1. 7/28/2016 Will outrage over recent murders help Honduran environmental activists achieve their goal? | Ensia
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WILL OUTRAGE OVER
RECENT MURDERS
HELP HONDURAN
ENVIRONMENTAL
ACTIVISTS ACHIEVE
THEIR GOAL?
Recent murders are affecting indigenous
people’s efforts to protect the environment .
June 13, 2016 — When Honduran environmental activist Berta
Cáceres was gunned down in her home last spring the
international community and even activists in the notoriously
violent country were shocked. Her death followed threats related
to her support for indigenous people fighting the construction of
Photo by Fernando Antonio / AP

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WRITER
Victoria Molina
Freelance writer
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the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam along the Gualcarque River.
A few days after her death Nelson García, another leader of the
Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras
(known as COPINH), which Cáceres founded in 1993 to advocate
for the native Lenca peoples’ rights, was also murdered.
Have these recent deaths made a difference in indigenous efforts
to protect the environment? Though change is slow, there is
some indication that they are not going unheeded.
“Berta had such an amazing support network and she had done
so much great work in reaching out to other organizations both
domestically and internationally that there’s this enormous
outrage when she was assassinated,” says Danielle DeLuca,
project manager for the Cambridge-based nonprofit Cultural
Survival, which advocates for indigenous groups around the
world.
Notoriously Unsafe
Honduras has one of the highest homicide rates in the world,
and it is notoriously unsafe for environmental activists.
According to the not-for-profit justice organization Global
Witness, at least 109 people were killed in the country between
2010 and 2015 for taking stands against dams, mining, logging
or agricultural projects. Scholars and activists blame a
combination of organized crime and a deficient judicial system
that has led to corruption — all born of a history of poverty,
inequality, political instability and the protection of corporate
interests over indigenous rights.
Rosana Resende, a cultural anthropologist at the University of
Florida, says the economic culture of entrepreneurialism and
lack of restrictions that gained momentum in Latin America in
the 1980s set the framework for increased privatization of global
resources. Also during the 1980s, much of Latin America was
crippled by a debt crisis. The International Monetary Fund and
other institutions implemented a number of policies, known as
the Washington Consensus, to reform the region’s economy.
These policies privatized government industries, opening them
up to foreign direct investment and liberalizing trade.
@vmsugranes

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Before her death, Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres led efforts to halt
construction of the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam in the mountainous Rio Blanco
region of western Honduras. Photo courtesy of Goldman Environmental Prize
Transnational companies entered indigenous territories
historically cared for by local people to extract resources.
“It was the privatizing and foreign direct investment pieces that
really led these countries to becoming vulnerable to large
extractive corporations,” Resende says.
Since 2009, DeLuca says, Honduras and the United States
increased the call for investment into the country in response to
high poverty levels. But the investment and job creation has been
a double-edged sword: “Along with that investment comes often
a disrespect from corporate entities for human rights and
indigenous people’s rights,” she says.
The Lenca began opposing the Agua Zarca Dam project in 2006;
the Gualcarque is sacred to them, and they are concerned about
the dam’s environmental impact on the river and its life. Cáceres
organized peaceful protests to voice the community’s discontent.
She helped push the largest dam builder in the world, China’s
Sinohydro, to withdraw from the project. In 2015 she was
awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in recognition of her
activism. Death threats against her increased. On March 3 of this
year, her killers made good on them.
Unprecedented Backlash
This time, though, the violence has brought unprecedented
backlash. Less than two weeks after Cáceres was killed, the
Dutch development bank FMO suspended all activities in

