Speaker 1: James Neelon is inside a bland, beige carpeted boardroom. He's
Speaker 1: sitting at a large round table under the dull glare
Speaker 1: of fluorescent light. In his role as the US Ambassador
Speaker 1: in Honduras, he spends a lot of time in rooms
Speaker 1: like this. Today's meeting is in Washington, d C. At
Speaker 1: the Council of the America's It's a group that promotes
Speaker 1: free trade and open markets. A couple dozen other diplomats
Speaker 1: from Central America and the Caribbean sit around the same table.
Speaker 1: It's March, less than two weeks after the murder of
Speaker 1: Berte Cassiris. The killing is sure to be a topic
Speaker 1: of discussion today, and Kneelan knows the case well. He
Speaker 1: attended Berta's funeral and he's met with her family, promising
Speaker 1: them whatever support his embassy can provide. But before Kneelan
Speaker 1: can get into all of that, the room erup perfect
Speaker 1: of a gentleman stood up in the middle of it,
Speaker 1: and I think he unfurled a banner and he said,
Speaker 1: you know, pointing at me. He said, this man has
Speaker 1: blood on his hands. And it was in reference to
Speaker 1: the Berta cass Race case. A couple of men grabbed
Speaker 1: the activists and began pushing them toward an exit door.
Speaker 1: The protesters fight back, One is shoved hard into a
Speaker 1: door frame on his way out of the room. In Honduras,
Speaker 1: the U s Embassy is a powerful institution. It's capable
Speaker 1: of exerting lots of pressure on local authorities, but for
Speaker 1: some that influence wasn't always welcome. Barretts Or herself had
Speaker 1: been deeply critical of the US and especially it's military,
Speaker 1: ever since her days in El Salvador, when she aided
Speaker 1: leftist rebels there in their fight against the US backed government.
Speaker 1: That distrust of America's motives is shared by many of
Speaker 1: her friends and colleagues in Copaine. For decades, America has
Speaker 1: provided financial and tactical support so the military and security
Speaker 1: forces of Honduras. The US government has also, through business
Speaker 1: development ventures and aid programs, supported private development projects like
Speaker 1: the one behind the Ahwa Zarca dam. Neeland says he
Speaker 1: doesn't mind being criticized, It's part of the job, but
Speaker 1: this kind of direct accusation that he was personally implicated
Speaker 1: in Barton's death struck a nerve. I guess I personally
Speaker 1: draw the line when people um accuse me of ill intent.
Speaker 1: You know, all I can say is that it was
Speaker 1: always my intention to try and do everything I could
Speaker 1: to bring the resources of the United States to bear
Speaker 1: to help Honduras in our mutual interest. But in a way,
Speaker 1: those protesters were just amplifying a message Berta had been
Speaker 1: repeating for years. She often talked about the negative impact
Speaker 1: of the US, especially the US military, on her country.
Speaker 1: The Awazarka damn she opposed was one example. Some of
Speaker 1: the Dessa employees she'd clashed with had undergone US led
Speaker 1: military training. This is Berta in a two thousand thirteen interview.
Speaker 1: This ex military, This as chief of security, he's ex military.
Speaker 1: And the guy who identifies himself as the head of
Speaker 1: Dessa you went to West Point and was a specialist
Speaker 1: in military intelligence. We're seeing that there is a connection
Speaker 1: in all of these mega projects, both in hydro electricity
Speaker 1: and mining, there's a connection to the military militaries. But
Speaker 1: Barta's relationship with America was complicated. She didn't really view
Speaker 1: America itself as an enemy. She visited the country regularly.
Speaker 1: She had family, brothers, sisters, niece's nephews who lived there.
Speaker 1: She had forged partnerships with US based NGOs, and she
Speaker 1: had even met with several US congress members and senators.
