Speaker 1: High listeners. A quick note before we start. A previous
Speaker 1: version of this episode implied that two people, Sergio Rodriguez
Speaker 1: and Mariano Diaz, had had direct telephone contact with one another.
Speaker 1: That section has been updated for clarity. Thanks, and here's
Speaker 1: episode three. Felix Molina is a former radio journalist who
Speaker 1: lives in Montreal, Canada, but his home is Honduras, where
Speaker 1: his family is, his friends, the colleagues he worked alongside
Speaker 1: for decades. But that's the country he can't return to.
Speaker 1: He says, it just isn't safe for him. You you
Speaker 1: always think about going back. It's just that living in
Speaker 1: exile isn't the solution. Exile is just a way to
Speaker 1: prolong my life. Alex Celio is the reason why Felix
Speaker 1: had to leave Honduras can't be separated from the story
Speaker 1: of Berta Cassarus's murder. The two of them met in
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties. Felix was working for a radio station
Speaker 1: where he covered human rights and indigenous issues. Naturally, his
Speaker 1: path crossed with Bertasana on a flint. She seemed like
Speaker 1: an important source for a subject that I was passionate
Speaker 1: about the visibility of those communities that were culturally distinct
Speaker 1: and Nonduras the ones that for years we've been taught
Speaker 1: about or wrongly taught about in school or Brindio. Over
Speaker 1: the next two decades, Felix went on to host a
Speaker 1: variety of radio programs in Honduras, and he often reached
Speaker 1: out to Berta. She became something more than a source.
Speaker 1: She was also a good friend, one he respected dania characteristic.
Speaker 1: She had this characteristic where she'd laugh almost always, and
Speaker 1: I'd even say that included when she was going after people,
Speaker 1: giving them grief and reprimanding them. Even then she'd be
Speaker 1: smiling fambience. But the very last time Felix Sawberta, that
Speaker 1: playful quality had been replaced by something heavier. He spotted
Speaker 1: her unexpectedly at an airport in El Salvador. Both of
Speaker 1: them were catching connecting flights. He guesses it was about
Speaker 1: a week before her murder. Felix could tell Berta was
Speaker 1: worried about something. In fact, she straight up told him so.
Speaker 1: Never before had she been so convinced she'd be assassinated
Speaker 1: as she was in that conversation. Never Over the years,
Speaker 1: Felix had talked to Berta many times about the dangers
Speaker 1: activists faced in Honduras, but not with this sense of urgency.
Speaker 1: She seemed convinced something bad was going to happen, and
Speaker 1: soon she was certain of it. She said, they're gonna
Speaker 1: kill me, Felix. They're gonna kill me, Libant Felix. When
Speaker 1: Berta said they were going to kill her, Felix says
Speaker 1: she was talking about the people working for Dessa, the
Speaker 1: company overseeing the hydro electric projects she'd been protesting. About
Speaker 1: a week after that encounter at the airport, Berta was dead,
Speaker 1: and Felix started digging into Dessa, trying to find out
Speaker 1: all he could about it. He worked alongside an international
Speaker 1: human rights organization. He won't reveal the group's name. It
Speaker 1: says that at a high aired private investigators to poke
Speaker 1: around the company. Joe Dania Buenola I had a good
Speaker 1: relationship with this organization for the past fifteen years. They
Speaker 1: trusted my work, in my journalistic credibility, and they shared
Speaker 1: with me the preliminary findings of their investigation. Those preliminary
Speaker 1: findings included the articles of incorporation for the company. This
Speaker 1: a a lacta constitute. It was now Monday May two,
Speaker 1: exactly two months after Barta's murder, and for the remainder
Speaker 1: of this episode, we're going to stay here. On this day,
Speaker 1: it was Labor Day for much of Latin America, a
Speaker 1: day off, but not for Felix. If they around Dia normal,
Speaker 1: this was normal work day for me, while everyone else
Speaker 1: was probably resting, probably Misconsando. He got out of bed
Speaker 1: that morning expecting a slow, easy day. Neither he nor
Speaker 1: the rest of Honduras could have realized how much would
Speaker 1: change over the course of that day. The lid would
Speaker 1: be ripped off Barta's investigation, new details and new evidence
Speaker 1: would be revealed, and the lives of several people Felix
Speaker 1: included would permanently veer into new directions. I'm monterereel for
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Green and the Story of may Sewo is this
Speaker 1: episode of Blood Ripping. M Felix hosted a radio show
Speaker 1: into Goosagalpa, the Honduran capital. As it happened, his guest
Speaker 1: on may Sewod was going to be Berte Cassarus's oldest daughter, Olivia.
