to
try to help him. Shortly after Lito arrived at about

(35:12):
five in the morning, police arrested him. Lito's relationship with
Berta had ended just a few months before. Some members
of Berta's inner circle, including her mother and her oldest daughter,
didn't get along with him, But it wasn't anyone from
Berta's family that pointed the finger at Lito. To them,

(35:35):
the idea of him murdering Berta was absurd, But someone
did place Lito at the scene of the crime. It
was the old guard at the entrance to the subdivision.
He said he saw Lito flee the area before police
first got there. The old man that guarded the entrance

(35:57):
declared that Tomas, instead of driving me of the subdivision
that morning, had actually taken Leto out, so his testimony
didn't match those given by Tomas and me, but it
was absurd, Gustavo says. The old man's description of Leto
included physical details that would be impossible to catch from

(36:20):
a quick glimpse through tinted windows in the dark, So
there were lots of ways in which it became evident
that this old man had been threatened or tortured or something.
But his testimony was false, so that it's squared with
the version that said lethal was guilty of this murder.

(36:51):
Protests erupted in the Honduran capital after Barth's murder. Students
demanding justice hurled rocks at riot police. Those police shot
tear gas and rubber bullets back at them. Berta's murder
instantly became international news, partly because of the attention she
just received from the Goldman Prize. Senators were on the

(37:13):
floor of the U S Capital urging Honduras to conduct
a full, sincere investigation. Celebrities jumped in. Leonardo DiCaprio tweeted
about Berta. Susan Sarandon posted a video I'm calling on
the Honduran government to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation
into the tragic murder Alberta Cassarez, and I demand that

(37:36):
the perpetrators beheld accountable. Environmentalists all over the world were
now talking about Ahwa Zarca, the name of the hydro
electric dam that Berta had been fighting. They talked about
the violence that had surrounded the project, about the threats
Berta had received, about the security protections she was supposed

(38:00):
to have received. The day after the murder, the Minister
of Security held a press conference. He said the government
was willing to protect her whenever she asked for it.
The minister suggested that the night she was killed, Berta
had not reached out to them. But we're not here

(38:23):
to say whether the security failed, but the assassination occurred.
The police were responsible for protecting her. Patrols were sent
to her home to protect her at her request. We
always tried to comply with her demands and protect her.
Unfortunately this happened, and we're working to investigate it. Bear

(38:44):
to his family interpreted statements like that as scapegoating, as
if it were Bart's fault, as if she'd failed to
specifically ask for protection. The night of her murder, Vert's
oldest daughter, Olivia, spoke at a candlelight vigil for her mother.

(39:04):
It was a political crime. She had been threatened, She
had declared many times, I'm being followed by hitman. It's
a farce when they claimed she was murdered because she
renounced the protective measures granted her. She never renounced those
protective measures. The only people who seemed uninterested in the

(39:27):
threats she had received were the investigators. As far as
the family could tell, it seemed that the police considered
this an open and shut case. It was a crime
of passion, a spat between Berta and an ex boyfriend.
Any evidence that gotten the way of that theory was ignored.
The day after the murder, a reporter cornered the security

(39:50):
minister and asked about the other victim. The activist said
to have been in the house with Berta without my own. Yes,
we do have knowledge of this person, but we don't
want to divulge more details from that because this is
an important person, one who cause us to step back
and take a pause in the investigation. I don't think.

(40:12):
After his encounter with his sketch artist, Gustavo became convinced
that the evidence wasn't guiding the investigators. Instead, he believed
the investigators must have been guiding the evidence because it
was a planned killing. They wanted a clean murder, one

(40:35):
shall we say, where she was alone, a clean job,
without any witnesses, and the story was going to be
that it had been an assault. Nobody would be able
to contradict that the problem would have ended there. But
the second scenario is there was a witness who survived,
who saw one of the gunmen. I saw him from

(40:58):
just a few meters away, so their Plan B was
going to be blame someone from Coping and so Gustavo
is sitting there alongside the police, and the puzzle pieces
of an elaborate conspiracy seemed to be falling into place,

(41:23):
then breaking apart, then recombining into new shapes. Plan A
was to kill Baranta without any clues whatsoever, but they
hadn't counted on a witness. Plan B then was to
blame someone who worked with Barrita and Copeine, like Lito

(41:45):
the ex boyfriend, to frame it as a classic crime
of passion. The problem was, the longer the police held Lito,
the more people vouch for him. His alibi was sound.
He hadn't been anywhere near Berta's house at the time
of the murder. In the end, they had to let

(42:09):
him go, and so the third scenario was, Okay, now
we can't do that. So Plans C is blame Gustavo.
For three days, he answered their questions. He led investigators

(42:32):
through Barton's house, recreating the events as he remembered them.
Step by step. He sorted through countless police mug shots.
Diplomats from the Mexican embassy and Honduras arrived to try
to help. At the end of the third day, he'd
given police all he could. Now it was time to

(42:53):
go home. His embassy helped him reserve a ticket back
for early the next morning. The met To can ambassador
send a message that night to the lead Honduran investigator
with all the travel details. He never responded to that message.

(43:17):
So when we were ready for the flight, we left
for the airport, thinking, okay, they're not interested in us anymore.
You know, it wasn't a big deal. When we got
to the airport with the security people from the embassy
and the ambassador and well also the consul. At the
time of departure, five in the morning, all the investigators

(43:38):
and the police were hiding in the airport. They came
out and they blocked the gate and they told me
you cannot leave, no brave. He felt like he was
trapped in a horror movie. But the script kept changing. First,

(44:00):
he was cast as the lone witness, a victim, one
who had been shot and whose blood was all over
the crime scene. Now, in a twist, Gustavo couldn't quite
believe he somehow had become the prime suspect. Coming up

(44:24):
on Blood River, we'll venture into a community that was
torn apart by the battle over the dam, where neighbors
bought neighbors. They told me, okay, woman, what we're going
to do is kill you. And when they told me
they were going to kill me, that's when I felt
the first blow. The first strike of the machete hit
me in the head, and after that another machete hit

(44:46):
me here in the chest. That violence, years later, would
lead investigators to new clues into new suspects in Barts
his murder. That's next time on Blood River. Blood River
is written and reported by me Monte Reel Top Foreheads

(45:10):
is our senior producer. May A Quava is our associate producer.
Our theme was composed and performed by Senia Rubinos. Special
thanks to Eduardo Thompson and Helen Navas and Carlos Rodriquez.
Francesca Levi is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Be sure

(45:30):
to subscribe if you haven't already, and if you like
what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps
others find out about the show. Thanks for listening.