When Death Flew Over the Ébano Lagoon

It was about 3:00 p.m. on the afternoon of September 16, 2021, when the Bell H1-1H, with the registration number 953, of the Honduran Air Force filled the sky over the community living on the shores of the Ébano Lagoon. 

A few seconds later, it started to rain lead.

The shots sank into the dry earth with power, like huge raindrops, throwing boulders into the sky on impact that then fell back down onto the moldy tin roofs of the beachside huts.

The Miskitos, the Indigenous people who live on the lagoon, still remember the sound of the shrapnel. A strong “P” and a long and bombastic “R.” 

Prrrrrrrrrrrrr, prrr, prrrr.

That afternoon, in the middle of the Caribbean jungle of the Moskitia region in Honduras, some Miskitos had approached an object that the soldiers aboard that helicopter were trying to guard. It was a gray boat with three engines. 

The boat had been fleeing along the shore as the helicopter chased it, dropping bullets from the sky. It landed on the beach with a pirouette that sent it flying through the air, locals remember. 

The helicopter, the Miskitos recall, passed by several times, spraying shots over their heads, before panic and chaos took hold of them. 

Two kilometers from the beach where the boat had run aground, in a house made of wooden boards and a tin roof, Élica Bermúdez was digesting the last bite of fried chicken she was having for lunch when she heard the thunder and immediately thought of her husband, Erick Barú Rivera. 

“They’ve killed him,” Élica said at the time, out loud, as if she had been talking to someone. 

It was a premonition. On the shore of the beach, her husband lay on the sand, on the verge of death. Two bullets had entered his back and were lodged in his stomach.

Suddenly, the rattle of gunfire came closer and closer until it could be heard a few meters away from the courtyard of their house. Élica ran into the room and threw herself over her youngest son, trying to protect him from the bullets falling from the sky.

For the next 40 minutes, the Miskitos recall, the people of the community ran. They ran into their rooms, hid behind trees. They screamed. They cried. They hurled insults. They cursed. 

Prrrr. Prrrrrr. Dust flooded the streets. My God! Lead rained. Bullets came through the roof. Jesus! The helicopter buzzed. Prrr. Blood. Another wounded. Father, help us! Dust. Another wounded. Prrr. Prrr. Another one. Buzzing. Oh, my God! Screaming. Buzzing. They killed him!

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Ibans

Ibans. That is the word used by its inhabitants to name this small strip of land bathed by the fresh waters of the Ébano Lagoon on one side and by the waters of the Caribbean Sea on the other. Its name, according to the community elders, is a distortion of the English word ebony, one of the most precious trees that grows in the forests around the lagoon. 

The Ébano Lagoon is located between the municipalities of Juan Francisco Bulnes and Brus Laguna, in the department of Gracias a Dios, in the jungle of the Honduran Moskitia. It is not unusual that its name, when pronounced by its inhabitants, switches between English and Spanish in such a way that some call it Ébano Lagoon and others call it Ibans Lagoon. It is a legacy of the great influence of the British Empire, which kept a foothold in this region from colonial times until the beginning of the 20th century, even after Spain had withdrawn from Central America.

Ibans, within the Moskitia, is one of the areas that nature has rewarded the most. It is surrounded by the richness of the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, which makes it a fertile area bathed by fresh waters that irrigate the forests. Its immense lagoon is full of fish and snails. And on the other side, it is bathed by the sea, with an abundance of crabs, lobster, and jellyfish, which fishermen sell to a Chinese company that has been exploiting this coast for years. 

Perhaps because of its geographical position, perhaps because of the orientation of the winds, or probably because of a whim of the sea, Ibans has also long been a place where the waves constantly throw up bales of cocaine, which drug traffickers drop on their way traveling from south to north. Not just a few bales. Sometimes, according to locals, when the boats run out of gas, water, or food, they run aground on the white sands of the shoreline and leave entire shipments at the mercy of the Miskitos, who fall on them like children on a piñata.

However, the costs of these piñatas are high.