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Honduras. Finnfund, a Finnish development finance company,
suspended its payments to the Agua Zarca project a few days
later.
FMO sent a letter to the president of Honduras, Juan Orlando
Hernández, expressing concerns and urging his administration
to take immediate action to stop the violence against activists.
“The right of speech for those who stand for their rights and
livelihoods of people are of very high value to FMO,” the letter
read. “Every individual should be able to feel safe when
defending their position. FMO rejects and condemns any
violence against those individuals or groups.”
FMO also is sending a fact-finding mission to Honduras that will
include the bank’s CEO and energy sector director, says senior
press officer Paul Hartogsveld. The mission will also include a
delegation of independent experts to determine and validate the
procedures that have been applied to Agua Zarca. “After that we
will make a final decision on the project and our suspension of
Honduras,” Hartogsveld says.
The violence also has strengthened the resolve of the Lenca
indigenous community to fight the Agua Zarca dam and other
development projects Berta Cáceres opposed. Cesario Padilla, a
journalist and activist in Honduras, says while the climate of
terror within these communities now feels permanent, at the
same time there is a strong willingness to continue the struggle
for indigenous rights to co-exist with natural resources.
For example, leaders of COPINH met with the vice-minister of
the Honduran Ministry of Energy, Natural Resources,
Environment and Mining two weeks after Cáceres’ murder to
request that the ministry cancel the permit for the Agua Zarca
dam. Members of COPINH have also been protesting outside the
Public Ministry in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. And, in an
initiative they’re calling “Justice for Berta Cáceres,” they are
asking Hondurans abroad and other sympathizers to protest
peacefully outside Honduran embassies in their countries on
June 15 to demand transparency on the murder investigation
and a cancellation on the Agua Zarca dam.
According to Tomás Gomez, the current coordinator of COPINH,

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Environmental and human-
rights activists fear continued
killings, threats and
persecution.
the military presence near the area where the Agua Zarca dam is
being built has increased and members of COPINH continue to
be intimidated and threatened. But there are also indications
that the Honduran government is finally heeding calls to ferret
out corruption. After global pleas for action, four suspects — two
of them associated with Desarrollos Energéticos S.A., the local
private energy company building Agua Zarca — were detained in
Honduras in early May in connection with Cáceres’ murder.
International Role
But Padilla says the Honduran government still shows reluctance
in taking action on two of the Cáceres family’s main demands: to
allow them and their team of lawyers to be a part of the
investigation into Berta Caceres’ murder and to allow an
independent investigation led by the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights.
The detentions “are an
act of goodwill,” Padilla
says. “But these demands
have not been met, and
therefore there is still
much distrust in the
actions of the Honduran
government.”
Environmental and human-rights activists fear continued
killings, threats and persecution. Padilla and DeLuca say the
Honduran government needs to do more — in terms of
protection for Berta Cáceres’ family, other members of COPINH
and Gustavo Castro, the only witness to Cáceres’ murders;
getting to the bottom of the murders; and scrutinizing projects
that threaten indigenous people and the environment.
The Honduran Public Ministry, the government entity handling
the Cáceres case, did not return numerous calls and emails
requesting comment.
DeLuca says the continued hostility toward COPINH after the
murders is a clear sign the crisis won’t be solved without the help
of other nations with a stake in the country. She calls on U.S.

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citizens in particular to urge the Department of State and
Congress to put pressure on Honduras to accept an independent
investigation.
“We don’t have confidence in the state of Honduras to conduct
an independent investigation,” DeLuca says.
Ultimately, activists hope to change the nature of development in
Honduras to give local communities a voice when their interests
conflict with those of international development corporations. As
part of that, Cáceres’s daughter, Laura Zuñiga Cáceres, is calling
on other countries to consider human rights in their investment
decisions.
“It is also important that the international community reflect
about the role played by their own governments in Honduras,”
she says.
Resende says it remains to be seen whether Cáceres’ murder is a
sufficient catalyst to effect policy that is centered on the people.
“Little change is possible, but we are also currently experiencing
a moment in time when activism is gaining momentum,” she
says.
Editor’s note: Victoria Molina produced this feature as a
participant in the Ensia Mentor Program. Her mentor for the
project was Cynthia Barnett. Some of the quotes in this piece
were translated from Spanish. The piece also appears in
Spanish at LatinAmericanScience.org.