Speaker 1: Not long after Felix got out of bed, he opened
Speaker 1: his computer. A few days before, that nonprofit group he'd
Speaker 1: been working with had provided him a file information they
Speaker 1: dug up about Dessa, the hydro electric company in Honduras.
Speaker 1: It's not always easy to figure out who really runs
Speaker 1: a company or whose money is behind it. Records can
Speaker 1: be difficult to access, and even when they are available,
Speaker 1: they're often full of holes. But this document listed names
Speaker 1: of some of Dessa's executives and shareholders. Many of those
Speaker 1: names hadn't been revealed to the public yet. As soon
Speaker 1: as he saw it, Felix had wanted to publish it,
Speaker 1: to send it out to the world, but a mentor
Speaker 1: of his warned there might be risks Pucia. She advised
Speaker 1: me to use caution. She said it was dangerous, and
Speaker 1: in fact I understood that comeboy effectivement. But on that
Speaker 1: Monday morning, Felix opened his Facebook page and took the leap.
Speaker 1: He posted the document. Then he got ready for work,
Speaker 1: stepped outside and flagged a taxi to go to the
Speaker 1: radio studio. Traffic was lighter than usual because of the holiday,
Speaker 1: but one road was still pretty busy, the one that
Speaker 1: runs right in front of the presidential Palace and passed
Speaker 1: some of the city's swankiest hotels. We were waiting at
Speaker 1: the stoplight for the light to change and through this
Speaker 1: I was distracted because it was a relaxed day and
Speaker 1: always in this intersection there's constantly people around, street vendors,
Speaker 1: people asking for money, jugglers, street artists. It's a stufflight
Speaker 1: that's always full of street performers. It was a spectacle
Speaker 1: that was too common for me to be concerned about them.
Speaker 1: But the taxi driver was keeping an eye on the scene,
Speaker 1: and that's when he noticed a young woman with blonde
Speaker 1: hair coming up behind the car. She was holding a gun.
Speaker 1: But before the driver could tell Felix about her and
Speaker 1: another man came from another direction towards the taxi and
Speaker 1: he tried to unexpectedly and forcibly grab my arm. I
Speaker 1: reacted by throwing myself all the way to the other
Speaker 1: side of the back seat of the taxi. In pre taxi,
Speaker 1: the driver slammed his foot on the gas to escape.
Speaker 1: Felix was still holding his cell phone as the taxi
Speaker 1: lurched forward, tires squealing, and as a moment conductors a salto.
Speaker 1: At that moment, the taxi driver had no doubt that
Speaker 1: this was an assault, and he fled the scene, as
Speaker 1: they say, and going the wrong way to get us
Speaker 1: to safety. Pul delamos and contra villa robberies are pretty
Speaker 1: common in Honduras. Felix figured the couple probably had just
Speaker 1: wanted to steal his cell phone. He considered himself lucky
Speaker 1: to have held onto it and to his life when
Speaker 1: he finally made it into the studio. Felix described the
Speaker 1: attempted robbery in a Facebook post. He ended it by typing,
Speaker 1: what a country we live in? Pensicki it Alava. I
Speaker 1: thought it was something that happened to thousands of people
Speaker 1: in Honduras. They rubbed phones and if people resist, they
Speaker 1: kill them. Maybe it was just a routine, though terrifying
Speaker 1: example of petty street crime. Or was there more to
Speaker 1: it than that? For Felix, that question would grow bigger
Speaker 1: and scarier as the day pushed on. The Morning of
Speaker 1: May two also got off to a rocky start for
Speaker 1: Sergio Rodriguez. Remember Sergio. He was Dessa's point man for
Speaker 1: the ahwa's Arca Damn and Rio Blanco, where Berta had
Speaker 1: rallied protesters against the project. Sergio had started off as
Speaker 1: the man in charge of environmental standards. Later his duties
Speaker 1: expanded to include community relations. After Berta was killed Some
Speaker 1: of her colleagues had told investigators that Sergio had threatened her,
Speaker 1: and so a couple of weeks after the murder, the
Speaker 1: investigators called him in to ask him about it. He
Speaker 1: denied the threats. After that questioning, they also made Sergio
Speaker 1: list his address into Goosey Galpa in case they needed
Speaker 1: to reach him. Sergio had an apartment in the capital,
Speaker 1: but that not the address he listed. Instead, he told
Speaker 1: them the address of his mother's house. He says he
Speaker 1: wasn't trying to deceive them, and he didn't really think
Speaker 1: anything about it until that morning on May two, the
Speaker 1: same morning when Felix Molina had experienced that strange encounter
Speaker 1: in the taxicab. That morning, Sergio's phone woke him up
Speaker 1: at about five thirty. It was his attorney calling. He
Speaker 1: told Sergio the police had a warrant to search what
Speaker 1: they thought was his house. So Sergio got out of bed,
Speaker 1: put on a yellow Polo shirt and a pair of khakis,
Speaker 1: and went to his mom's. When I got there, I
Speaker 1: saw all the police cars and military vehicles, people wearing
Speaker 1: balaclavas from the Federal Agency of Investigation and the prosecutors.