‘We Are Poor’

When I first arrived in Ibans in March 2023, almost a year and a half after the helicopter had attacked the village, everything seemed calm. To get to Ibans from Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, you have to travel for three days. Moving from one village to another within the Moskitia depends on several things: the weather, whether transportation is available, and whether there are enough people wanting to go to the same place to make setting out in a pickup truck or launching a boat worthwhile. 

The trip from Tegucigalpa to the Moskitia began with an hour’s flight to Ceiba, the largest neighboring city to the Moskitia jungle — although calling it a city is being generous. Then you have to wait until early the next morning to board a truck that travels for eight hours to Batalla, the first village in the Moskitia. In Batalla you have to wait another day to be able to travel by boat for an hour to Ibans. 

SEE ALSO: Cocaine and Narco-Politics in the Moskitia Region of Honduras

The other way to get there is to go from Puerto Lempira on a six-hour boat trip out to sea. When I took this route on my second visit, it rained almost non-stop. But upon arrival, the water of the Ibans lake was still as a mirror, and a huge carpet of floating green water lilies adorned the sides of the main dock. I was greeted by one of the leaders, who introduced me to the members of the council of elders, which acts as a local government, and then to a dozen survivors and witnesses of the shooting. 

At Ibans, I spoke with survivors who showed me their scars, x-rays, medical exams, videos, and photographs of what happened that afternoon. In addition, I listened to the accounts of more than a dozen witnesses, examined the 113-page file opened by the Special Prosecutor’s Office for the Protection of Ethnic Groups and Cultural Heritage, and spoke with lawyers, police, military, Indigenous leaders, and public officials. 

Despite the claims made by military officials that what happened that day was a confrontation between soldiers and drug traffickers, all indications are that it was more of a direct attack.

The first person I interviewed in Ibans was Élica Bermúdez, the widow of Erick Barú, who died from his bullet wounds in a Tegucigalpa hospital two days after the assault. In addition to Barú, according to the inhabitants of Ibans and the criminal case opened in the case, two more Miskito men, Launder López and Héctor Derich, died of heart attacks on the beach after hearing the sounds of war. At least 11 other Miskitos were wounded by bullets that afternoon.

Élica is a 32-year-old Miskito woman. The day I met her, she looked dirty, with pale skin and matted hair. Standing beside her husband’s grave, she sobbed as she talked about how she had been left alone and without hope.

The same is true of seven other survivors I interviewed over the course of five months between March and July 2023. All of them believe that the criminal investigation opened into the shooting will never bring justice. Some believe this is because the Honduran state has no intention of investigating at all.

“It’s because we are poor,” says Élica.

The Helicopter

Cherlito Platino points with his index finger to the scar located right in the middle of the back of his neck. 

“The doctors couldn’t remove the bullet because they said it was in a delicate place, very dangerous to take it out,” he says, trying to articulate his words in Spanish, his second language after the native Miskito tongue. 

I met Cherlito one afternoon in early July. He is one of the survivors of the shooting, and to prove it, in addition to his scars, he has an x-ray showing the bullet lodged between his vertebrae. He was introduced to me by one of the Indigenous leaders of the Ibans community after I asked him if I could meet the survivors of the helicopter attack. It was not difficult to reach him. In this community, almost everyone knows and remembers that day in September 2021 as if it were yesterday. 

Cherlito recalls he was casting his fishing net in the waters of the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Ibans and pulling it up full of jellyfish. In his boat, a medium-sized motorboat powered by a 200-horsepower engine, he was accompanied by three other fishermen and a driver. Together, they had been out at sea for about six hours, filling the buckets with jellyfish they would sell for 21 lempiras each, or about 80 cents in US dollars. 

But then something unexpected happened. 

“Prrr prrr, the shots rang out. Soldiers were shooting from both sides of the helicopter, through both doors,” Cherlito recounts.

Below the helicopter, in the waters of the Caribbean Sea, a huge gray speedboat was traveling at full speed towards the coast of Ibans, driven by the power of three Yamaha engines of 300 horsepower each. 

On the shore, about 200 Miskito men, women, boys, and girls suddenly stopped their fishing to watch. They lowered the buckets from their shoulders, dropped their nets and looked up to the horizon, observing the scene not with fear but with the joy of someone who has found treasure. 

