A few days ago, I had the opportunity to an attend an event at the University of Costa Rica by the name “Por qué mataron a Berta Cáceres?” (“Why did they kill Berta Cáceres?”) Before attending the event, I had never heard of Berta Cáceres, her indigenous people, or the struggles of many Honduran activists for the rights of indigenous people groups like hers. I went to “Por qué mataron a Berta Cáceres?” because one of my friends wanted to go, but I left with a broader worldview and a desire to do something with the information I’d learned.
So here we are.
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Berta Cáceres was an activist and member of the Lenca people group who was assassinated on March 2, 2016. Before her assassination, she was working to keep a local business firm, DESA, from building a dam and hurting the water supply to a community of Lenca people in a town called Rio Blanco. Although the Honduran government is supposed to communicate with indigenous people for the use of their land, a pattern that occurs far too often is that the government overlooks talking to the indigenous people for the sake of profit. Also far too often, doing so is easy because those same indigenous people sometimes lack the faculty to fight for themselves. Berta Cáceres and her organization COPINH had been fighting against this type of exploitation for some time (The Guardian).
For this work and more, Berta Cáceres had received multiple death threats and warnings in the time leading up to her death. According to an interview with the Guardian, she felt very strongly about the causes for which she was fighting. “We must undertake the struggle in all parts of the world, wherever we may be, because we have no other spare or replacement planet,” she said in the interview. “We have only this one, and we have to take action.”
After her death, local authorities tried to frame those close to her for the murder, but those in her organization, COPINH, are convinced it was an assassination (The Guardian). And statistically, they’re probably right. Honduras is one of the most dangerous places in the world for activists fighting for the interests of indigenous people.
The event I went to, just three months after this woman’s assassination, was hosted by her two daughters, Laura and Berta. They are both young, only about 20 years old. They talked about their mother’s life and her work. They talked about her legacy as an activist and as a mother. Even today, they are continuing their mother’s fight to protect the rights and the land of the Lenca people in Honduras. But more than that, they realize that to spread word of their mother’s death and look for justice, they will have to look outside of their own country. And so that’s what they are doing – traveling from country to country sharing their mother’s story and calling for change.
Much was said during the event I attended, but one of the most powerful things I remember Berta’s daughters saying was that the most important thing that we, as a global community, can do in the face of violence like that raged against their mother is to strengthen our solidarity. We must strengthen our solidarity, they said. Because only in taking a stand, together, against violence and exploitation and injustice, can we hope to change the world into a place where activists aren’t murdered, and assassinations (perhaps indirectly) facilitated by a country’s government can’t take place.
Attending “Por qué mataron a Berta Cáceres?” and hearing the daughters of this strong woman speak out only months after their mother’s death (with clear voices and few tears) was incredibly powerful. It couldn’t have been easy for them, but seeking justice was visibly more important to them than hiding from their pain.
After the two girls had shared, they asked for comments or questions from the audience. One man stood up and said something along the lines of, “I know, as Costa Ricans, it’s easy for us to think, oh poor guys, poor things – but that’s Honduras. It’s not us. But really, it’s not that far away. That could be us. It is us.” I’m paraphrasing his words, partly in translation and partly because of my faulty memory, but the point he was making was, and is, very clear. Injustices can feel distant, and they can feel like they don’t affect us. For those of us in the United States, it’s even easier to feel like we are far removed from acts such as these. However, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere…. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
It’s for that reason that we must care about injustices, no matter where they occur. No matter how we feel about saving the environment, no matter how we feel about big business vs. indigenous people groups – we must care about injustice. We must fight against it, not only for those who haven’t any voice, but also for the threat injustice of any kind poses to the existence of justice everywhere.
