While you read this, don't forget the part that Hillary played in supporting
the Coup in Honduras.
Miriam
Berta Lives! The Life and Legacy of Berta Cáceres
Thursday, 10 March 2016 00:00 By Beverly Bell, Other Worlds | Op-Ed
Berta Cáceres rallies a crowd. (Photo: HispanTV)I began writing a eulogy
for Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores years ago, though she died only last week.
Berta was assassinated by Honduran government-backed death squads on March
3. Like many who knew and worked with her, I was aware that this fighter for
indigenous peoples' power; for control over their own territories; for
women's and LGBTQ rights; for authentic democracy; for the well-being of
Pachamama; for an end to tyranny by transnational capital; and for an end to
US empire was not destined to die of old age. She spoke too much truth to
too much power.
Berta cut her teeth on revolution. She was strongly marked by the broadcasts
from Cuba and Sandinista-led Nicaragua that her family listened to
clandestinely, gathered around a radio with the volume turned very low;
those stations were outlawed in Honduras. Always a committed Leftist,
Berta's mother raised her many children to believe in justice. Doña Bertha
-- the mother made her youngest child her namesake -- was mayor and governor
of her town and state back when women were neither, in addition to being a
midwife. She was Berta's life-long inspiration. As a young adult, like so
many others from the region who shared her convictions, Berta went on to
support the Salvadoran revolution.
In 1993, Berta -- a Lenca Native -- cofounded the Civic Council of Popular
and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). At that time in the
country, there was little pride and even less power in being indigenous.
Berta created COPINH to build the political strength of Lencas, campesinos,
and other grassroots sectors to transform one of the most corrupt,
anti-democratic, and unequal societies in the hemisphere.
A Political Force: COPINH Under Berta's leadership
Berta loved to say, "They fear us because we're fearless." The fearlessness
paid off over the years. COPINH has successfully reclaimed ancestral lands,
winning unheard-of communal land titles. They have stalled or stopped dams,
logging operations, and mining exploration -- not to mention free-trade
agreements. They have prevented many precious and sacred places from being
plundered and destroyed.
In addition to Berta's remarkable leadership, COPINH's victories have come
through their size, strength, unity, and fierce commitment. Communities have
participated in hundreds of protests, from their local mayors' office to the
steps of the national congress. They have occupied public spaces, including
several of the six US military bases in their country, and refused to leave.
They have shut down the road to Tegucigalpa, strategically blocking goods
from moving to the city. They have declared a boycott of all international
financial institutions on their lands. They have helped coordinate 150 local
referendums to raise the stakes on democracy.
Here is one of many tales that Berta told of strategies and actions. The
backstory is that Honduran farmers -- which most COPINH members are -- wear
thick work boots made of unventilated rubber. Over their course of
containing sweaty feet, they come to smell horrendously, so bad that
campesinos/as refer to them as bombas, bombs. Early in COPINH's history, a
team went from La Esperanza to Tegucigalpa to negotiate with the government
on a land titling law. The discussions went on for days. Berta told that,
during lunchtime, the government received lavish, catered meals; the COPINH
members had no money, and so their side of the table stayed empty. Far less
connected in those days, the group had nowhere to sleep or shower, and spent
the nights in the streets. At one point, the negotiations were tense and the
members of COPINH's team were shaky on their strategy. They asked for a
recess, but the government refused. So someone on the COPINH side gave a
discrete signal, and altogether the farmer-activists pulled off their
bombas. The smell was so toxic that the government officials fled the room.
COPINH was able to regroup and develop a stunning strategy. The indigenous
radicals won the law.
The most recent campaign and partial victory are also the proximate causes
of Berta's death: stopping the Agua Zarca dam project on a sacred Lenca
river. The COPINH community of Rio Blanco -- everyone: elders, toddlers,
nursing mothers -- formed a human barricade and blocked construction of the
dam. Meanwhile, Berta, other members of COPINH, and national and
international friends pressured the World Bank and the largest dam company
in the world, Chinese state-owned Sinohydro, to pull out. Rio Blanco did not
blockade the construction for an hour or for a day, or for a week. They did
it for more than a year. They did it until they won. They got the most
powerful financial interests in the world to abandon the project.
