Endangered Species: Enviromental activist

Berta Cáceres

 

Life

Cáceres was born into the Lenca people in La Esperanza (Intubucá), Honduras
(4 March 1972)She grew up in the 1970s during a time of civil unrest and violence in Central America. Her mother Berta Flores was a role model of humanitarianism: she was a midwife and social activist who took in and cared for refugees from El Salvador.
Cáceres studied education at a university and graduated with a teaching qualification.She found in Fr. Ismael Moreno, director of Radio Progreso & ERIC-SJ, a close friend and collaborator.She was assassinated in her home by armed intruders, after years of threats against her life (3 March 2016)

Activism

In 1993, as a student activist, Cáceres co-founded the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), an organization to support indigenous people's rights in Honduras. She led campaigns on a wide variety of issues, including protesting illegal logging, plantation owners, and the presence of US military bases on Lenca land.She supported feminism, LGBT rights, as well as wider social and indigenous issues.

In 2006, a group of indigenous Lenca people from Río Blanco asked Cáceres to investigate the recent arrival of construction equipment in their area.Cáceres duly investigated and informed the community that a joint venture project between Chinese company Sinohydro, the World Bank's International Finance Corporation, and Honduran company Desarrollos Energéticos, S.A.  had plans to construct a series of four hydroelectric dams on the Gualcarque River.

The developers had breached international law by failing to consult with the local people on the project. The Lenca were concerned that the dams would compromise their access to water, food and materials for medicine, and therefore threaten their traditional way of life. Cáceres worked together with the community to mount a protest campaign. She organized legal actions and community meetings against the project, and took the case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
From 2013, Cáceres led COPINH and the local community in a year-long protest at the construction site to prevent the companies from accessing the land. Security officers regularly removed protesters from the site.  On 15 July 2013, the Honduran military opened fire on the protesters, killing one member of COPINH and injuring three others. The community regularly complained of threats and harassment from the company employees, security guards, and the military. In May 2014, members of COPINH were attacked in two separate incidents that resulted in two members dead and three seriously injured.

In late 2013, both Sinohydro and the International Finance Corporation withdrew from the project because of COPINH's protests.Desarrollos Energéticos (DESA) continued, however, moving the construction site to another location to avoid the blockade. Other local business leaders supported the project. Officials filed criminal charges against Cáceres and two other indigenous leaders for "usurpation, coercion and continued damages" against DESA for their roles in the protest, which was alleged to have incited others to cause damages to the company. In response to the charges, Amnesty International stated that, if the activists were imprisoned, Amnesty International would consider them prisoners of conscience. Dozens of regional and international organizations called upon the Honduran government to stop criminalizing the defense of human rights and to investigate threats against human rights defenders.

Honors

• In 2012 Cáceres was awarded the Shalom Award by the Society for Justice and Peace at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in 2012.
• She was nominated as a finalist for the 2014 Front Line Defenders Prize.
• In 2015 she was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize.

In April 2015, the international human rights organization Global Witness highlighted Cáceres' case as emblematic of the severe risks faced by environmental activists in Honduras. This country had the highest number of killings of environmental and land defenders per capita in the world.