Upon reaching the shore, the boat hit the beach at the speed provided by its three engines and jumped into the air in a spectacular pirouette, landing on the sand about 20 meters inland. Three frightened men got off the boat and disappeared like smoke, scurrying off into the hills. 

Seeing the boat run aground, the Miskitos jumped on it in the hope of taking for themselves some of the cocaine treasure they imagined was inside the boat. 

Before the first of them could reach the boat, the bullets from the helicopter hit the beach, sending the sand flying into the air and creating a huge golden cloud.

The bullets went through Cherlito’s boat some 200 meters out to sea, and one of them hit him right in the back of the neck.

“The bullets were so fast they had already hit me by the time I felt it,” says Cherlito, who, though wounded and bleeding, helped his companions take the boat to the beach. “We all got off the boat, and then I lost my strength, and everything went black.” 

He fainted.

The Boat

Sergio Herrera is an elementary school teacher. He is also a survivor of the attack, and he described to me what happened next. That afternoon, he was out buying some brushes to paint his house when he was surprised by the sight of so many people running towards the beach.

Upon seeing the bullets hit, the Miskitos retreated. Some threw themselves into the brush that grows along the seashore. Others threw themselves on their bellies in the sand, pretending to be dead. Others hid under a bush or fled, slipping away down the paths that lead to the beach.

But just a few minutes later, Sergio walked towards the boat and saw that a group of about 50 Miskitos was surrounding it. By then, it was already being guarded by a group of about eight soldiers. The soldiers were those stationed in a small, improvised military post installed in Ibans four years ago as part of the “Shield” (Escudo) plan. Their presence came on orders from the government of Honduras’ then-President Juan Orlando Hernandez, and their stated objective was to shut down the drug trafficking routes taken by planes and boats coming from South America.

The military, who had appeared in support of the helicopter, according to the Miskitos, guarded the boat and pointed their rifles at anyone who tried to approach it. 

“All of us who were there, the soldiers and also the population, assumed that the boat was full of drugs. That’s why the soldiers were guarding it. The message was clear: ‘If you try to get to the boat, we are not going to allow it,’” recalls Sergio, sitting under the shade of a tree in front of his house.

For many Miskitos, the drugs that come from the sea are just another of nature’s resources. Some even speak of “high season” and “low season” for cocaine packages. These people consider these packages something to which they are somehow entitled, like the fish from the sea, the fruits from the forest, and the wood from the trees. 

So that day they approached the boat, sniffing out its contents from afar. Suddenly, lead rained from the sky once again.

According to witnesses and survivors, in the middle of the commotion, a drunken Miskito jumped on one of the soldiers guarding the boat and tried to take his rifle, to which the soldier responded by opening fire. 

The soldier missed the drunk, but in the chaos, Sergio was hit.

“I felt a sting,” Sergio remembers, as he puts his hand to his chest. “I looked at myself and saw blood coming out of my heart. My friend Franklin, who was next to me, saw me bleeding and said, ‘I’m hit too.’ But I could no longer react. Then I felt myself fading away.”  

He fainted.

Next to Sergio was Tecxi Jackson, another of the jellyfish fishermen who was working on the beach that afternoon. 

“The helicopter started shooting, and with the commotion of the people, some of them jumped on the boat. Then, I just felt a bullet hit my hand. I felt the heat,” says Texci.

Near Sergio, Tecxi, and Franklin, another man had just fallen to the sand after being pierced by a bullet: Erick Barú Rivera. Erick had just gotten off a small fishing boat and was running towards the boat, trying to grab a share of the treasure.

“When I saw that the helicopter was shooting, I told him not to go near,” recalls Wilmer Rivera, his cousin, as he points to his grave in the Ibans cemetery. The cemetery is so small and with so few dead the graves don’t have names — everyone just knows whose grave is whose.

“He told us we were cowards and ran off in the direction of the boat. He had only gone a few steps when he was shot in the back,” Wilmer says.

The helicopter descended a little, hovering for a few seconds just a few meters above the boat, and then it ascended again. 