Tragically, because other financial interests are always waiting in the
wings to plunder for profit, the dam is still under construction.
Forty-eight more are either planned or underway on their lands.
Berta's belief in participatory democracy extended profoundly to her
everyday practice. As the unparalleled leader of COPINH, and with a large
gap between her level of education and political experience and that of all
but a few in the group, it would be have been easy for her to act on her
own. Yet she always made herself accountable to the communities she worked
for.
I saw the degree of this commitment in action one night when Berta called in
to Utopia, COPINH's rural community meeting center, and asked to speak to
everyone. Fifteen or so people quickly gathered around the cell phone on the
shaky wooden table next to the only light, that of a candle. Berta explained
a fairly pro forma request that had come to her from a government office,
and proposed a response. When she was finished, she asked the almost
exclusively illiterate, campesino/na group, "¿Cheque sí, o cheque no?" All
raised their thumbs toward the little cell phone and called out, "Sí!" No
joint decision had been required, and yet she had sought consensus.
That's accountability.
Berta Cáceres 1973 - 2016. (Photo: Fr Melo Coto SJ and ISN) The Woman
Behind the Myth
Berta was unflappable. She was calm in the face of chaos and strategic in
the face of disaster. She got right in the face of soldiers and goons when
they aggressed her or others, and told them what was what.
Berta was indefatigable, working around the clock with no complaint. When
not traveling around Honduras or the world to raise support for the
struggle, she would wake early and go straight to her desk to receive
updates, often on the most recent attacks on COPINH members, and in those
cases to write condemnations -- all even before a cup of coffee. She would
then jump into her yellow beater truck to pick up other members of COPINH
and head off to wherever action or investigation was needed.
I was amazed that Berta drove that noteworthy truck everywhere without
protection, and that she lived in a house secured by only a small bolt and a
couple of friendly dogs. Then I realized that it made no difference how much
security she had. The government and the companies she opposed almost always
knew where she was (Berta also spent periods in deep hiding), and how to get
her when they were ready to kill her.
Berta took two small breaks in her life. The first was a two-week vacation
with a friend in a neighboring country, the second a three-month semi-repose
at my house in Albuquerque -- though even then she spent most of her days
building a continent-wide boycott of the World Bank and Inter-American
Development Bank.
Even as she served her community, Berta rose in the past decade to become an
international people's diplomat. She was a heroine to many global movements,
a critical player in many struggles, a keynote speaker at many venues. She
was someone consulted by government officials, by international networks,
and even, a few months ago, by Pope Francis.
As we watched Berta's rise as a global leader, our close friend and
colleague Gustavo Castro commented to me, "I hope she never loses her
humility." She never did.
I once asked Berta how to say "integrity" in Spanish. She translated it
"coherencia," coherence between one's stated principles and actions,
coherence amongst all parts of one's life. Berta had coherence.
She was highly critical of US Americans for our lack of that coherence. She
once led an anti-oppression training for an organization I was running, in
which she asked us to examine whether we were Caesars or artisans. She
meant whether our practice -- not just our statements -- aligned us with the
oppressors or with the oppressed, and whether we were promoting the
grassroots or ourselves as leaders. For a long time after, the refrigerator
that Berta and I shared held her line drawing of a thonged Roman sandal. She
also commented to me once that the problem with US Americans is our
attachment to comfort.
Berta herself eschewed comfort. She lived in the modest house in which she
was raised, where she cared for her elderly mother. She slept in a bare
cement room, more than half of which had been converted to her office,
housing her desk with its mountain range of documents and small computer
table. Her trademark style -- regardless of with whom she was meeting -- was
jeans, sneakers, and a cotton shirt. She did not shop, go to fancy
restaurants, take a plane when a bus was available.
