I bring the verdent painting my memories, we went two days to those mountains from Intibucá to La Tejera in Rio Blanco and then to the Culatón and the Vega del Achotal, one truly pauses because she cannot walk at the pace of the companions who are directing the walk, we take twice as long as they do to reach the point, but we arrive, and at each stop to breathe, indeed one breathes the mountain, restless and still, green in all imaginable tones of green, immensely large its green horizon, like the hope of the Bertas which multiplied 41 months after her physical absence.
Berta in the word and in the determined actions of the people, in the political clarity that the struggles are made with the bodies that refine the ideas of belonging, of the ancestral memory, of the things that must be remembered and those that we have to unlearn. There, among skinny dogs and fat pigs, chickens, hunting cats and tame ducks, one can feel again, by the way one lives with them, that life transcends the human being, that there are other beings who also breathe, the river roars or sings, the little birds bring and carry joys, the clouds darken in the portent of rain that makes the corn that was saved grow after DESA paid the Madrid to machete the community corn fields in the recovered lands; The mountain silently assumes the role of resisting the white man or the colonized Indian who put a price on it. Everything that lives here speaks of her, of her passage that in the history of the Lenca people marks a before and after Berta, which is now, now the COPINH is Berta and Berta continues to be in COPINH.
In La Tejera, the empirically raised antenna of the community radio “La Voz del Gualcarque” plays songs that are not heard on commercial radio stations and people listen to their own voice to command the respect snatched from them because on other racist radio stations, Indians were referred to as synonymous with brutes, nachas, or foxes towards women, being the only extremes that patriarchy inherits from indigenous women. On their radio that crosses mountains, Lenca Indians like Rosalina and María Santos, who are leaders, tell the people how the struggle is going, denounce the aggressions, conspire, talk about the silence that will never be theirs again, ancestors of generous wisdom like don Lucío or Felipe share with their paused voice of a time that was before and of a memory that is now.
Everything becomes possible again when one returns from walking in Rio Blanco and has bathed in the sacred waters of the Rio Gualcarque, it must be because one feels again how it felt when Berta was, in a hurry, overnight, with the rhythm with which she invited us to accompany her, as she put it elegantly and beautifully when she was given that last prize, the Goldman, “there is no time anymore”, and I would like time to return it to us so that it will reveal us and hurry us herself, but it must be her memory, the one that remains intact because her daughters and her son, the COPINH, We sing for her, we write her name, we draw her face, we colour her in Melissa Cardoza’s story, we read it in the book written by Claudia Korol, We think it when Victor Fernandez tells of the cause and the legal process, we feel it again when we see Rosalina that the greatness of her courage does not correspond with the fragility of her body and we marvel at how she grows when she says, when she affirms that it was Berta who taught her to scare away fear.
I bring the green in my memories, the green of the river to which you brought us Bertita, the green of the river that runs, the green of the river that sings, the green of the river that continues to call us, after 41 months in which you have not ceased to be, we begin to understand that time, shape and distance have dimensions that you are surely teaching us to perceive, even if we do not know how to understand.
