The Civil Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, 6
months after the assassination of COPINH’s General Coordinator, hereby states
that:
- The assassination of the woman who served as COPINH’s General Coordinator and who was a founding member of the organization was a crime committed against the entire Lenca people’s struggle to build autonomy and defend Mother Earth, our shared natural resources, and our rights as indigenous peoples.
- Despite this crime
we re-affirm that we will continue our fierce struggle against the deadly
projects that have been imposed without consultation since the 2009 military
coup d’état. We know that our sister Berta Cáceres Flores has not died as
long as neither her struggle nor her political project, embodied by this
organization, have died.
- Our compañera Berta Cáceres, our
sister, is the victim of a State crime, having suffered persecution by
Honduran authorities, security forces and courts and criminalization of
her work throughout her years of political activity, aided and abetted by corporations
like DESA, and international banks like FMO, CABEI and FINNFUND, who want
to plunder our shared natural resources to turn them into their own profit.
- Over the 23 years
of our organization’s existence, this
crime has been the biggest blow to our people and it is an attempt to
end the struggle waged by COPINH, which continues to suffer from
demonization and criminalization by the government and national and international
corporations and financial institutions.
- Having accompanied
Berta in her struggle, which is our people’s struggle, we are completely
clear that justice will not come from the corrupt and inefficient
institutions that have promoted the extermination of peoples in resistance
and that the arrests they have made do not represent justice for this
assassination but are clear example of the way that impunity is produced
in this country.
- COPINH continues
to demand the creation of an
Independent Investigation Commission so that we can get to the bottom
of this crime, a demand that has fallen on the government’s deaf ears.
- For several years COPINH
has been demanding the expulsion of
the Agua Zarca Hydroelectric Project from Lenca territory, where it
has been imposed without consultation, along with the 50 other concessions for dams and wind-power megaprojects that
they seek to impose upon our territory.
- The Lenca people
are fighting to live in peace, which is why we demand the de-militarization of our territories, where the
soldiers, police and private security forces exist to secure private
investments by violating the most basic of human rights and sewing fear,
terror and death.
- Faced with this
assassination, the corporations and banks who finance terror and death
should know that COPINH will be unwavering in its efforts to find those
who participated in this act. May the perpetrators know that we will not
rest in our search for Justice for our sister and that we will denounce each
and every attack we suffer for carrying out our work before the
international authorities.
- COPINH knows that
both before and after the 2009 coup d’état the violence and atrocities come
from the interference of the U.S., with its money and its interventions, as
with the coup d’état itself. The imposition of the extractivist model
comes as a result of the U.S. capitalist doctrine and Berta’s
assassination is part of a clear strategy to eliminate by force any form of
opposition to that economic model, which the U.S. is at the heart of.
- We denounce the campaigns to criminalize our
organization, financed by DESA on national TV, where they roll out Gloria
López, a person who does not represent Lenca women and is a farce of a
dignified indigenous person and who we are sure is being used by Honduran
businessmen to manipulate public opinion and create more conflict.
- COPINH is
completely clear what justice in the face of this enormous loss means:
finding who assassinated her, who gave the order to assassinate her, and
denouncing the criminal power structure that allowed for her
assassination. It means that the work of resistance, of emancipation, of
rebellion by COPINH and the Lenca people remains steadfast. It means
tireless struggle against this economic, political and cultural system
that seeks to eliminate our communities, their ancestral resistance and
alternatives to dispossession, exploitation, racism and exclusion.
- Justice is keeping
the memory of Berta’s life alive, the convictions that led her to be the greatest leader of the Lenca
people in the history of the Lenca people’s resistance. Justice is
clearly telling the corporations, the representatives of the state and all
of those who enter Lenca territory that we will not allow the development
of any project, action or activity that rolls over people or that
eliminates our voices. It means development by the communities and NOT by
corporations that take advantage of communities, development based on
proposals that stem from our needs.
Six months after this vile crime the Lenca people
continue to cry over this loss for the Honduran social movement, yet we have
not forgotten that her spirit accompanies us as one more ancestor who has
joined us in the millenarian resistance of the Lenca people.
Six months after this assassination thousands of
voices have risen to demand Justice for Berta and to take up our demands, for
which COPINH profoundly thanks the communities, grassroots social movements and
civil society from all regions of the continent and world. As a people in
struggle we know that justice will come only through the efforts of the
grassroots social movement and people of conscience.
Berta didn’t die, she multiplied!
With the ancestral
strength of Berta, Lempira, Mota, Iselaca and Etempica we raise our voices full
of life, justice, freedom, dignity and peace!
La Esperanza, Honduras, September 2nd, 2016