Besides COPINH and the struggle for justice, Berta had another profound
commitment: to her mother and her four children. I recall watching the deep
pride on Berta's face when one of her daughters, then only 7 or so, recited
a poem "Las Margaritas" (The Daisies) for a group of foreign visitors; it
was a very different expression than I had ever seen. She grew prouder as
her three daughters and son grew older, all of them holding the flame for
justice.
Following Berta's murder, her children and mother issued a statement in
which they said, "We know with complete certainty that the motivation for
her vile assassination was her struggle against the exploitation of nature's
common wealth and the defense of the Lenca people. Her murder is an attempt
to put an end to the struggle of the Lenca people against all forms of
exploitation and expulsion. It is an attempt to halt the construction of a
new world.
"Berta's struggle was not only for the environment, it was for system
change, in opposition to capitalism, racism and patriarchy."
After the Honduran government dropped sedition charges against Berta -- one
of its countless attempts to silence her - in 2013, someone asked her mother
if she were scared for her daughter. Laughing, Berta quoted her mother's
response: "Absolutely not. She's doing exactly what she should be doing."
Berta's humor was legend. A joke from her, and her soft
up-and-down-the-scales laugh, punctuated the most tense of moments and kept
many of us going, even as she never strayed from the gravity of the
situation. One of her jokes was recirculated this week by radical Honduran
Jesuit priest Ismael "Melo" Moreno. He once accompanied her to Rio Blanco,
where someone snapped a photo of them together. As she peered at the
picture, Berta laughed and said to Melo, "Let's see which of the two of us
goes first."
When Berta saw a performance of the Raging Grannies, a group of elder women
who dress up in outrageous skirts and joyously sing protest songs at rallies
and events in Albuquerque, she told me, "I never wanted to live to be an old
woman. Now I do." That chance was just taken from her.
Berta Cáceres with children, circa 1999. (Photo: Beverly Bell)
Repression in the Wake of Berta's Death
One person witnessed the assassination: Gustavo Castro Soto, coordinator of
Otros Mundos Chiapas/Friends of the Earth Mexico, coordinator of the
Mesoamerican Movement against the Extractive Mining Model (M4), and
co-founder and board member of . A close friend and ally of Berta, Gustavo
slept in her house on the last night of her life to provide accompaniment in
the hope of deterring violence, something dozens of us have had to do for
her over the years. Gustavo was shot twice and feigned death. Berta died in
his arms.
Gustavo was immediately detained in physically and psychologically inhumane
conditions by the Honduran government, and held for several days for
"questioning." The subsequent days have resembled a bad spy movie, with
Gustavo finally given permission to leave the country, only to be seized at
the migration checkpoint at the airport by Honduran authorities, then placed
into protective custody in the Mexican Embassy, only to be handed back to
Hondurans, who took him back to the town of La Esperanza again for
"questioning." The Honduran government has just said that Gustavo must stay
in Honduras for 30 days. He is being "protected" by the Tigers, vicious
US-funded and -trained "special forces."
Chillingly, according to the State Department, the US is cooperating with
the Honduran investigators. A note from a close colleague, from outside
Gustavo's place of detention yesterday, said that a team of US "FBI types"
are actually in the interrogation room. The role of the US government in the
attempted destruction of social movements in Honduras is vast. One can draw
also draw a straight line from Washington to Berta's death. But that is the
topic of another article.
Gustavo continues to be in terrible danger in Honduran custody, as what he
witnessed is an impediment to the government's attempts to pin Berta's
murder on COPINH itself. In a note to some friends on March 6, Gustavo
wrote, "The death squads know that they did not kill me, and I am certain
that they want to accomplish their task."