Speaker 1: I was there before or six in the morning at
Speaker 1: my mom's and they told me I was being arrested
Speaker 1: for the death of Betts. As they read him his rights,
Speaker 1: Sergio watched them search every corner of the house. They
Speaker 1: searched one bedroom at a time, going through the closets,
Speaker 1: the bathrooms. Officers were noting the colors of the closet
Speaker 1: doors and the bedspreads. His mother struggled to sort through
Speaker 1: the confusion in lyme pres Obviously, I was concerned about
Speaker 1: the impression this had on my mom. My mom is
Speaker 1: an eighty four year old woman. I was worried about
Speaker 1: her health, so I asked them, please, please, could you
Speaker 1: avoid exposing me to the media? VANDAM released. The investigators
Speaker 1: had other priorities they were hunting for evidence. The only
Speaker 1: item of note they collected from this raid was Sergio's
Speaker 1: cell phone, a gold Samsung Galaxy Edge with a black case.
Speaker 1: But this wasn't the only place being searched that morning.
Speaker 1: At the exact same time, ten separate teams of investigators
Speaker 1: and military police were launching simultaneous raids. While Sergio watched
Speaker 1: them pick apart his mother's place, another team was rifling
Speaker 1: through the Dessa offices inside it to goose Galpa high rise,
Speaker 1: and other teams were raiding the houses of five other men.
Speaker 1: Three of those men would be arrested that same morning,
Speaker 1: along with Sergio. By the time of police escorted Sergio
Speaker 1: out of his mother's house, dozens of reporters were outside.
Speaker 1: Their cameras were ready as he was escorted past them.
Speaker 1: The police draped a fuzzy yellow blanket over Sergio's head
Speaker 1: and led him into the back seat of an unmarked car.
Speaker 1: Sergio's request to the police to keep things quiet apparently
Speaker 1: had backfired. Thea Luno from Mikasa. The only place the
Speaker 1: media showed up was my house, Sergio, and the news
Speaker 1: of the arrests flooded the airwaves in Honduras that morning.
Speaker 1: Being practical, military spokesman listed the names of Sergio and
Speaker 1: the three others who've been arrested that morning. The first
Speaker 1: was a former Honduran military officer who previously had been
Speaker 1: in charge of secure Purity Fordessa, near the Gualukakee River.
Speaker 1: The second was a veteran of the Hondurans Special Forces,
Speaker 1: an army major who worked in military intelligence. The third
Speaker 1: was a year old one of at least three suspected cicadios,
Speaker 1: or hitman hired to kill albert To the police hauled
Speaker 1: all four men to a federal building into Gooseagalpa. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: other officers were cataloging the evidence collected during the raids.
Speaker 1: They had cell phones, tablets, and hard drives. Agents turned
Speaker 1: the home of the accused hitman inside out, and then
Speaker 1: they searched the home next door, where his twin brother lived.
Speaker 1: They stripped the sheets from the beds and lifted the mattresses.
Speaker 1: Underneath one mattress they found something interesting, a gun with
Speaker 1: a white plated handle. It was a Smith and Wesson
Speaker 1: thirty eight special, the same kind of gun that had
Speaker 1: killed Berta. Police called it Operation Jaguar. For weeks, the
Speaker 1: investigators had been planning this morning of raids in the
Speaker 1: two months after the murder. The Cassarra's family and really
Speaker 1: everyone in Honduras saw the investigation as a series of missteps.