Speaker 1: She didn't agree with a lot of what the US
Speaker 1: government did, but she understood that sometimes the best way
Speaker 1: to get Honduran politicians to hear you was to have
Speaker 1: people in America helped deliver the message. I'm monte Reel
Speaker 1: for Bloomberg Green and this is ud River. Hidden away
Speaker 1: in the lower level of the Heart Building where U
Speaker 1: S senators have their offices. You walk down a cavernous hallway,
Speaker 1: turn a corner and find room one. Yellow post it
Speaker 1: notes with little arrows drawn on them are stuck on
Speaker 1: the walls and on the front desk, leading you towards
Speaker 1: someone named Tim Are. That's Tim Riser. If you're down
Speaker 1: in this corner of the US Capital Complex, you're probably
Speaker 1: looking for him. He's the senior foreign policy adviser for
Speaker 1: the Democratic Senator from Vermont, Patrick Lahy, and Tim is
Speaker 1: the guy who runs much of the day to day
Speaker 1: business of a very important Senate subcommittee, the one that
Speaker 1: decides which countries get American aid dollars. The second I
Speaker 1: walk into his office, he nods to a poster sized
Speaker 1: picture of Berta's smiling face. It's hard to miss. The
Speaker 1: poster sits in the window directly behind his desk. It's
Speaker 1: been here since almost the day that Berta Custus was killed.
Speaker 1: Riser was among those on Capitol Hill who had met
Speaker 1: Berta after she'd won the Goldman Prize. In having known her,
Speaker 1: even the slight amount that I did, made it all
Speaker 1: the more sort of personal and just a feeling that
Speaker 1: this was something that we absolutely had to respond to.
Speaker 1: Members of the Cassarus family visited Riser and others on
Speaker 1: Capitol Hill. They spoke about the threats Barta had received
Speaker 1: and the false leads that were pursued in the early
Speaker 1: days of the murder probe. What we saw was first
Speaker 1: of all predictable, an attempt to cover up the crime.
Speaker 1: It's how the police behave in Honduras and countries like
Speaker 1: that all the time, to obscure what happened, or to
Speaker 1: frame somebody else, or to pretend to be investigating when
Speaker 1: really nothing is happening. Um and we saw all of
Speaker 1: that here. Rice Or knew of a very specific way
Speaker 1: to send a message to the Honduran authorities. He could
Speaker 1: withhold the money his subcommittee controlled if the Honduran security
Speaker 1: state couldn't protect Berta and solve a crime like this,
Speaker 1: did it really deserve tens of millions of dollars in
Speaker 1: US financial support? And I think people up here saw
Speaker 1: this as emblematic of a much larger problem and something
Speaker 1: that could not be allowed to just be swept under
Speaker 1: the rug the way these cases so often are. As
Speaker 1: a result, Senator lah He made clear that he was
Speaker 1: not going to allow US aid to Honduras, to the
Speaker 1: government of Honduras, particularly to the police and the armed forces,
Speaker 1: to continue, at least not the aid which this subcommittee
Speaker 1: provides until we saw a satisfactory resolution of this case.
Speaker 1: The U s Embassy in Honduras also offered to assist
Speaker 1: local police. Honduras is a sovereign country in the US
Speaker 1: can just take over an investigation, but Ambassador Neelan told
Speaker 1: Berta's family that the embassy would try to help out
Speaker 1: around the margins. The embassy assigned a Justice Department officer
Speaker 1: to help the Hondurans with technical aspects of the investigation,
Speaker 1: such as telephone data retrieval. It also offered the use
Speaker 1: of the FBI crime Lab for analysis of evidence. Barta's
Speaker 1: older brother says the presence of a US Justice official
Speaker 1: comforted him. He liked the idea that there might be
Speaker 1: someone keeping an eye on the Honduran police as the
Speaker 1: investigation progressed. Today, he believes that helped lead to the
Speaker 1: first arrests in the case, the ones we detailed in
Speaker 1: episode three. But others in the family were wary of
Speaker 1: US involvement, and they remain so to this day. They
Speaker 1: don't necessarily see the US embassy and the organizations that
Speaker 1: work closely with its allies. Barretta's daughter, er Tita Isabelle,
Speaker 1: said as much during a rally on the streets of
Speaker 1: New York weeks after the murder. Little is he on
Speaker 1: with you? She repeated her calls for a new independent
Speaker 1: homicide investigation. She said the state run investigation was fatally
Speaker 1: flawed and nothing, not even the assistance from the US,
Speaker 1: would fix that. As Bertita Isabelle addressed people in the
Speaker 1: streets of New York, her colleagues were delivering the same
Speaker 1: message inside Honduras. This is from a BBC report. The
Speaker 1: sun's beating down onto the tarmac here and a crowd
Speaker 1: of demonstrators, I'd say about two hundred people from Copeine,
Speaker 1: the organization that Berta cassid Is co founded, are assembled
Speaker 1: here in front of them a line of riot place.