The Honduran government also imprisoned COPINH leader Aureliano "Lito"
Molina Villanueva for two days just after Berta's murder, on "suspicion in a
crime of passion." It is interrogating COPINH leaders Tomas Gomez and Sotero
Chaverria, while denying them lawyers. This is part of an effort to
criminalize COPINH members. Now, COPINH needs more than ever to be
protected, to be supported, and to carry on the legacy that Berta helped to
build.
¡Berta Lives!
Berta touched everyone she met, and even countless ones she didn't. My young
daughter is one of those. The morning of Berta's death, she wrote this: "Bev
tells me that her close friend Berta died last night. I was shocked, because
how can somebody kill someone who was only trying to do what's right? Then I
remembered they killed Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. If I die for doing
the right thing, that would let me know that I did my part in this world.
Just like Berta."
When Berta received the 2015 Goldman Prize, the most prestigious
environmental award in the world, she dedicated the prize to rebellion, to
her mother, to the Lenca people, to Rio Blanco, to COPINH -- and "to the
martyrs who gave their lives in defense of the riches of nature."
Now Berta is one of these martyrs.
Berta, Gustavo, and I were co-founders in 1999, and have remained active
members of, the grassroots network Convergence of Movements of the Peoples
of the Americas (COMPA). Early on the horrific morning of March 3, a COMPA
listserv note blasted the news of Berta's assassination. Reading that
message, I spotted the posting just prior, dated February 24. It was from
Berta. It read simply, "Aqui!" I am here!
She is here. Long may Berta live, in the hearts, minds, passions, and
actions of all of us. May all women and men commit themselves to realizing
the vision of transformation, dignity, and justice for which Berta lived,
and for which she died.
¡Berta Cáceres, presente!
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
BEVERLY BELL
Beverly Bell has worked for more than three decades as an advocate,
organizer and writer in collaboration with social movements in Latin
America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the US. Her focus areas are just
economies, democratic participation and gender justice. Beverly currently
serves as associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and
coordinator of Other Worlds. She is author of "Walking on Fire: Haitian
Women Stories of Survival and Resistance" and of "Fault Lines: Views Across
Haiti's Divide." She is also a member of Truthout's Board of Advisers.
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Berta Lives! The Life and Legacy of Berta Cáceres
Thursday, 10 March 2016 00:00 By Beverly Bell, Other Worlds | Op-Ed
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reference not valid.
Berta Cáceres rallies a crowd. (Photo: HispanTV)I began writing a
eulogy for Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores years ago, though she died only last
week. Berta was assassinated by Honduran government-backed death squads on
March 3. Like many who knew and worked with her, I was aware that this
fighter for indigenous peoples' power; for control over their own
territories; for women's and LGBTQ rights; for authentic democracy; for the
well-being of Pachamama; for an end to tyranny by transnational capital; and
for an end to US empire was not destined to die of old age. She spoke too
much truth to too much power.
Berta cut her teeth on revolution. She was strongly marked by the
broadcasts from Cuba and Sandinista-led Nicaragua that her family listened
to clandestinely, gathered around a radio with the volume turned very low;
those stations were outlawed in Honduras. Always a committed Leftist,
Berta's mother raised her many children to believe in justice. Doña Bertha
-- the mother made her youngest child her namesake -- was mayor and governor
of her town and state back when women were neither, in addition to being a
midwife. She was Berta's life-long inspiration. As a young adult, like so
many others from the region who shared her convictions, Berta went on to
support the Salvadoran revolution.
In 1993, Berta -- a Lenca Native -- cofounded the Civic Council of Popular
and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). At that time in the
country, there was little pride and even less power in being indigenous.
Berta created COPINH to build the political strength of Lencas, campesinos,
and other grassroots sectors to transform one of the most corrupt,
anti-democratic, and unequal societies in the hemisphere.
A Political Force: COPINH Under Berta's leadership
Berta loved to say, "They fear us because we're fearless." The fearlessness
paid off over the years. COPINH has successfully reclaimed ancestral lands,
winning unheard-of communal land titles. They have stalled or stopped dams,
logging operations, and mining exploration -- not to mention free-trade
agreements. They have prevented many precious and sacred places from being
plundered and destroyed.