Speaker 1: Those missteps were real, and investigators wasted weeks following too
Speaker 1: many false leads. They'd seemed too suspicious of Berta's friends,
Speaker 1: her colleagues, and especially of Gustavo Castro. Suberta's family and colleagues.
Speaker 1: It seemed in those early days that no one was
Speaker 1: looking at Dessa the hydro Electric Company. But now, exactly
Speaker 1: two months after the murder, it was clear that investigators
Speaker 1: had in fact shifted their focus away from Barta's close friends.
Speaker 1: Several disconnected clues had come together, and police believed they
Speaker 1: pointed to Dessa. A couple of days after the murder,
Speaker 1: police had gotten their hands on a thumb drive, the
Speaker 1: kind you pop into a USB port on a computer.
Speaker 1: This drive actually had been plugged into a security camera.
Speaker 1: That camera had captured grainy images of the road leading
Speaker 1: into Bartas subdivision. Investigators scanned the files on the thumb
Speaker 1: drive and found the footage from the night Rita was killed.
Speaker 1: On that video, at PM, you see headlights from a
Speaker 1: vehicle nearing the subdivision. The vehicle stops and three p
Speaker 1: bolt visible only as silhouettes run through the camera frame.
Speaker 1: You can't make out any faces. This was one of
Speaker 1: the first pieces of evidence that gave investigators an idea
Speaker 1: of what they now think really happened on the night
Speaker 1: of Berta's murder. It was just the start. Days after
Speaker 1: the murder, police pulled data from the cellular phone towers
Speaker 1: closest to Berta's house, but it took them about five
Speaker 1: weeks to analyze it. Aside from the other residents of
Speaker 1: the subdivision, five cell phones had been active near Berta's
Speaker 1: house surround the time of the murder. The police believed
Speaker 1: that three of those phones belonged to the hitman, including
Speaker 1: one who had been arrested on May two at the
Speaker 1: same time as Sergio Rodriguez. Sarah Geo's phone could not
Speaker 1: be traced to the subdivision that night, but that didn't
Speaker 1: mean he was cleared. There was still more evidence to collect.
Speaker 1: Bread crumbs of The police were following clues that seemed
Speaker 1: to connect Dessa to the others who had been at
Speaker 1: the scene of the crime. One of the other three
Speaker 1: men arrested in the early morning raids of May two
Speaker 1: was named Mariano Diaz. He was the army major, the
Speaker 1: guy who worked in military intelligence. But months before Berta's
Speaker 1: murder on during investigators had started keeping an eye on him.
Speaker 1: This had nothing to do with Berta, at least not
Speaker 1: at first. They thought Diaz might be linked to a
Speaker 1: drug trafficking and kidnapping ring. They began tracing his phone calls.
Speaker 1: That phone tap turned out to be an incredible stroke
Speaker 1: of luck. After Berta was killed, investigators realized that Diaz
Speaker 1: had been in contact with people connected to Dessa. The
Speaker 1: more they looked at the phone records, the more connections emerged.
Speaker 1: Both Sergio and Diaz had also been talking to the
Speaker 1: former deaths As security chief, a man named Douglas Bustillo.
Speaker 1: He also would be arrested in the raids of may Sewo. Bustillo,
Speaker 1: in turn, had also been in regular contact with two
Speaker 1: suspected gunmen that police had tracked a Berta's house the
Speaker 1: night of the murder. All of this information justified the
Speaker 1: warrant the police used for the May second raids. Investigators
Speaker 1: laid out a hypothetical plot they believed Sergio and Diaz,
Speaker 1: the expert in military intelligence, were each involved in planning
Speaker 1: separate aspects of the murder. Sergio, they said, helped surveil
Speaker 1: Berto through a network of informants. Diaz had handled other details,
Speaker 1: like getting the guns in the vehicle used for the crime.
Speaker 1: Both of them separately were in contact with the former
Speaker 1: desks A security chief, Bustillo. The police alleged Boustillo helped
Speaker 1: put together the team of cicarios, low level criminals willing
Speaker 1: to kill for a payday. The company immediately denied all
Speaker 1: involvement in the murder and continues to dispute this interpretation
Speaker 1: of events, But for investigators it emerged as a working theory.
