Part 4: 'A Treasure Trove'

Investigators collect thousands of phone records – from accused gunmen, middlemen, and company executives – and reconstruct an alleged murder plot.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
James Neelon is inside a bland, beige carpeted boardroom. He's
sitting at a large round table under the dull glare
of fluorescent light. In his role as the US Ambassador
in Honduras, he spends a lot of time in rooms
like this. Today's meeting is in Washington, d C. At
the Council of the America's It's a group that promotes

(00:24):
free trade and open markets. A couple dozen other diplomats
from Central America and the Caribbean sit around the same table.
It's March, less than two weeks after the murder of
Berte Cassiris. The killing is sure to be a topic
of discussion today, and Kneelan knows the case well. He

(00:46):
attended Berta's funeral and he's met with her family, promising
them whatever support his embassy can provide. But before Kneelan
can get into all of that, the room erup perfect
of a gentleman stood up in the middle of it,

(01:10):
and I think he unfurled a banner and he said,
you know, pointing at me. He said, this man has
blood on his hands. And it was in reference to
the Berta cass Race case. A couple of men grabbed
the activists and began pushing them toward an exit door.
The protesters fight back, One is shoved hard into a
door frame on his way out of the room. In Honduras,

(01:43):
the U s Embassy is a powerful institution. It's capable
of exerting lots of pressure on local authorities, but for
some that influence wasn't always welcome. Barretts Or herself had
been deeply critical of the US and especially it's military,
ever since her days in El Salvador, when she aided

(02:05):
leftist rebels there in their fight against the US backed government.
That distrust of America's motives is shared by many of
her friends and colleagues in Copaine. For decades, America has
provided financial and tactical support so the military and security
forces of Honduras. The US government has also, through business

(02:29):
development ventures and aid programs, supported private development projects like
the one behind the Ahwa Zarca dam. Neeland says he
doesn't mind being criticized, It's part of the job, but
this kind of direct accusation that he was personally implicated
in Barton's death struck a nerve. I guess I personally

(02:53):
draw the line when people um accuse me of ill intent.
You know, all I can say is that it was
always my intention to try and do everything I could
to bring the resources of the United States to bear
to help Honduras in our mutual interest. But in a way,
those protesters were just amplifying a message Berta had been

(03:15):
repeating for years. She often talked about the negative impact
of the US, especially the US military, on her country.
The Awazarka damn she opposed was one example. Some of
the Dessa employees she'd clashed with had undergone US led
military training. This is Berta in a two thousand thirteen interview.

(03:40):
This ex military, This as chief of security, he's ex military.
And the guy who identifies himself as the head of
Dessa you went to West Point and was a specialist
in military intelligence. We're seeing that there is a connection
in all of these mega projects, both in hydro electricity
and mining, there's a connection to the military militaries. But

(04:04):
Barta's relationship with America was complicated. She didn't really view
America itself as an enemy. She visited the country regularly.
She had family, brothers, sisters, niece's nephews who lived there.
She had forged partnerships with US based NGOs, and she

(04:24):
had even met with several US congress members and senators.
She didn't agree with a lot of what the US
government did, but she understood that sometimes the best way
to get Honduran politicians to hear you was to have
people in America helped deliver the message. I'm monte Reel

(04:56):
for Bloomberg Green and this is ud River. Hidden away

(05:27):
in the lower level of the Heart Building where U
S senators have their offices. You walk down a cavernous hallway,
turn a corner and find room one. Yellow post it
notes with little arrows drawn on them are stuck on
the walls and on the front desk, leading you towards
someone named Tim Are. That's Tim Riser. If you're down

(05:53):
in this corner of the US Capital Complex, you're probably
looking for him. He's the senior foreign policy adviser for
the Democratic Senator from Vermont, Patrick Lahy, and Tim is
the guy who runs much of the day to day
business of a very important Senate subcommittee, the one that

(06:13):
decides which countries get American aid dollars. The second I
walk into his office, he nods to a poster sized
picture of Berta's smiling face. It's hard to miss. The
poster sits in the window directly behind his desk. It's
been here since almost the day that Berta Custus was killed.

(06:38):
Riser was among those on Capitol Hill who had met
Berta after she'd won the Goldman Prize. In having known her,
even the slight amount that I did, made it all
the more sort of personal and just a feeling that
this was something that we absolutely had to respond to.

