Six months after the murder of Berta Caceres, far from forgetting, people throughout the world demanded justice and vowed to continue her organizing work in defense of land and territory locally, regionally and internationally.
On June 21, 2015 the London-based Guardian newspaper published an article describing the testimony of a soldier who says he deserted the army after his unit was given an order to kill activists whose names appeared on two lists. The second list contained the name of Lenca indigenous leader Berta Caceres, murdered last March.
Like Berta Caceres before her, Maxima Acuña has resisted violence and eviction in championing the protection of natural resources against powerful international corporate exploitation.
On December 28, 2015 in the early morning, the Honduran Navy shot and killed two Afro-Indigenous Garifuna men, Jostin Lino Palacios, age 24 and Elvis Garcia, age 19 in Barra de Iriona in the department of Colon, on the northeast coast of Honduras.
The favela is a complex world where poverty coexists with police and drug-trafficking violence. At first glance it would seem to be the most difficult place to build alternatives from the bottom up and from the Left. Nevertheless, hundreds of activists have chosen favelas as the place to create something new.
Berta Cáceres united sectors and issues, across borders. And by bringing paths together, she was building a broad road to freedom. That is the road she has left to her children, and to the many others who will follow in her footsteps.
We shall follow the water, as Brother Moon instructs us, and remind the world every so often that it is not who you are that matters, but what you know. Our best scientists, it turns out, are Post Paris indigenous.
This is the third piece in a series on land rights and food sovereignty in Haiti, featuring critical research and analysis, as well as interviews with grassroots leaders and people affected by land grabs.
Wind energy projects on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec are facing opposition from local indigenous communities. What’s at stake?
While most combatants in Colombia’s conflict have been men, women’s participation in the construction of peace is badly needed for peace to be sustainable. When the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1325, mandating the full, equal participation of women at peace talks, it was an attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice for integrating a gender perspective into peace processes.