Speaker 1: They still needed proof, of course, and that was the
Speaker 1: mission of the raids that morning, to collect cell phones, computers,
Speaker 1: and tablets, anything that might be hiding more evidence. That
Speaker 1: thirty eight special they found under a mattress seemed to
Speaker 1: back up the investigator's theory, or at least it didn't
Speaker 1: contradict it. A ballistics expert would later examine the gun
Speaker 1: alongside some of this shell fragments collected in Bertha's house.
Speaker 1: They matched. That afternoon, Sergio and the other three men
Speaker 1: were locked behind bars. They held me in preventative detention
Speaker 1: and took me to a maximum security prison. It was
Speaker 1: a huge shock. He listened to other inmates screaming, and
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden, everything went dark. Ceph and Lewis.
Speaker 1: The electricity went out, and the first thing I thought
Speaker 1: was that they were going to kill me because of
Speaker 1: all the stories you hear about what it's like in
Speaker 1: the federal penitentiary and Penitentially, it's late afternoon out on
Speaker 1: May second, Felix Molina is inside the radio studio like
Speaker 1: everyone else. He's been following the news, catching reports about
Speaker 1: the raids and the arrests. Felix had planned to talk
Speaker 1: to Barratt's oldest daughter, Olivia on his show that afternoon,
Speaker 1: but the Cassara's family had been caught off guard by
Speaker 1: the events of that morning. They first learned of the
Speaker 1: raids when reporters started calling them. Olivia and her sisters
Speaker 1: said that because they didn't know anything about the arrests,
Speaker 1: they couldn't be sure that the true architects of the
Speaker 1: assassination had been captured. Olivia said that the four men
Speaker 1: arrested might have been fall guys. We don't trust the
Speaker 1: judicial system in this country. We don't believe in it.
Speaker 1: Felix also had his doubts, and after the attempted robbery
Speaker 1: that morning, he was thinking a lot about his own safety.
Speaker 1: I mentioned it on air, and there were people who
Speaker 1: heard this and who saw my Facebook post and who
Speaker 1: were worried for me. He call me post. Those calls
Speaker 1: from concerned listeners included one from members of a local
Speaker 1: human rights organization. They invited Felix to their office to
Speaker 1: tell them more about the assault. They knew Felix had
Speaker 1: publicly posted the names of Death's executives and investors earlier
Speaker 1: that morning, and they suspected the assault might be connected
Speaker 1: to that. So late that afternoon, Felix caught another cab
Speaker 1: to their office. He told them all the details of
Speaker 1: the hold up once he got there, about how the
Speaker 1: woman and the man had threatened him at gunpoint, how
Speaker 1: is quick thinking taxi driver had sped away just in time.
Speaker 1: By the time the meeting was over and it was
Speaker 1: time for him to go, Felix actually felt a little
Speaker 1: nervous those personas, And I asked two people who were
Speaker 1: there at the office at the time if they'd come
Speaker 1: with me outside to look for a taxi. And it
Speaker 1: took a long time to find a cab to take
Speaker 1: me back to my house. Finally I grabbed the street
Speaker 1: taxi like I always do, Como on tax On his
Speaker 1: way home, he realized he was seeing the same familiar buildings,
Speaker 1: the same familiar streets that he'd passed by earlier in
Speaker 1: the day on his way to work. This was the
Speaker 1: avenue where he had been assaulted that morning, near the
Speaker 1: Presidential Palace by the five star hotels. The taxi made
Speaker 1: its way to the very street light where Felix had
Speaker 1: narrowly escaped danger earlier that morning. He sat there in
Speaker 1: the taxi waiting for the light to change, just like before,
Speaker 1: but this time he was paying attention. His eyes scanned
Speaker 1: the street. He noticed movement around the car. It didn't
Speaker 1: feel right, yea mislus generals personas sin person, and that
Speaker 1: the same street light. This time it wasn't two people,
Speaker 1: but rather five people who surrounded the taxi while we
Speaker 1: waited for the light to change. They told me, this
Speaker 1: time you won't escape. He may staves. A man reached
Speaker 1: into the taxi and grabbed Felix with one hand. In
Speaker 1: his other hand, the man held a pistol He made
Speaker 1: the sparrow. He shot me point blank. La valla. The
Speaker 1: bullet that he shot at me went through both my legs.