(07:01):
Members of the Cassarus family visited Riser and others on
Capitol Hill. They spoke about the threats Barta had received
and the false leads that were pursued in the early
days of the murder probe. What we saw was first
of all predictable, an attempt to cover up the crime.
It's how the police behave in Honduras and countries like

(07:22):
that all the time, to obscure what happened, or to
frame somebody else, or to pretend to be investigating when
really nothing is happening. Um and we saw all of
that here. Rice Or knew of a very specific way
to send a message to the Honduran authorities. He could

(07:43):
withhold the money his subcommittee controlled if the Honduran security
state couldn't protect Berta and solve a crime like this,
did it really deserve tens of millions of dollars in
US financial support? And I think people up here saw
this as emblematic of a much larger problem and something

(08:05):
that could not be allowed to just be swept under
the rug the way these cases so often are. As
a result, Senator lah He made clear that he was
not going to allow US aid to Honduras, to the
government of Honduras, particularly to the police and the armed forces,
to continue, at least not the aid which this subcommittee

(08:28):
provides until we saw a satisfactory resolution of this case.
The U s Embassy in Honduras also offered to assist
local police. Honduras is a sovereign country in the US
can just take over an investigation, but Ambassador Neelan told
Berta's family that the embassy would try to help out

(08:50):
around the margins. The embassy assigned a Justice Department officer
to help the Hondurans with technical aspects of the investigation,
such as telephone data retrieval. It also offered the use
of the FBI crime Lab for analysis of evidence. Barta's
older brother says the presence of a US Justice official

(09:12):
comforted him. He liked the idea that there might be
someone keeping an eye on the Honduran police as the
investigation progressed. Today, he believes that helped lead to the
first arrests in the case, the ones we detailed in
episode three. But others in the family were wary of

(09:34):
US involvement, and they remain so to this day. They
don't necessarily see the US embassy and the organizations that
work closely with its allies. Barretta's daughter, er Tita Isabelle,
said as much during a rally on the streets of
New York weeks after the murder. Little is he on

(10:01):
with you? She repeated her calls for a new independent
homicide investigation. She said the state run investigation was fatally
flawed and nothing, not even the assistance from the US,
would fix that. As Bertita Isabelle addressed people in the
streets of New York, her colleagues were delivering the same

(10:24):
message inside Honduras. This is from a BBC report. The
sun's beating down onto the tarmac here and a crowd
of demonstrators, I'd say about two hundred people from Copeine,
the organization that Berta cassid Is co founded, are assembled
here in front of them a line of riot place.

(10:45):
And what the people here are demanding is that there
is an international commission of inquiry that will investigate the
murder of Berta cassidy Is. They don't trust the hon
Jurn authorities. The Cassara's family and the protesters wanted to
Human Rights Commission within the United Nations to conduct a
parallel investigation, one that ran alongside the Honduran governments. There

(11:09):
was a precedent for this. Forty three students disappeared in
Mexico and the Commission did set up its own inquiry,
but this time the Honduran government was not interested in
more help. They didn't want a third set of eyes
looking into the case. The Hondurans said that they did

(11:31):
not need the Inter American Commission support with the investigation
because they had the FBI support. Roxanna Alfos is a
professor at UC Berkeley's Law School and the co director
of the International Human Rights Law Clinic. She says the
Honduran government used the us IS limited involvement as a
cover to try to derail a parallel investigation. The Cassarus

(11:57):
family decided to take matters into their own hands. They
tapped into a network of international human rights advocates and
identified several experts with extensive legal and prosecutorial experience. The family,
with help from several Honduran and international NGOs, convinced those

(12:18):
experts to dig into the case. The family members decided
to move forward, and so they chose a group of
five legal experts to comprise a team to conduct an
independent and partial investigation, and I was asked to be

(12:40):
a member of that team. The group was called guy PAY.
It's an acronym and translated from the Spanish, it stands
for the International Advisory Group of Experts. Its members included
attorneys who prosecuted high profile human rights cases around the world,
cases like the war crime tribunals in the former Yugoslavia

(13:03):
and prosecutions of military and paramilitary abuse in Colombia. Roxanna
herself had spent two decades litigating cases, mostly in Latin America.
These included extra judicial killings and forced disappearances. At first,
she was reluctant to get involved in this one. She

(13:24):
was raising two very young kids in California at the time,
heading to Honduras to investigate murder and corruption seemed like
a recipe for trouble. She declined, but then reconsidered. She
says she felt an obligation to help, so in October