Speaker 1: And what the people here are demanding is that there
Speaker 1: is an international commission of inquiry that will investigate the
Speaker 1: murder of Berta cassidy Is. They don't trust the hon
Speaker 1: Jurn authorities. The Cassara's family and the protesters wanted to
Speaker 1: Human Rights Commission within the United Nations to conduct a
Speaker 1: parallel investigation, one that ran alongside the Honduran governments. There
Speaker 1: was a precedent for this. Forty three students disappeared in
Speaker 1: Mexico and the Commission did set up its own inquiry,
Speaker 1: but this time the Honduran government was not interested in
Speaker 1: more help. They didn't want a third set of eyes
Speaker 1: looking into the case. The Hondurans said that they did
Speaker 1: not need the Inter American Commission support with the investigation
Speaker 1: because they had the FBI support. Roxanna Alfos is a
Speaker 1: professor at UC Berkeley's Law School and the co director
Speaker 1: of the International Human Rights Law Clinic. She says the
Speaker 1: Honduran government used the us IS limited involvement as a
Speaker 1: cover to try to derail a parallel investigation. The Cassarus
Speaker 1: family decided to take matters into their own hands. They
Speaker 1: tapped into a network of international human rights advocates and
Speaker 1: identified several experts with extensive legal and prosecutorial experience. The family,
Speaker 1: with help from several Honduran and international NGOs, convinced those
Speaker 1: experts to dig into the case. The family members decided
Speaker 1: to move forward, and so they chose a group of
Speaker 1: five legal experts to comprise a team to conduct an
Speaker 1: independent and partial investigation, and I was asked to be
Speaker 1: a member of that team. The group was called guy PAY.
Speaker 1: It's an acronym and translated from the Spanish, it stands
Speaker 1: for the International Advisory Group of Experts. Its members included
Speaker 1: attorneys who prosecuted high profile human rights cases around the world,
Speaker 1: cases like the war crime tribunals in the former Yugoslavia
Speaker 1: and prosecutions of military and paramilitary abuse in Colombia. Roxanna
Speaker 1: herself had spent two decades litigating cases, mostly in Latin America.
Speaker 1: These included extra judicial killings and forced disappearances. At first,
Speaker 1: she was reluctant to get involved in this one. She
Speaker 1: was raising two very young kids in California at the time,
Speaker 1: heading to Honduras to investigate murder and corruption seemed like
Speaker 1: a recipe for trouble. She declined, but then reconsidered. She
Speaker 1: says she felt an obligation to help, so in October
Speaker 1: she and the rest of the group got to work.
Speaker 1: So the first thing that we did was, you know,
Speaker 1: begin to compile background information. They tried to put the
Speaker 1: crime in the larger context of violence against activists in Honduras,
Speaker 1: and specifically against activists aligned with Berta's organization Copeine. They
Speaker 1: focused only on a three year period from and they
Speaker 1: began compiling a list of instances where Dessa the hydro
Speaker 1: Electric company had threatened, harassed, or violated the rights of
Speaker 1: members of Copine under checkpoints their race. There was just
Speaker 1: three years. We documented a hundred and thirty five incidents
Speaker 1: of violence. So that was the first step understand the context.
Speaker 1: The next step was to look at them criminal investigative file.
Speaker 1: That meant trying to review the evidence that the Honduran
Speaker 1: investigators had so far collected. Roxanna's team asked to see
Speaker 1: all of the tens of thousands of pages of the file.