In addition to Berta's remarkable leadership, COPINH's victories have come
through their size, strength, unity, and fierce commitment. Communities have
participated in hundreds of protests, from their local mayors' office to the
steps of the national congress. They have occupied public spaces, including
several of the six US military bases in their country, and refused to leave.
They have shut down the road to Tegucigalpa, strategically blocking goods
from moving to the city. They have declared a boycott of all international
financial institutions on their lands. They have helped coordinate 150 local
referendums to raise the stakes on democracy.
Here is one of many tales that Berta told of strategies and actions. The
backstory is that Honduran farmers -- which most COPINH members are -- wear
thick work boots made of unventilated rubber. Over their course of
containing sweaty feet, they come to smell horrendously, so bad that
campesinos/as refer to them as bombas, bombs. Early in COPINH's history, a
team went from La Esperanza to Tegucigalpa to negotiate with the government
on a land titling law. The discussions went on for days. Berta told that,
during lunchtime, the government received lavish, catered meals; the COPINH
members had no money, and so their side of the table stayed empty. Far less
connected in those days, the group had nowhere to sleep or shower, and spent
the nights in the streets. At one point, the negotiations were tense and the
members of COPINH's team were shaky on their strategy. They asked for a
recess, but the government refused. So someone on the COPINH side gave a
discrete signal, and altogether the farmer-activists pulled off their
bombas. The smell was so toxic that the government officials fled the room.
COPINH was able to regroup and develop a stunning strategy. The indigenous
radicals won the law.
The most recent campaign and partial victory are also the proximate causes
of Berta's death: stopping the Agua Zarca dam project on a sacred Lenca
river. The COPINH community of Rio Blanco -- everyone: elders, toddlers,
nursing mothers -- formed a human barricade and blocked construction of the
dam. Meanwhile, Berta, other members of COPINH, and national and
international friends pressured the World Bank and the largest dam company
in the world, Chinese state-owned Sinohydro, to pull out. Rio Blanco did not
blockade the construction for an hour or for a day, or for a week. They did
it for more than a year. They did it until they won. They got the most
powerful financial interests in the world to abandon the project.
Tragically, because other financial interests are always waiting in the
wings to plunder for profit, the dam is still under construction.
Forty-eight more are either planned or underway on their lands.
Berta's belief in participatory democracy extended profoundly to her
everyday practice. As the unparalleled leader of COPINH, and with a large
gap between her level of education and political experience and that of all
but a few in the group, it would be have been easy for her to act on her
own. Yet she always made herself accountable to the communities she worked
for.
I saw the degree of this commitment in action one night when Berta called in
to Utopia, COPINH's rural community meeting center, and asked to speak to
everyone. Fifteen or so people quickly gathered around the cell phone on the
shaky wooden table next to the only light, that of a candle. Berta explained
a fairly pro forma request that had come to her from a government office,
and proposed a response. When she was finished, she asked the almost
exclusively illiterate, campesino/na group, "¿Cheque sí, o cheque no?" All
raised their thumbs toward the little cell phone and called out, "Sí!" No
joint decision had been required, and yet she had sought consensus.
That's accountability.
Berta Cáceres 1973 - 2016. (Photo: Fr Melo Coto SJ and ISN) The Woman
Behind the Myth
Berta was unflappable. She was calm in the face of chaos and strategic in
the face of disaster. She got right in the face of soldiers and goons when
they aggressed her or others, and told them what was what.
Berta was indefatigable, working around the clock with no complaint. When
not traveling around Honduras or the world to raise support for the
struggle, she would wake early and go straight to her desk to receive
updates, often on the most recent attacks on COPINH members, and in those
cases to write condemnations -- all even before a cup of coffee. She would
then jump into her yellow beater truck to pick up other members of COPINH
and head off to wherever action or investigation was needed.