(13:45):
she and the rest of the group got to work.
So the first thing that we did was, you know,
begin to compile background information. They tried to put the
crime in the larger context of violence against activists in Honduras,
and specifically against activists aligned with Berta's organization Copeine. They

(14:09):
focused only on a three year period from and they
began compiling a list of instances where Dessa the hydro
Electric company had threatened, harassed, or violated the rights of
members of Copine under checkpoints their race. There was just

(14:29):
three years. We documented a hundred and thirty five incidents
of violence. So that was the first step understand the context.
The next step was to look at them criminal investigative file.
That meant trying to review the evidence that the Honduran
investigators had so far collected. Roxanna's team asked to see

(14:53):
all of the tens of thousands of pages of the file.
The Honduran prosecutors resisted at first, but soon they handed
over about three thousand pages of it Roxanna and the
team studied the ballistics reports, the autopsy, and the statements
that the Honduran investigators had collected. The interviewed witnesses, people

(15:14):
who knew something about the context, knew something about the
day of for the threats um and then in July
of two thousand seventeen, after months and months of requests,
we got access to about fifty five gigs of telephone data.

(15:38):
This was mostly data that had been collected during the
raids we detailed in the last episode on May two,
when police confiscated the phones of four suspects and searched
Dessa's offices. Those fifty five gigs of data that the
investigators got amounted to about forty thousand pay ages. Most

(16:01):
of that was in the form of What's app text messages.
These texts would become the center of the case, guilt
or innocence, imprisonment or freedom. Everything seemed to rest heavily
on those messages, and even now, four years after the murder,

(16:21):
it still does. Some of those what's app texts were
sent as part of a group chat. The group, according
to its what's App heading, was created to discuss matters

(16:43):
of security at the Ahwa Zarka site. It included members
of dessa's security team in Rio Blanco, as well as
some of dessa's high level executives and board members. These
individuals were so sure of impunity that they texted back

(17:06):
and forth and and pretty openly regarding their plans to
neutralize the opposition, to eliminate the opposition to the Damn project.
With thousands of pages of messages to wade through, there
were a few obvious time stamps to check out first.
For example, the morning after Berta was killed, there was

(17:30):
quite a bit of chatter. Then The members of the
group seemed to be following the initial phases of the
investigation closely to Roxanna's team. It seemed like DESSA was
getting frequent updates from inside the crime scene. The message
string from the day after the murder includes a text
from ADESSA project manager who suggested he'd been in touch

(17:54):
with a local police chief. He wrote, I've solicited the
help of the commission her. He confirms his support. He'll
inform me of details of the murder. He also recommended
we issue a press release to create some distance from
these events. Then, just hours after Berts's body was found

(18:16):
Sergio Rodriguez, Dessa's head of environmental standards and community Relations,
received a police report on his phone. The report included
descriptions of Berta's wounds and the bloodstains in the bedrooms
and in the hallway of her house. It also identified
two suspects, the ones that we talked about in episode one.

(18:38):
They were Berta's ex boyfriend, Oreleano Molina or Alto, and
also Gustavo Castro, the Mexican activist who had also been
wounded in the attack. Sergio forwarded the report to the
others on the Dessa group chat Roxanna says telephone data
showed that the report came directly from police in Santa Barbara,

(19:01):
the province where the Ahwazarka Dam site was located. That
that information is highly confidential. There is no reason or
justification that law enforcement should share their preliminary conclusions regarding

(19:22):
a a murder with a company, But it was completely
consistent with the relationship that the company had established with
the police. The company treated the police like their private army.
But the messages didn't just show a connection to local
law enforcement. They also revealed that Dessa executives were in

(19:46):
contact with the Minister of Security himself. Adasay executive reported
on the group chat that the Minister had assured the
company that the murder was being treated as a Leo
de filed us, or loosely translated, a skirt problem, a
simple crime of passion, nothing more. Roxanna's team would trace

(20:09):
the WhatsApp messages back in time for years. Those text
messages allowed them to sketch a detailed narrative, the story
of what they describe as a long running and sinister
corporate conspiracy. You have a treasure trove of evidence in

(20:29):
this case because the perpetrators were absolutely sure they would
never be held to account, not just for the murder,
but for all the other crimes that were being committed.
In November, more than a year and a half after

(20:51):
the murder, Roxanna's team released the results of its investigation.
The group handed its findings over to prosecutors. One of
the key figures in the plot they outlined was Dootless Bustillo.
He was one of the four men arrested in May,
two months after Berta's murder. He was a former lieutenant