Speaker 1: The Honduran prosecutors resisted at first, but soon they handed
Speaker 1: over about three thousand pages of it Roxanna and the
Speaker 1: team studied the ballistics reports, the autopsy, and the statements
Speaker 1: that the Honduran investigators had collected. The interviewed witnesses, people
Speaker 1: who knew something about the context, knew something about the
Speaker 1: day of for the threats um and then in July
Speaker 1: of two thousand seventeen, after months and months of requests,
Speaker 1: we got access to about fifty five gigs of telephone data.
Speaker 1: This was mostly data that had been collected during the
Speaker 1: raids we detailed in the last episode on May two,
Speaker 1: when police confiscated the phones of four suspects and searched
Speaker 1: Dessa's offices. Those fifty five gigs of data that the
Speaker 1: investigators got amounted to about forty thousand pay ages. Most
Speaker 1: of that was in the form of What's app text messages.
Speaker 1: These texts would become the center of the case, guilt
Speaker 1: or innocence, imprisonment or freedom. Everything seemed to rest heavily
Speaker 1: on those messages, and even now, four years after the murder,
Speaker 1: it still does. Some of those what's app texts were
Speaker 1: sent as part of a group chat. The group, according
Speaker 1: to its what's App heading, was created to discuss matters
Speaker 1: of security at the Ahwa Zarka site. It included members
Speaker 1: of dessa's security team in Rio Blanco, as well as
Speaker 1: some of dessa's high level executives and board members. These
Speaker 1: individuals were so sure of impunity that they texted back
Speaker 1: and forth and and pretty openly regarding their plans to
Speaker 1: neutralize the opposition, to eliminate the opposition to the Damn project.
Speaker 1: With thousands of pages of messages to wade through, there
Speaker 1: were a few obvious time stamps to check out first.
Speaker 1: For example, the morning after Berta was killed, there was
Speaker 1: quite a bit of chatter. Then The members of the
Speaker 1: group seemed to be following the initial phases of the
Speaker 1: investigation closely to Roxanna's team. It seemed like DESSA was
Speaker 1: getting frequent updates from inside the crime scene. The message
Speaker 1: string from the day after the murder includes a text
Speaker 1: from ADESSA project manager who suggested he'd been in touch
Speaker 1: with a local police chief. He wrote, I've solicited the
Speaker 1: help of the commission her. He confirms his support. He'll
Speaker 1: inform me of details of the murder. He also recommended
Speaker 1: we issue a press release to create some distance from
Speaker 1: these events. Then, just hours after Berts's body was found
Speaker 1: Sergio Rodriguez, Dessa's head of environmental standards and community Relations,
Speaker 1: received a police report on his phone. The report included
Speaker 1: descriptions of Berta's wounds and the bloodstains in the bedrooms
Speaker 1: and in the hallway of her house. It also identified
Speaker 1: two suspects, the ones that we talked about in episode one.
Speaker 1: They were Berta's ex boyfriend, Oreleano Molina or Alto, and
Speaker 1: also Gustavo Castro, the Mexican activist who had also been
Speaker 1: wounded in the attack. Sergio forwarded the report to the
Speaker 1: others on the Dessa group chat Roxanna says telephone data
Speaker 1: showed that the report came directly from police in Santa Barbara,
Speaker 1: the province where the Ahwazarka Dam site was located. That
Speaker 1: that information is highly confidential. There is no reason or
Speaker 1: justification that law enforcement should share their preliminary conclusions regarding
Speaker 1: a a murder with a company, But it was completely
Speaker 1: consistent with the relationship that the company had established with
Speaker 1: the police. The company treated the police like their private army.