Speaker 1: The assailants fled, and a group of bystanders rushed to
Speaker 1: Felix's taxi to see if they could help. I really
Speaker 1: could have bled to death in the taxi. I was scared, crying.
Speaker 1: I didn't know what to do. The people insisted taking
Speaker 1: me to the hospital because I couldn't move, I couldn't
Speaker 1: get up from the seat. I couldn't feel my legs.
Speaker 1: So finally I got to the public hospital, the teaching hospital,
Speaker 1: and just as I got to the entrance of the hospital,
Speaker 1: I lost consciousness. Who's hospital. Felix had spent that late
Speaker 1: morning devouring media reports about the arrests in Barton's murder case.
Speaker 1: Now as evening approached, he himself had become part of
Speaker 1: the news and Honduras, a prominent radio journalist has been
Speaker 1: shot four times but survived. Felix Molina was reportedly attacked
Speaker 1: twice in the same day Monday. He was shot twice
Speaker 1: in each leg, and a statement released by human rights
Speaker 1: group Molina said he believed he was directly targeted and
Speaker 1: vowed to continue practicing journalism without fear. He said, quote,
Speaker 1: I declare myself a survivor of the insecurity that the
Speaker 1: majority of the country faces. Molina shooting came on the
Speaker 1: eve of World Press Freedom Day. So Felix is in
Speaker 1: his hospital bit and he's replaying everything in his mind.
Speaker 1: The news that morning suggested that current and former military officials,
Speaker 1: including at least one in military intelligence, had been detained
Speaker 1: in Barton's murder, and Felix begins to think about the
Speaker 1: assault on him. It seems so organized, so pre planned,
Speaker 1: and he's growing convinced both of the assaults against him
Speaker 1: that day we're connected to Berta's murder the Swiss Siskyspitale.
Speaker 1: After the second attack, after I was in the hospital,
Speaker 1: I started to reflect on this, on the motus of
Speaker 1: arandi of criminal organizations in Honduras, it was all there
Speaker 1: in assassination of Bertha. You had military men who were
Speaker 1: experts and intelligence trained by the Special Forces, and then
Speaker 1: you had hired hitman without experience as a way to
Speaker 1: mislead investigations. So I started to reflect that what happened
Speaker 1: to me wasn't just an everyday crime, that it was
Speaker 1: a consequence of my coverage of the story of Verta Casis.
Speaker 1: His assailants were never caught, and he can't prove they
Speaker 1: were connected to the company or its shareholders, who completely
Speaker 1: deny all involvement. But Felix is convinced that the events
Speaker 1: of that day amounted to more than a chain of coincidences.
Speaker 1: And now now I can say without any doubt that
Speaker 1: I suffered the consequences of reporting on the work and
Speaker 1: on the assassination of Berta cas It is definitely covert.
Speaker 1: Ultravajo definite. It's nighttime now. On May two, the President
Speaker 1: of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, held a press conference a
Speaker 1: few hours earlier to celebrate the four arrests. Now, he's
Speaker 1: preparing for a trip the next morning. He needs to
Speaker 1: be in Washington, d C. That's where an energy summit
Speaker 1: is being held for leaders from the US, Mexico, and
Speaker 1: the Caribbean. Hernandez is scheduled to meet with some very
Speaker 1: high profile attendees at that conference. Vice President Joe Biden
Speaker 1: is one of them. Hernandez wants to assure him that
Speaker 1: renewable energy projects like hydro electric dams, our developments worth
Speaker 1: backing and integrated North America working to promote energy security
Speaker 1: beyond our borders can be a major asset for the
Speaker 1: entire hemisphere, and it is profoundly it's profoundly in the
Speaker 1: self interest of the United States to see the Caribbean
Speaker 1: country succeed. Secretary of State John Kerry has been optimistic
Speaker 1: about energy partnerships with Central American countries, especially those countries
Speaker 1: encouraging private sector involvement. Every one of US, I think,
Speaker 1: should take note of the that the Caribbean and Central
Speaker 1: American nations continue to pursue legal, regulatory and policy reforms.