“I saw that it was on its way up when it started shooting again. I saw the two pilots and the two soldiers at the doors shooting with M60 machine guns,” says Sergio, showing on his phone a video uploaded to Facebook by some residents who publicly filed a complaint about the incident.

The helicopter lifted off, and while it had first fired on the Miskitos trying to approach the boat, it then began to rain bullets on the entire community of Ibans, according to the Miskitos.

Vanesa Duarte, director of the Celso Castillo daycare center in the community of Coyoles, a hamlet next to Ibans, pulls out her cell phone and shows me the video of the helicopter hovering near her house. There are other videos like this one, filmed by locals, that show images of the helicopter and the bursts of gunfire over Ibans.

Minutes before filming the video, her husband, who works in timber, had run towards the boat intending to grab some of the supposed loot. But on the way, he ran into the helicopter, which was spitting fire, and had to dive for cover behind some old sheeting.

“When they heard the helicopter, my kids came out to see it. They always went out to wave goodbye to it when it passed by. But suddenly, I saw them run inside because they heard the gunfire, and they could see the bullets, they could see little rays of light falling to the ground, and they could hear the thunder,” recalls Vanesa.

Vanesa’s house has a dock overlooking the Ébano Lagoon. Minutes before the shooting, her cousin had moored his boat to the dock to rest. He works delivering sacks of food, one of the Honduran government’s Pyrrhic projects to alleviate the hunger that plagues the Moskitia. His boat was, at that moment, full of those sacks.  

“Since there were a lot of sacks on my brother-in-law’s boat, maybe those in the helicopter thought it was the drugs, and they stopped in front of my house, in front of my window, as if it were a movie! And they took aim. My children were shouting at me, ‘Mommy, mommy, they’re going to shoot us!’ But thank God the men didn’t shoot at us and the helicopter lifted off again,” she recalls.

The hail of bullets fell everywhere, even in the daycare center where Vanessa works, which every day houses 32 children between 2 and 5 years old. There are still traces of the shooting: a bullet hole on the walls of one of the classrooms. 

Modesto Morales, an Indigenous leader in the Moskitia, remembers it as chaos. “The helicopter began to shoot at people and houses. It shot at me. I jumped off my motorcycle when I saw it had shot out the tire and put another bullet in the bike. Then I shouted to someone who was with me, ‘They killed me!’ And I jumped onto the sand, pretending to be dead. It was like we were at war.”

A ‘Too Poor’ Investigation

On the evening of that September 16, while the wounded from Ibans were still being transported to receive medical attention in facilities in different parts of the country, the Honduran armed forces gave their version of events in a brief statement. It was just over 100 words and was published on their Facebook page under the heading, “Securing a boat allegedly carrying drugs.”

The military’s publication basically put forward three ideas. The first was that that afternoon, one of its helicopters was chasing a boat with “supposed drugs.” To that end, they published photos of the boat with plastic barrels at the back and armed soldiers around it. 

The second was that after being abandoned by its crew members, “cells linked to drug trafficking tried to unload the drugs” from the vessel, and, as they did so, they shot at the helicopter. As “evidence” they published two close-up photos of an aircraft with two holes that could have been caused by bullets. 

The third claim was that after the confrontation, the vessel was secured by elements of the armed forces “while waiting for an inspection of the barrels and fuselage.”

The communiqué, which to date has been the only official statement from the authorities on the matter, omitted mention of the wounded and dead during the encounter. Nor does it say anything about shooting at terrified children, daycare centers, and churches.

The day after the shooting, Indigenous leaders from different Miskito organizations went to Tegucigalpa and filed a two-page complaint with the Special Prosecutor’s Office for the Protection of Ethnic Groups and Cultural Heritage. In the complaint, addressed to the then prosecutor Jany del Cid, the leaders demanded an investigation to clarify the facts of the case and the dismissal of the armed forces spokesperson who had handled the case. They also asked for compensation for the physical and psychological damages to the affected Miskitos, as well as for the authorities to repair the damages to the roofs and walls of houses, schools, and churches.