Speaker 1: But the messages didn't just show a connection to local
Speaker 1: law enforcement. They also revealed that Dessa executives were in
Speaker 1: contact with the Minister of Security himself. Adasay executive reported
Speaker 1: on the group chat that the Minister had assured the
Speaker 1: company that the murder was being treated as a Leo
Speaker 1: de filed us, or loosely translated, a skirt problem, a
Speaker 1: simple crime of passion, nothing more. Roxanna's team would trace
Speaker 1: the WhatsApp messages back in time for years. Those text
Speaker 1: messages allowed them to sketch a detailed narrative, the story
Speaker 1: of what they describe as a long running and sinister
Speaker 1: corporate conspiracy. You have a treasure trove of evidence in
Speaker 1: this case because the perpetrators were absolutely sure they would
Speaker 1: never be held to account, not just for the murder,
Speaker 1: but for all the other crimes that were being committed.
Speaker 1: In November, more than a year and a half after
Speaker 1: the murder, Roxanna's team released the results of its investigation.
Speaker 1: The group handed its findings over to prosecutors. One of
Speaker 1: the key figures in the plot they outlined was Dootless Bustillo.
Speaker 1: He was one of the four men arrested in May,
Speaker 1: two months after Berta's murder. He was a former lieutenant
Speaker 1: in the Honduran Army, and he'd also spent a couple
Speaker 1: of years as the head of security for Dessa in
Speaker 1: Rio Blanco, Berta had known Bustillo well. Even though they
Speaker 1: were on opposite sides of the protests, they sometimes exchanged messages.
Speaker 1: Before she died, beart To complained that the nature of
Speaker 1: his messages to her had changed from business like exchanges
Speaker 1: to aggressive pestering that amounted to sexual harassment. In an
Speaker 1: interview with a Swedish journalists, she described it as abuse
Speaker 1: and called Bustillo out by Namestio. Even after that public complaint,
Speaker 1: Bustillo continued to send bear to message. Is. In one exchange,
Speaker 1: he said, along a couple of pictures he'd found of
Speaker 1: her online, who is this? Bear To respond, ha ha ha,
Speaker 1: Like you don't know, he replies. A few more lines
Speaker 1: are exchanged. He tells her she's very beautiful and that
Speaker 1: many men must find her attractive. He writes, I like simple,
Speaker 1: charismatic slender women who are strong and stand up for themselves.
Speaker 1: He says he'd love to spend some time with her.
Speaker 1: He sends her a wink emoji. Take care, beautiful lady,
Speaker 1: he writes. Berta doesn't respond to that, but the next
Speaker 1: day bust is back at it. Hello, good morning, and
Speaker 1: Bone appetite since it's lunchtime. He sends a flower emoji again.
Speaker 1: Berta doesn't respond. Another day passes another Hello, Barta, Isabelle,
Speaker 1: he says. Barta finally writes back, it seems you've sold
Speaker 1: your conscience and ideals and you've turned your back on
Speaker 1: the people of Latagra. Latagra that's the name of the
Speaker 1: cluster of homes in Rio Blanco where the opposition to
Speaker 1: Dessa is centered. Bear to ask Bustillo, are you not
Speaker 1: tired of being the frontman for Dessa. Boustillo had stopped
Speaker 1: formally working for Dessa a few months before, but in
Speaker 1: the context of these and other messages, it's clear he's
Speaker 1: still involved in the company's activities. Bustillo replies to Berta,
Speaker 1: I am not a frontman for Dessa, nor do I
Speaker 1: even remember that company. He tells Berta she should encourage
Speaker 1: her people to stop being so ungrateful. Beart To replies
Speaker 1: that she's pretty sure. Boustillo remembers Dessa because he keeps
Speaker 1: repeating the company line. It's sad, she said, to see
Speaker 1: the role that you've been relegated to. Bustio ends the
Speaker 1: exchange with a long string of ha has on November,
Speaker 1: about three and a half months before Barton's murder, Bustio
Speaker 1: sent a message to Adessa Executive. Roxanna's team did not
Speaker 1: identify him in its report because he hadn't been indicted.
Speaker 1: They called him Directivo Trace or Executive number three. Bustillo
Speaker 1: wrote to Executive number three, telling him complete the fifty percent.
Speaker 1: Prosecutors believed this was a request for payment and that
Speaker 1: Bustillo was requesting half of what was owed to him.