Speaker 1: Are going to modernize and integrate their energy systems and
Speaker 1: make private sector clean energy more attractive in all of
Speaker 1: those places. Clean energy for Hernandez government, hydro electric projects
Speaker 1: like the Awazarka Dam. We're supposed to be the lynch
Speaker 1: pins in Honduras's economic renaissance. Fernandez himself, back when he
Speaker 1: was the head of the Honduran National Congress, had been
Speaker 1: the one to draft that strategy. But now Barta's killing
Speaker 1: was a black cloud over all of that. Hernandez like
Speaker 1: to say that Honduras was open for business, but who
Speaker 1: is going to pour money into a local industry that
Speaker 1: was marred by high profile scandal in violence. The timing
Speaker 1: of all of this didn't sit right with Barta's family.
Speaker 1: Was it all a big quin students? Exactly one day
Speaker 1: before the President of Honduras attends a summit to promote
Speaker 1: his renewable energy agenda, his government, to great fanfare, announces
Speaker 1: the arrests of Berta's killers. The Cassaris family issued a
Speaker 1: statement online and above it they posted photos the ones
Speaker 1: that the government released that day of agents standing next
Speaker 1: to a handcuffed Sergio Rodriguez. The statement began. The Honduran
Speaker 1: government made a surprise announcement on Monday morning, claiming to
Speaker 1: have caught the culprits who assassinated Berta. The most impressive
Speaker 1: detail is that they were able to snap many well
Speaker 1: posed photos of those culprits alongside federal agents. Despite this show,
Speaker 1: we continue our call for an independence international investigation. Even
Speaker 1: after the arrests, the family still didn't trust the Honduran investigators.
Speaker 1: That evening, Berta's daughter, Bertita Isabelle, was monitoring everything that
Speaker 1: was unfolding from thousands of miles away in Barcelona. She
Speaker 1: and others from Copaine had met with members of the
Speaker 1: European Parliament that week. They were lobbying for support. Bertita
Speaker 1: was calling for an international investigation into her mom's murder.
Speaker 1: The arrest that morning didn't satisfy her. On the night
Speaker 1: of May sewo Bertita isabel stood on a concert stage.
Speaker 1: She was next to Manu Chow, French and Spanish rock
Speaker 1: star who sold millions of albums in Europe and Latin America.
Speaker 1: Bar Tita Isabel is saying that her mother didn't die.
Speaker 1: She multiplied that's become a rallying cry that bears his
Speaker 1: family and their backers have spread around the world. The
Speaker 1: family is trying to assemble an international team of lawyers
Speaker 1: and investigators to re examine the evidence in the case,
Speaker 1: to look at it all with fresh eyes. Even after
Speaker 1: the arrests of that day, She and her family believe
Speaker 1: the Honduran investigation has been corrupted from the start. Sergio
Speaker 1: Rodriguez was a mid level employee of the hydro electric
Speaker 1: company bart His family suspects he was a puppet following
Speaker 1: a plan that had been masterminded by his superiors, perhaps
Speaker 1: some of the same people whose names had appeared on
Speaker 1: the document that Felix Molina had posted on his Facebook
Speaker 1: page earlier that morning. In the next couple of months,
Speaker 1: the family would continue to travel to the United States
Speaker 1: and around the world, and that international team of investigators
Speaker 1: would take shape. After the raids of the morning of
Speaker 1: May two, on during investigators as well as that international team,
Speaker 1: would have a lot more information to sift through. The
Speaker 1: phones that had been confiscated were full of information. The
Speaker 1: most interesting evidence by far was the WhatsApp text messages
Speaker 1: pulled from them, and so we got fifty five gigs
Speaker 1: of data they had extracted from their cell phones, which
Speaker 1: was a tiny fraction of the data, and it was
Speaker 1: about pages. Those messages will become the foundation of the case.
Speaker 1: A new, far more dramatic story will take shape, one
Speaker 1: that will lead investigators towards the person they'll describe as
Speaker 1: the mastermind behind the murder. That's next time on Blood River. M.
Speaker 1: Blood River is written and reported by me monte Reel
Speaker 1: top Forehes is our senior producer. My Aquava is our
Speaker 1: associate producer. A theme was composed and performed by Sena Rubinos.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Carlos Rodriguez. Francesca Levi is the head
Speaker 1: of Bloomberg Podcast. Be sure to subscribe if you haven't already,
Speaker 1: and if you like what you hear, please leave us
Speaker 1: a review. It helps others find out about the show.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to