The complaint is signed by 11 Indigenous leaders of the Moskitia, and is backed by 11 accounts from direct witnesses and relatives of the victims. In their accounts, they all state that no Miskito was armed that afternoon and that no one ever fired at the helicopter. 

Just five days later, the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Ethnic Groups said it had no jurisdiction in the case and transferred the investigation to the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights. In a memorandum in the file, obtained by InSight Crime, the institution argued that it does not have sufficient resources to continue with the investigation and that “it is public knowledge” that the Human Rights Prosecutor’s Office had already initiated inquiries, as it had announced via its social media accounts. The investigation, in other words, had become a hot potato. 

On September 23, two days after the file was transferred to the human rights prosecutors, the prosecutors sent a memo to the Technical Agency for Criminal Investigation, the special investigations unit of the Attorney General’s Office. In the memo, they asked the agency to designate five agents to begin the investigation. Three investigative agents, an expert in visual inspections, and a technician in evidence seizure and extraction were scheduled to visit Ibans on October 16. However, the visit never took place. The potato was still too hot. 

On September 30, an assistant from the Human Rights Prosecutor’s Office attached another memorandum to the investigation file in which he stated that on that day he tried to contact one of the victims by telephone, but “the call did not go through.” He noted this down, then took no further action.

On October 13, the regional coordinator of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Ceiba asked the head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights for a report on what happened in Ibans. In the report, dated October 15, the unit responded that, according to the investigations carried out and the consultations made with the police in Puerto Lempira, the largest Honduran city in the Moskitia and site of the only preventive police post in the area, there was no information about the case. This was because they were never able to go to the site, since the police did not have the resources for the journey. 

This may be true. The police chief of Puerto Lempira, Commissioner Mario Posadas, told me

“To get around, we have to exchange gasoline vouchers in exchange for a ride from the fishermen.” 

Pedro Mejía, a lawyer with the organization Litigio Estratégico, which fights for the defense of human rights in Honduras, is the legal representative of 11 of the surviving victims and the relatives of those killed in the shooting. When I spoke to him at the end of July, he was discouraged and described the investigation as “too poor.” 

The 113 pages that make up the file to which InSight Crime had access reveal that two years after the event, judicial authorities have not gone to Ibans to investigate the shootings. 

SEE ALSO: Honduras – Organized Crime News 

In November 2023, InSight Crime requested an interview with a representative of the Honduran Air Force high command. We also asked for comments from the Honduran Public Ministry and the police to explain why, two years after the incident, they have not even visited the Ibans community to investigate. At the time of publication, we had received no response from any of these institutions.

Hiding the Evidence?

According to the attorney, Mejía, the poor state of the case file is not only due to the lack of investigation by prosecutors and police, but also because the Armed Forces is hiding and may have destroyed evidence. On March 17, 2022, six months after the shootings in Ibans, the military announced in a brief statement put out on social media that the Bell H1-1H helicopter carrying the registration number 953, the same one that, according to Mejía, participated in the operation in Ibans, had crashed and burned. It was, according to the statement, totally destroyed, but its occupants suffered only slight burns. 

In addition, according to the Miskitos’ testimonies, 40 days after the shooting, a group of soldiers came to Ibans. They went door to door, demanding that the inhabitants hand over the shell casings they had collected after the shooting. 

“Soldiers and police came house to house and asked if we had the bullets that were left over, and told us we had to hand them in. They told us it was for justice. But justice never came,” says one of the Ibans community leaders, who preferred not to be identified by name for fear of reprisals. 

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Their fear is not unfounded. At least two Miskito leaders from the community have had to flee because of death threats. The latest was Modesto Morales. In a phone call at the end of July 2023, Modesto claimed that a group of armed men dressed in black came to his house at night after he filed a complaint against the military for human rights abuses against the community. 

Nevertheless, on one of my visits to the region, I managed to find some shell casings, some may still remain in Ibans. After pointing out the holes in the roof of his house where he says the shots entered, an inhabitant showed me casings he said were from the incident.  One shell casing had the number 7.62 mm on its base. This is the caliber used in M60 machine guns mounted in the helicopters described by the witnesses. The M60 is a powerful device used in military conflicts, usually as a means of supporting troops on the ground. And it is an even more powerful weapon when fired at tin-roofed schools and unarmed people. 