(21:14):
in the Honduran Army, and he'd also spent a couple
of years as the head of security for Dessa in
Rio Blanco, Berta had known Bustillo well. Even though they
were on opposite sides of the protests, they sometimes exchanged messages.
Before she died, beart To complained that the nature of

(21:34):
his messages to her had changed from business like exchanges
to aggressive pestering that amounted to sexual harassment. In an
interview with a Swedish journalists, she described it as abuse
and called Bustillo out by Namestio. Even after that public complaint,

(21:57):
Bustillo continued to send bear to message. Is. In one exchange,
he said, along a couple of pictures he'd found of
her online, who is this? Bear To respond, ha ha ha,
Like you don't know, he replies. A few more lines
are exchanged. He tells her she's very beautiful and that

(22:19):
many men must find her attractive. He writes, I like simple,
charismatic slender women who are strong and stand up for themselves.
He says he'd love to spend some time with her.
He sends her a wink emoji. Take care, beautiful lady,
he writes. Berta doesn't respond to that, but the next

(22:41):
day bust is back at it. Hello, good morning, and
Bone appetite since it's lunchtime. He sends a flower emoji again.
Berta doesn't respond. Another day passes another Hello, Barta, Isabelle,
he says. Barta finally writes back, it seems you've sold

(23:03):
your conscience and ideals and you've turned your back on
the people of Latagra. Latagra that's the name of the
cluster of homes in Rio Blanco where the opposition to
Dessa is centered. Bear to ask Bustillo, are you not
tired of being the frontman for Dessa. Boustillo had stopped

(23:26):
formally working for Dessa a few months before, but in
the context of these and other messages, it's clear he's
still involved in the company's activities. Bustillo replies to Berta,
I am not a frontman for Dessa, nor do I
even remember that company. He tells Berta she should encourage

(23:47):
her people to stop being so ungrateful. Beart To replies
that she's pretty sure. Boustillo remembers Dessa because he keeps
repeating the company line. It's sad, she said, to see
the role that you've been relegated to. Bustio ends the
exchange with a long string of ha has on November,

(24:22):
about three and a half months before Barton's murder, Bustio
sent a message to Adessa Executive. Roxanna's team did not
identify him in its report because he hadn't been indicted.
They called him Directivo Trace or Executive number three. Bustillo

(24:47):
wrote to Executive number three, telling him complete the fifty percent.
Prosecutors believed this was a request for payment and that
Bustillo was requesting half of what was owed to him.
Executive Number three responded with a time six pm. He

(25:09):
followed that with another message, Let's meet in thirty at
Chili's in Los Proceres Mall. Bustillo seemed confused about exactly
when they should meet six fifteen or in thirty minutes.
These were two different times when he expressed confusion. The

(25:30):
executive row back, Bustilla, get it together. This isn't a party.
Have everything prepared because it could happen at any time
in the course of the day. Roxanna's team believed that
this time period November was when the murder for Higher
scheme was first plauded. This is based on messages and

(26:03):
phone calls exchanged between Bustillo the Dessay executives. The accused
gunman and Mariano Diaz. Diaz is the military guy whose
phone was tapped as part of another investigation into a
drug and kidnapping ring. One of the people Diaz had
been in regular contact with was Henry Hernandez. He was

(26:25):
one of the accused hitmen. Their direct messages to each
other seemed to reference the exchange of a gun and
payments and additional men who could be hired to carry
out quote a job from the guy pay Investigators reading
of the messages, it seemed that this job they were

(26:45):
talking about was supposed to happen in February, about one
month before Berta was actually murdered. So what we think
happened in early February was there is an effort to
kill that down, a failed effort. The plan, she says,

(27:09):
was for Henry Hernandez to travel to La Esperanza. There,
Mariano Diaz was supposed to meet him and give him
a gun. The Guide A members believed the killing was
planned for February five, but Berta's daughters were at the house.