Speaker 1: Executive Number three responded with a time six pm. He
Speaker 1: followed that with another message, Let's meet in thirty at
Speaker 1: Chili's in Los Proceres Mall. Bustillo seemed confused about exactly
Speaker 1: when they should meet six fifteen or in thirty minutes.
Speaker 1: These were two different times when he expressed confusion. The
Speaker 1: executive row back, Bustilla, get it together. This isn't a party.
Speaker 1: Have everything prepared because it could happen at any time
Speaker 1: in the course of the day. Roxanna's team believed that
Speaker 1: this time period November was when the murder for Higher
Speaker 1: scheme was first plauded. This is based on messages and
Speaker 1: phone calls exchanged between Bustillo the Dessay executives. The accused
Speaker 1: gunman and Mariano Diaz. Diaz is the military guy whose
Speaker 1: phone was tapped as part of another investigation into a
Speaker 1: drug and kidnapping ring. One of the people Diaz had
Speaker 1: been in regular contact with was Henry Hernandez. He was
Speaker 1: one of the accused hitmen. Their direct messages to each
Speaker 1: other seemed to reference the exchange of a gun and
Speaker 1: payments and additional men who could be hired to carry
Speaker 1: out quote a job from the guy pay Investigators reading
Speaker 1: of the messages, it seemed that this job they were
Speaker 1: talking about was supposed to happen in February, about one
Speaker 1: month before Berta was actually murdered. So what we think
Speaker 1: happened in early February was there is an effort to
Speaker 1: kill that down, a failed effort. The plan, she says,
Speaker 1: was for Henry Hernandez to travel to La Esperanza. There,
Speaker 1: Mariano Diaz was supposed to meet him and give him
Speaker 1: a gun. The Guide A members believed the killing was
Speaker 1: planned for February five, but Berta's daughters were at the house.
Speaker 1: Henry makes it to Leesperanza. He sees that bert isn't
Speaker 1: ever loom and he says, I can't do this. That
Speaker 1: next morning, on February six, Douglas Bustillo send a message
Speaker 1: to Executive Number three. He wrote, mission aborted. Yesterday it
Speaker 1: wasn't possible. I will wait for your response. I no
Speaker 1: longer have the logistics in place. I am at zero. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he says mission mission aborted for lack of resources. Executive
Speaker 1: Number three responded to Boustillo with this remember the scene
Speaker 1: um and then says I think he says something like
Speaker 1: receivers or like I got the message. What does it
Speaker 1: remember the scene? It's open for interpretation. I think if
Speaker 1: you look at that text in the context of the
Speaker 1: plan and means clean up after yourself, at least that's
Speaker 1: the way I would interpret it. After Bustillo was arrested,
Speaker 1: investigators found photos of Berta's house in his phone and
Speaker 1: the day before the actual murder. The chats suggest he
Speaker 1: planned to meet with Executive Number three hours before the murder.
Speaker 1: The phones that investigators believe were used by the accused
Speaker 1: gunmen show them traveling to Laesperanza around the same time
Speaker 1: Douglas Bustillo was searching for pictures of Berta on his phone,
Speaker 1: and about an hour before Berta Cassarus was killed Bustillo
Speaker 1: was in contact with the accused gunmen. These phone records
Speaker 1: and What'sapp messages later would be used against those who
Speaker 1: had been arrested up to this point, Sergio Rodriguez, Douglas Bustillo,
Speaker 1: Mariano Diaz, and the accused gunman. In June, judge ordered
Speaker 1: that those suspects would go to trial. A few months later,
Speaker 1: GUP published its report, revealing many of these phone intercepts
Speaker 1: for the first time, But the report did not publicly
Speaker 1: reveal one piece of information that would soon become critically important.
Speaker 1: Who was Executive number three? Way back in when violence
Speaker 1: was first breaking out in Rio Blanco. Phone records suggests
Speaker 1: that Executive Number three was hard at work behind the scenes.
Speaker 1: Remember what happened In July A soldier working for Dessa's
Speaker 1: security team shot and killed a coping protester. Then the
Speaker 1: same day, young Christian Madrid, whose family supported the dam
Speaker 1: was shot and killed in the family cow pasture. Violence
Speaker 1: like that was a potential public relations disaster for Dessa.