The lawyer Mejía believes the investigation will never move forward. In part, he says, because the authorities themselves are afraid to investigate an institution as powerful and feared in Honduras as the Armed Forces. 

“It’s not necessary for someone to receive a threat. It’s known that the Armed Force [sic] is an institution to be feared,” he tells me. 

The lack of cooperation from the military, according to the survivors, may also be related to a blunt fact: The boat abandoned in Ibans on September 16, 2021 did not even have drugs on it.

According to eyewitness accounts, on the day of the shooting, the Miskitos hovered, angrily, near the boat. Finally, one of the leaders intervened, approaching the commander in charge of the troops guarding the boat, who was well known in the area. According to Modesto, the commander had earlier introduced himself as part of the of Task Force Bravo, a joint US-Honduran unit operating under the direction of the US military’s Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).

InSight Crime also contacted the US State Department requesting a comment on the events at Ibans, but had received no response by the time of publication.

On the day of the incident, Modesto said, the commander asked Hernández if the Miskitos could take the gasoline that was on the boat.

“[He] told me, ‘Calm your people down.’” Modesto recalls. “I explained to him that the people demanded to keep what was on the boat, whether it was drugs or gasoline, because they had done so much damage. He told me, ‘Okay, I authorize you to see what is in the boat, and if it is gasoline, you can take it. If it is drugs, no. Nor can you take the engines because I have to hand over the boat for inspection,'” 

Modesto assures me that he got on the boat and removed the plastic covering the barrels. There, he saw that there were 18 barrels on the boat. Fourteen were empty; four had some gasoline. 

“Then the people jumped on the barrels and took them away. They even threw me out, and I couldn’t stand up because I weigh almost 300 pounds,” Modesto recalls. 

His words are reinforced by a video uploaded to YouTube titled, “Lancha sube en Ibans la Moskitia en tiroteo,” published on October 6, 2021, by user @franklinlopez4042. In the video, a crowd of Miskitos can be seen ransacking the silvery-gray boat. Some of them take the barrels and the straps they find inside the ship. 

Honduran authorities did not report any drug seizures that day in Ibans. 

Caught Between Two Fires

The Miskitos have been caught between forces that, in one way or another, destroy their way of life, their health, and their forest. The events of that day in September 2021 were not unique. 

In 2012, a boat piloted by a US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent and two Honduran counternarcotics agents opened fire after colliding with a civilian passenger boat. On hearing the gunfire, a DEA agent in a support helicopter then ordered the Honduran gunners to fire on the passenger boat. The gunfire killed two pregnant women, a 14-year-old child, and an adult. All Miskitos, all civilians. 

On that occasion, the facts came out thanks to videos declassified by the US Department of Justice. However, Miskito leaders speak of several other cases that have not been reported. They tell of other helicopters firing on civilians, of beatings at the hands of the military, of torture, and robberies. They insist that the Miskito people are being harassed by both drug traffickers and Honduran and foreign authorities.  

And now, more than two years after the latest attack, and after dozens of attempts by the Miskitos and their lawyers to obtain justice for the scars and the deaths they have suffered in the village of Ibans, there is only despair, trauma, and pain.

Before leaving that piece of paradise and its Ebony Lagoon, I have one last conversation with Elica, Erick Barú’s widow. She confides in me, tells me a kind of secret that she has kept to herself and that she now thinks it is a good time to share. Lowering her voice a little, she says:

“The Miskito has beliefs … and sometimes, when my boy gets sick, his belly swells. The Miskito say it’s because his dead father comes to feed him.” 

But the dead do not eat the same as the living. That is why, according to the Miskitos, children get sick. 

“Our belief says that if I burn the clothes he left behind and draw smoke, he goes away,” she adds. “But my child is not cured. He gets sick again, and he gets sick again.  Now he has come down with another illness. He is very sad. I say it must be his father’s spirit who is bothering me.” 

All the ghosts left by that helicopter will take a long time to leave the town on the Ébano lagoon.