Dear Meteor readers,

Tomorrow it will be one month since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and the stories of patients being denied or having difficulty accessing care have been worse than we had even imagined. A 10-year-old rape victim was encouraged by forced childbirth advocates to carry the resulting pregnancy to term when she had to fly to another state to obtain the procedure, a miscarrying woman in Louisiana was denied care and forced to deliver a nonviable fetus, and a woman in Michigan was denied care for a life-endangering ectopic pregnancy, among other and surely yet more stories.

This is not an anniversary any of us wanted to celebrate—but it’s a good reminder to keep donating to abortion funds, as they are the ones on the frontlines fighting to get pregnant people the care they need. We have a long battle ahead of us to secure justice. So, it’s a good time to remember that that is actually possible. In this vein, we have a real treat this week.

Writer and editor Megan Carpentier chats with award-winning Guardian environmental justice reporter Nina Lakhani about her groundbreaking book on the life and murder of Honduran grassroots activist Berta Cáceres—and the threats Lakhani has faced herself for telling that story.

But first, the news.

¡Viva la Revolución!

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

WHAT’S GOING ON

187 Minutes: On Thursday evening, the Congressional hearings into the Jan. 6th riots came to a close… at least until the fall session. The hearing’s focus was on the three hours between when Trump encouraged protesters to march to the Capitol and when he finally (barely) told them to go home. The committee hearing highlighted Trump’s inaction and refusal to do his duty to stop the insurrection. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) concluded the hearing by stating, “Donald Trump made a purposeful choice to violate his oath of office.” Sure sounds like it!

Also, IDK about you, but I will never get over this video of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) running away as the rioters (whom he’d cheered on earlier in the day) closed in on the Senate.

Meanwhile, former presidential adviser and Breitbart founder Steve Bannon was convicted of contempt charges on Friday for initially defying a subpoena to appear before the committee. (It is hard to argue that Bannon does not hold the committee and, like, half the country in contempt.)

Welcome Justice Jackson: Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson had her first vote on the Supreme Court this week, and she dissented. The court’s conservative majority, however, backed a lower court ruling preventing the Biden administration from reverting back to Obama-era, less-Trumpian but still aggressive immigration policies.

Just say it: Feminist philosopher Kate Manne talked to Brian Lehrer about why when talking about our reproductive rights using the term “pregnant people” is simply more “accurate and inclusive” and does not, in fact, diminish women.

AND:

• Pat Benatar can no longer in good conscience sing her classic, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.”

• Turns out how you view gender does impact how you vote.

• On the legacy of Susan Faludi’s feminist tome Backlash.

• I love fat girls hiking in the woods!

TRUTH TO POWER

Why We Need To Keep Speaking Up

Guardian reporter Nina Lakhani talks about the intense pressure she and  indigenous land defender Berta Cáceres faced to remain silent.

BY MEGAN CARPENTIER

BERTA CÁCERES ON THE BANK OF THE GUALCARQUE RIVER IN THE RIO BLANCO REGION OF WESTERN HONDURAS, WHICH SHE HELPED SAVE (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE GOLDMAN ENVIRONMENTAL PRIZE)

What do you do when everyone wants you to shut up—or is actively trying to shut you up? If you’re either Honduran activist Berta Cáceres or her biographer, Guardian journalist Nina Lakhani, you keep talking.

Nina first met Berta in Tegucigalpa—the capital of Honduras—in November 2013. Berta, a well-known indigenous rights activist from the Lenca community in western Honduras, was there to, among other things, speak about her concerns that the soon-to-be elected conservative president could further suppress his political opponents and eventually put an end to the country’s growing social movements.

“The army has an assassination list with my name at the top,” Berta told Nina at the time. “I want to live, but in this country there is total impunity. When they want to kill me, they will do it.”

And, less than three years later, she was assassinated.

Ultimately, it was Berta’s involvement, starting in 2013, in the effort to stop a corrupt hydroelectric project from building a dam in the Lenca people’s backyard that pissed off the people dangerous enough to kill her.

Nina, who had been writing a book about Berta prior to the assassination, persevered in her own work, covering the 2018 trial for Berta’s murder despite threats to her safety. (Ultimately, seven men—many of whom worked for the hydroelectric company— were convicted at that trial and the former company president was convicted in July 2021.)

But it didn’t end there — not completely.

Nina’s book about Berta—Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet—came out in June 2020, and Nina immediately faced legal threats in the U.K., where libel laws are more liberal than in the U.S.

But with the end of the statute of limitations on that suit, she’s ready to talk.

NINA LAKHANI (COURTESY OF NINA LAKHANI) 

Megan Carpentier: How did you get interested in Berta Cáceres’s story?

Nina Lakhani: When she was alive, she had been leading a campaign in Honduras to stop the construction of an internationally-financed hydroelectric dam — an energy project on a river considered sacred by the Lenca people, which had been illegally sanctioned by a corrupt government. And for leading that campaign, there had been a campaign of terror against her and her organization, which had led to her having to go underground — to go on the run, really — because she was facing these trumped-up criminal charges.

At the time of her murder in March 2016, she was undoubtedly the most well-known activist in Latin America working on environment and land issues. She had won the Goldman Environmental Prize — which is sometimes called the Nobel Prize for environmentalists — in 2015. She’d had an audience with the Pope in Rome in the year before she died.

She was incredibly well-known, and they murdered her anyway.