(27:29):
Henry makes it to Leesperanza. He sees that bert isn't
ever loom and he says, I can't do this. That
next morning, on February six, Douglas Bustillo send a message
to Executive Number three. He wrote, mission aborted. Yesterday it

(27:51):
wasn't possible. I will wait for your response. I no
longer have the logistics in place. I am at zero. Yeah,
he says mission mission aborted for lack of resources. Executive
Number three responded to Boustillo with this remember the scene

(28:21):
um and then says I think he says something like
receivers or like I got the message. What does it
remember the scene? It's open for interpretation. I think if
you look at that text in the context of the
plan and means clean up after yourself, at least that's

(28:42):
the way I would interpret it. After Bustillo was arrested,
investigators found photos of Berta's house in his phone and
the day before the actual murder. The chats suggest he

(29:04):
planned to meet with Executive Number three hours before the murder.
The phones that investigators believe were used by the accused
gunmen show them traveling to Laesperanza around the same time
Douglas Bustillo was searching for pictures of Berta on his phone,
and about an hour before Berta Cassarus was killed Bustillo

(29:29):
was in contact with the accused gunmen. These phone records
and What'sapp messages later would be used against those who
had been arrested up to this point, Sergio Rodriguez, Douglas Bustillo,
Mariano Diaz, and the accused gunman. In June, judge ordered

(29:49):
that those suspects would go to trial. A few months later,
GUP published its report, revealing many of these phone intercepts
for the first time, But the report did not publicly
reveal one piece of information that would soon become critically important.
Who was Executive number three? Way back in when violence

(30:21):
was first breaking out in Rio Blanco. Phone records suggests
that Executive Number three was hard at work behind the scenes.
Remember what happened In July A soldier working for Dessa's
security team shot and killed a coping protester. Then the
same day, young Christian Madrid, whose family supported the dam

(30:46):
was shot and killed in the family cow pasture. Violence
like that was a potential public relations disaster for Dessa.
That same day, the executive sent What's App text message
to his colleagues. It said, pay the reporter from h
H H H is the name of the top cable

(31:10):
news channel and Honduras. He suggested a payment of two
thousand olympidas or about eighty dollars. The Guide Bay investigators
knew the identity of Executive Number three, but they didn't
reveal his name and their report. They knew that before
he joined Dessa, he'd been a high level military intelligence officer,

(31:34):
and through the phone records they could see that he
took an interest in Berta. Sometimes he reached out to
her personally, so he's using her as a human source
of intelligence. So he's taking the information she was revealing
about her movements directly or and directly about her movements,

(31:54):
her concerns, and he was feeding that information back to
his company, and then they were acting on that information.
I mean, that's a classic intelligence cycle. Barrett's family also
knew exactly who Executive number three was. They've been hearing
his name from Bear to herself for years, and within

(32:20):
a few months all of Honduras would know his name.
It's March two, the two year anniversary of Bart's killing.
A white Toyota pickup truck pulls up in front of

(32:40):
a federal building in the city of San Pedro de
su La. Federal agents in black face masks opened the
back door of the truck. They lead a man in
handcuffs past the cameras and microphones of reporters. Police in
Honduras have arrested David kept Dios. He is an executive

(33:02):
of DASA. Casto is being accused of being the mastermind
behind the assassination of environmental activists but Cassera. Most of
the news reports include very few details about David Castillo's life,
but they hint an interesting past. He grew up in Honduras,

(33:22):
but was educated in the United States at the Military
Academy at West Point. He'd lived in the Washington, d c.
Area for a couple of years before returning to work
for the Honduran Armed Forces in intelligence and counter intelligence,
and in before he turned thirty years old, Castillo was

(33:44):
named executive president of Dessa, where he was in charge
of developing the Agua Zarca Dam. On the day of
his arrest, Berta's daughter, Bertita Isabelle, tells CNN that the
family is relieved than an accused intellectual author behind her

(34:04):
mother's murder has finally been identified and arrested. Today we
can begin to believe that we're starting to break the
bonds of impunity that we're behind the murder of my
mother Berta cases. David Castillo is a person that Copin
and the family members have denounced from the beginning. Dessa

(34:31):
issued a statement again denying involvement in Berta's murder and
defending Castillo's innocence, but Castillo himself has never told his
full story publicly. He spent the last two years in
prison awaiting trial. During that time, he's remained something of

(34:51):
a mystery, the accused mastermind of a brazen murder, waiting
to make his case. I did not order this, I
did not participate it in the murder of Bertas there
is no evidence whatsoever that could link me to killing Alberta.

(35:16):
On the next episode of Blood River, we may be
accused mastermind. Blood River is written and reported by me

(35:36):
Monte reel sofra Forehas is our senior producer. My Aquava
is our associate producer. Our theme was composed and performed
by Senior Rubinos Special thanks to Carlos Rodriguez. Francesco Levi
is the head of the Berg Podcasts. Be sure to
subscribe if you haven't already, and if you like our show,

(35:59):
please leave us a review. Thanks for listening,