Speaker 1: That same day, the executive sent What's App text message
Speaker 1: to his colleagues. It said, pay the reporter from h
Speaker 1: H H H is the name of the top cable
Speaker 1: news channel and Honduras. He suggested a payment of two
Speaker 1: thousand olympidas or about eighty dollars. The Guide Bay investigators
Speaker 1: knew the identity of Executive Number three, but they didn't
Speaker 1: reveal his name and their report. They knew that before
Speaker 1: he joined Dessa, he'd been a high level military intelligence officer,
Speaker 1: and through the phone records they could see that he
Speaker 1: took an interest in Berta. Sometimes he reached out to
Speaker 1: her personally, so he's using her as a human source
Speaker 1: of intelligence. So he's taking the information she was revealing
Speaker 1: about her movements directly or and directly about her movements,
Speaker 1: her concerns, and he was feeding that information back to
Speaker 1: his company, and then they were acting on that information.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's a classic intelligence cycle. Barrett's family also
Speaker 1: knew exactly who Executive number three was. They've been hearing
Speaker 1: his name from Bear to herself for years, and within
Speaker 1: a few months all of Honduras would know his name.
Speaker 1: It's March two, the two year anniversary of Bart's killing.
Speaker 1: A white Toyota pickup truck pulls up in front of
Speaker 1: a federal building in the city of San Pedro de
Speaker 1: su La. Federal agents in black face masks opened the
Speaker 1: back door of the truck. They lead a man in
Speaker 1: handcuffs past the cameras and microphones of reporters. Police in
Speaker 1: Honduras have arrested David kept Dios. He is an executive
Speaker 1: of DASA. Casto is being accused of being the mastermind
Speaker 1: behind the assassination of environmental activists but Cassera. Most of
Speaker 1: the news reports include very few details about David Castillo's life,
Speaker 1: but they hint an interesting past. He grew up in Honduras,
Speaker 1: but was educated in the United States at the Military
Speaker 1: Academy at West Point. He'd lived in the Washington, d c.
Speaker 1: Area for a couple of years before returning to work
Speaker 1: for the Honduran Armed Forces in intelligence and counter intelligence,
Speaker 1: and in before he turned thirty years old, Castillo was
Speaker 1: named executive president of Dessa, where he was in charge
Speaker 1: of developing the Agua Zarca Dam. On the day of
Speaker 1: his arrest, Berta's daughter, Bertita Isabelle, tells CNN that the
Speaker 1: family is relieved than an accused intellectual author behind her
Speaker 1: mother's murder has finally been identified and arrested. Today we
Speaker 1: can begin to believe that we're starting to break the
Speaker 1: bonds of impunity that we're behind the murder of my
Speaker 1: mother Berta cases. David Castillo is a person that Copin
Speaker 1: and the family members have denounced from the beginning. Dessa
Speaker 1: issued a statement again denying involvement in Berta's murder and
Speaker 1: defending Castillo's innocence, but Castillo himself has never told his
Speaker 1: full story publicly. He spent the last two years in
Speaker 1: prison awaiting trial. During that time, he's remained something of
Speaker 1: a mystery, the accused mastermind of a brazen murder, waiting
Speaker 1: to make his case. I did not order this, I
Speaker 1: did not participate it in the murder of Bertas there
Speaker 1: is no evidence whatsoever that could link me to killing Alberta.
Speaker 1: On the next episode of Blood River, we may be
Speaker 1: accused mastermind. Blood River is written and reported by me
Speaker 1: Monte reel sofra Forehas is our senior producer. My Aquava
Speaker 1: is our associate producer. Our theme was composed and performed
Speaker 1: by Senior Rubinos Special thanks to Carlos Rodriguez. Francesco Levi
Speaker 1: is the head of the Berg Podcasts. Be sure to
Speaker 1: subscribe if you haven't already, and if you like our show,
Speaker 1: please leave us a review. Thanks for listening,