I started investigating her murder for The Guardian, and it just became really so clear to me that if they could kill her, they could kill anybody. She wasn’t the first environmental indigenous activist to be killed in Honduras nor the last, but hers was a really emblematic case in terms of what she was fighting for and who she was fighting against—and in that her murder was prosecuted.

Why was the prosecution of her murderers so emblematic?

There was a coup in Honduras in 2009, and she was murdered in March of 2016. In that period, more than a hundred environmental and land defenders had already been murdered, and no one had ever been held to account. But when she was killed, it made headlines across the world, and there was a huge amount of lobbying and campaigning for something to happen from the E.U., the U.S. and her family. And we kept reporting on her murder.

So the government — this authoritarian post-coup government, many of whom are now awaiting trial in the U.S. for drug trafficking — was under pressure to hold a trial, right? Eight people were prosecuted at the first trial, a combination of the hired hit men (the sicarios) and middlemen in the company, Desarrollos Energéticos (DESA), itself, many of whom had connections to the Honduran armed forces. [Seven were convicted.] Most recently the president of the dam company  — a former military intelligence officer trained at West Point — was also convicted.

But it’s important to understand that what she was doing by delaying the construction of the dam was causing DESA to lose profits, and part of the executive team made the decision to kill her. So there has been some justice [through the earlier trials], but the higher-ups have never been held to account. The politicians that enabled the campaign of terror against her and others, that enabled her death, and that enabled a cover-up to some extent, have never been held to account. And nobody that financed the project has either.

Her family last month submitted a case for a criminal investigation in the Netherlands against the Dutch development bank, FMO, that was involved in the financing of the dam project — which is really unheard of in these types of cases.

BERTA CÁCERES IN FRONT OF THE LOGO FOR THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF POPULAR AND INDIGENOUS ORGANIZATIONS OF HONDURAS (COPINH), WHICH SHE FOUNDED (PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE GOLDMAN ENVIRONMENTAL PRIZE)

It’s clear that Berta was killed in order to silence her — but you also faced threats in reporting on her, right?

A few months after her murder, I uncovered the links between the perpetrators and the U.S. military training that they’d received. Then, I started getting a huge amount of harassment and stress from the Honduran government and the military. The U.S. embassy in Honduras launched a really dirty underground campaign to discredit me and my reporting. [In Lakhani’s book, she details this campaign—which involved off-the-record press briefings to discredit her reporting on how the U.S. had previously provided military training to many of the men involved in Cáceres’s murder—and notes that the U.S. government never responded to questions about it.]

During the first trial for her murder, when I was the only reporter there, I also received what we believed were threats coming from military intelligence. I was declared persona non grata in the country—I wasn’t able to ever go back to the country by plane; I’ve always gone by land. I was labeled a terrorist, a communist, a drug trafficker. There was this really sustained campaign to stop the only reporter who was pursuing this case.

And then, just before the book was published, we received a threat of legal action in the U.K. by Honduran banks involved in the project. When it was published, we received more threats [to sue me for libel]—which went on for 15 months.

To have that threat hanging over me was really probably the worst of all of the threats I had in this whole period, because you have billionaire banks threatening to ruin you—not just financially, but also to ruin my reputation. I felt very isolated, because when you are facing people with unlimited resources determined to shut you up and discredit you, it is really difficult.

But really, all of this was just telling me that I needed to keep going—because this was a story that was uncomfortable for a lot of people in power. They desperately did not want me to be doing this work.

What struck me about reading your book is this innate sense that Berta had about intersectionality: She was an indigenous rights activist, a gender identity activist, an anti-capitalist, a land defender. How do you feel she came to see all that as interrelated?

When you are a grassroots leader, things aren’t divided: Land rights are indigenous rights, indigenous rights are anti-colonial, water rights are indigenous rights and human rights. You don’t separate them out. We are whole people, we are whole communities; all of those things go together.

What made Berta really unique is that she was absolutely a grassroots leader [but] she also went all around the world to be with other communities—First Nation communities in Canada, indigenous communities in the U.S., local groups in Kenya, in Kazakhstan, Brazil, Guatemala — and absorb what she could about their grassroots resistance. Through that, she became an incredibly smart political thinker. She understood and could explain every local struggle in a regional and global context—the geopolitical context, economic context, cultural context, gender context. And that made her incredibly powerful and dangerous.

She saw, on a grassroots level, what was going on in terms of international financing coming in through development banks in the name of green energy, but at the cost of whole communities being obliterated or being displaced, forced migration, rivers being polluted and more. But she also then absorbed the Washington consensus, World Bank policies and International Monetary Fund policies and understood that these things weren’t just happening by chance: The reason that all of these massive energy projects were coming to places like Central America was because there was huge amounts of money being poured into green energy products to function as carbon credits [to offset pollution in richer nations]. People like her, communities like hers, were collateral damage—a sacrifice for the supposed greater good.

What do you want people to take away from Berta’s story, in the end?

That the causes and the consequences of the planet burning are playing out right now in communities — and, how you learn about the causes and the consequences is actually from communities. We need to actually listen (and have the humility to listen) to the real experts who are on the ground and not try to impose solutions or “development.” Imposing development or imposing climate solutions is why we are in this mess.

We’re not the ones that know best necessarily. But we can help communities on the ground who have been practicing climate solutions and good environmental practices and sustainable farming and stuff forever. We can learn from them — and we can support them without imposing “solutions” on them.

If you know someone who could use a little inspiration, forward this email to them!

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