I was amazed that Berta drove that noteworthy truck everywhere without
protection, and that she lived in a house secured by only a small bolt and a
couple of friendly dogs. Then I realized that it made no difference how much
security she had. The government and the companies she opposed almost always
knew where she was (Berta also spent periods in deep hiding), and how to get
her when they were ready to kill her.
Berta took two small breaks in her life. The first was a two-week vacation
with a friend in a neighboring country, the second a three-month semi-repose
at my house in Albuquerque -- though even then she spent most of her days
building a continent-wide boycott of the World Bank and Inter-American
Development Bank.
Even as she served her community, Berta rose in the past decade to become an
international people's diplomat. She was a heroine to many global movements,
a critical player in many struggles, a keynote speaker at many venues. She
was someone consulted by government officials, by international networks,
and even, a few months ago, by Pope Francis.
As we watched Berta's rise as a global leader, our close friend and
colleague Gustavo Castro commented to me, "I hope she never loses her
humility." She never did.
I once asked Berta how to say "integrity" in Spanish. She translated it
"coherencia," coherence between one's stated principles and actions,
coherence amongst all parts of one's life. Berta had coherence.
She was highly critical of US Americans for our lack of that coherence. She
once led an anti-oppression training for an organization I was running, in
which she asked us to examine whether we were Caesars or artisans. She meant
whether our practice -- not just our statements -- aligned us with the
oppressors or with the oppressed, and whether we were promoting the
grassroots or ourselves as leaders. For a long time after, the refrigerator
that Berta and I shared held her line drawing of a thonged Roman sandal. She
also commented to me once that the problem with US Americans is our
attachment to comfort.
Berta herself eschewed comfort. She lived in the modest house in which she
was raised, where she cared for her elderly mother. She slept in a bare
cement room, more than half of which had been converted to her office,
housing her desk with its mountain range of documents and small computer
table. Her trademark style -- regardless of with whom she was meeting -- was
jeans, sneakers, and a cotton shirt. She did not shop, go to fancy
restaurants, take a plane when a bus was available.
Besides COPINH and the struggle for justice, Berta had another profound
commitment: to her mother and her four children. I recall watching the deep
pride on Berta's face when one of her daughters, then only 7 or so, recited
a poem "Las Margaritas" (The Daisies) for a group of foreign visitors; it
was a very different expression than I had ever seen. She grew prouder as
her three daughters and son grew older, all of them holding the flame for
justice.
Following Berta's murder, her children and mother issued a statement in
which they said, "We know with complete certainty that the motivation for
her vile assassination was her struggle against the exploitation of nature's
common wealth and the defense of the Lenca people. Her murder is an attempt
to put an end to the struggle of the Lenca people against all forms of
exploitation and expulsion. It is an attempt to halt the construction of a
new world.
"Berta's struggle was not only for the environment, it was for system
change, in opposition to capitalism, racism and patriarchy."
After the Honduran government dropped sedition charges against Berta -- one
of its countless attempts to silence her - in 2013, someone asked her mother
if she were scared for her daughter. Laughing, Berta quoted her mother's
response: "Absolutely not. She's doing exactly what she should be doing."
Berta's humor was legend. A joke from her, and her soft
up-and-down-the-scales laugh, punctuated the most tense of moments and kept
many of us going, even as she never strayed from the gravity of the
situation. One of her jokes was recirculated this week by radical Honduran
Jesuit priest Ismael "Melo" Moreno. He once accompanied her to Rio Blanco,
where someone snapped a photo of them together. As she peered at the
picture, Berta laughed and said to Melo, "Let's see which of the two of us
goes first."
When Berta saw a performance of the Raging Grannies, a group of elder women
who dress up in outrageous skirts and joyously sing protest songs at rallies
and events in Albuquerque, she told me, "I never wanted to live to be an old
woman. Now I do." That chance was just taken from her.
