Berta Cáceres was a Lenca indigenous woman from Honduras who fought her entire life in the defense of the territory and rights of the Lenca people. She was murdered in her home in 2016 at the age of 44. In addition to being an environmental activist and indigenous leader, she also co-founded the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH).
Cáceres was born in La Esperanza, a town in southwestern Honduras and as a child watched her mother become a humanitarian role model. Her mother worked as a midwife and social activist, providing healthcare to refugees from El Salvador, and served as mayor of La Esperanza for two terms, later becoming a congresswoman and then governor of Intibucá state. Cáceres followed in her footsteps, becoming a student activist while in university. This is around the time when she co-founded COPINH, and also began leading campaigns on a wide range of issues, such as indigenous rights, LGBTQ rights, feminism, illegal logging and plantation owners, and the presence of the US military on Lenca land.
The issue that would eventually lead to her death began in 2006, when a group of Lenca people asked for her help in investigating construction equipment that had appeared on their land. The project turned out to be a series of four hydroelectric dams on the Gualcarque River, which violated international treaties by not consulting with the indigenous groups who lived there, and which would compromise the indigenous people’s ability to access fresh water and food, and ultimately threaten their way of life. This project was led by three groups, two of which quit the project after a yearlong protest by COPINH that began in 2013, led by Cáceres, but the third group carried on. Cáceres continued the grassroots campaign against the project, keeping up a road blockade for over a year, and was eventually successful in stopping the project from moving forward.
She won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015, but the threats against her life continued, and led to her murder in 2016, even though the Honduran government had guaranteed her protection. This is actually quite common in countries such as Honduras and Nicaragua especially—because of national and international pressure, governments commit to protecting activists and women who constantly receive death threats, but the protection they actually receive is another story entirely.
Her murder was eventually linked to one of the groups involved in the dam project, and the group manager was finally found guilty as the intellectual author of her murder in 2021 (aka he hired the men who actually murdered her), after 7 men (2 with links to US training) were arrested, found guilty, and sent to prison in 2018-19. I don’t mention any of their names, or the company names responsible, in an attempt to remember Cáceres herself and not her murderers.
She is survived by her husband and four children. I want to end this with one of her favorite quotes, which was “They are afraid of us because we are not afraid of them”. May she rest in power.