Berta Cáceres with children, circa 1999. (Photo: Beverly Bell)
Repression in the Wake of Berta's Death
One person witnessed the assassination: Gustavo Castro Soto, coordinator of
Otros Mundos Chiapas/Friends of the Earth Mexico, coordinator of the
Mesoamerican Movement against the Extractive Mining Model (M4), and
co-founder and board member of . A close friend and ally of Berta, Gustavo
slept in her house on the last night of her life to provide accompaniment in
the hope of deterring violence, something dozens of us have had to do for
her over the years. Gustavo was shot twice and feigned death. Berta died in
his arms.
Gustavo was immediately detained in physically and psychologically inhumane
conditions by the Honduran government, and held for several days for
"questioning." The subsequent days have resembled a bad spy movie, with
Gustavo finally given permission to leave the country, only to be seized at
the migration checkpoint at the airport by Honduran authorities, then placed
into protective custody in the Mexican Embassy, only to be handed back to
Hondurans, who took him back to the town of La Esperanza again for
"questioning." The Honduran government has just said that Gustavo must stay
in Honduras for 30 days. He is being "protected" by the Tigers, vicious
US-funded and -trained "special forces."
Chillingly, according to the State Department, the US is cooperating with
the Honduran investigators. A note from a close colleague, from outside
Gustavo's place of detention yesterday, said that a team of US "FBI types"
are actually in the interrogation room. The role of the US government in the
attempted destruction of social movements in Honduras is vast. One can draw
also draw a straight line from Washington to Berta's death. But that is the
topic of another article.
Gustavo continues to be in terrible danger in Honduran custody, as what he
witnessed is an impediment to the government's attempts to pin Berta's
murder on COPINH itself. In a note to some friends on March 6, Gustavo
wrote, "The death squads know that they did not kill me, and I am certain
that they want to accomplish their task."
The Honduran government also imprisoned COPINH leader Aureliano "Lito"
Molina Villanueva for two days just after Berta's murder, on "suspicion in a
crime of passion." It is interrogating COPINH leaders Tomas Gomez and Sotero
Chaverria, while denying them lawyers. This is part of an effort to
criminalize COPINH members. Now, COPINH needs more than ever to be
protected, to be supported, and to carry on the legacy that Berta helped to
build.
¡Berta Lives!
Berta touched everyone she met, and even countless ones she didn't. My young
daughter is one of those. The morning of Berta's death, she wrote this: "Bev
tells me that her close friend Berta died last night. I was shocked, because
how can somebody kill someone who was only trying to do what's right? Then I
remembered they killed Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. If I die for doing
the right thing, that would let me know that I did my part in this world.
Just like Berta."
When Berta received the 2015 Goldman Prize, the most prestigious
environmental award in the world, she dedicated the prize to rebellion, to
her mother, to the Lenca people, to Rio Blanco, to COPINH -- and "to the
martyrs who gave their lives in defense of the riches of nature."
Now Berta is one of these martyrs.
Berta, Gustavo, and I were co-founders in 1999, and have remained active
members of, the grassroots network Convergence of Movements of the Peoples
of the Americas (COMPA). Early on the horrific morning of March 3, a COMPA
listserv note blasted the news of Berta's assassination. Reading that
message, I spotted the posting just prior, dated February 24. It was from
Berta. It read simply, "Aqui!" I am here!
She is here. Long may Berta live, in the hearts, minds, passions, and
actions of all of us. May all women and men commit themselves to realizing
the vision of transformation, dignity, and justice for which Berta lived,
and for which she died.
¡Berta Cáceres, presente!
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Beverly Bell
Beverly Bell has worked for more than three decades as an advocate,
organizer and writer in collaboration with social movements in Latin
America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the US. Her focus areas are just
economies, democratic participation and gender justice. Beverly currently
serves as associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and
coordinator of Other Worlds. She is author of "Walking on Fire: Haitian
Women Stories of Survival and Resistance" and of "Fault Lines: Views Across
Haiti's Divide." She is also a member of Truthout's Board of Advisers.
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