‘Her Life Hung by a Thread Because of This Work’

Janine Jackson interviewed Beverly Bell about Honduran indigenous environmental activist Berta Cáceres for the May 1, 2015, CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. Note: Cáceres was murdered, apparently in retaliation for her activist work, on March 2, 2016–see FAIR.org, 3/4/16.

Berta Caceres with members of COPINH in the Rio Blanco region of Honduras.

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Janine Jackson: The Goldman Environmental Prize is, among other things, an opportunity for media to explore particular stories from around the world, as represented by the work and struggles of the grassroots activists the prize spotlights each year. It’s overwhelmingly a missed opportunity, though, and 2015 looks like no exception.

Corporate media disinterest may be related to the fact that serious, deep reporting of the lives of people like Honduran indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres and her group COPINH, one of this year’s recipients, requires an unflinching look at the powerful governments and corporations that repress people like Cáceres, often violently, in an effort to get at the natural resources in their communities.

Beverly Bell is coordinator of the group Other Worlds and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. She’s worked and traveled with Berta Cáceres and the group COPINH, the National Council of Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, for many years. Welcome to CounterSpin, Beverly Bell.

Beverly Bell

Beverly Bell: Thank you, Janine. I’m so glad to be here, and especially for the wonderful opportunity to highlight this amazing, amazing movement in Honduras that so few people in the US are aware of.

JJ: Well, yes, and looking into it I found virtually nothing about Berta Cáceres or COPINH in the major US media. A San Francisco Chronicle piece, a Fox News Latino piece, and a mention in a Tribune wire piece about Myint Zaw, another recipient. So I imagine that many listeners really don’t know much about her or her work. Can you tell us what Berta Cáceres and COPINH do that earns them both death threats in Honduras and the Goldman Environmental Prize?

BB: First, just to underscore what you said, that the Goldman Prize, which is considered the “green Nobel Prize”—it’s the largest prize in the world for environmental justice activists, five of the six recipients this year were members of movements who were fighting corporate extraction and mega-development projects on their land. So you’re right, it is no surprise that the mainstream press has overlooked this.

But for us, it is a huge victory. All of us who care about what’s happening in Honduras and all of us who care about fighting the role of the US, which in Honduras is utterly central, Honduras being basically the prime client state of the US government in Central America, the role it has played for many years.

But to tell you about Berta: First to say, Berta is an extraordinary woman. She was raised by a very, very radical mother in a small town in Honduras. Her mother was mayor and then governor of the state. And Berta grew up listening to clandestine revolutionary radio from Cuba and Nicaragua. They had to go into an inner room and close the doors to listen, because they would have been arrested. But she was radicalized at a very early age, and came to understand the roots of the repression and the US domination that Honduras has, as I said, lived under for a long time.

She started this group COPINH, which is composed of Lenca indigenous and other rural-based peoples, about 20 years ago. The group has been stunning in its victories. For example, they are the first group that ever got the Honduran law changed to grant communal title, instead of individual land titles, which allows for collective indigenous ownership. And then they went on to win many, many cases of land being granted to their peoples, where the land had previously been stolen. They have virtually cleared Lenca lands of outside logging operations. They’ve actually stopped, through direct action, 36 logging and sawmills, and now the loggers don’t even try to go into their lands anymore. They got one large community declared a protected area, and that’s pretty much unheard of.

They were among those who won the provision in the Honduran constitution to free, prior and informed consent by the government before any extraction or development projects get installed on their land. Well, of course this has not been respected, but it is a huge victory on the books.

They also were very key in getting Manuel Zelaya, the president that the US helped overthrow in 2009—and, incidentally, in Hillary Clinton’s new book, she does confirm the role of the US in the coup, and there’s a lot of other evidence. But one of the reasons for that coup was that COPINH was so influential in pushing Zelaya to support land reform. And that just completely freaked the oligarchy that has pretty much run Honduras. And so they said, “No, wait, wait, wait, we can’t live in a country where grassroots peoples have the power to take our land away,” and that was one of the big factors behind the coup.

Oh, I could go on and on and on about their victories. But there’s one for which she won the award, and I will say that she and COPINH won it. And just a parenthetical, Goldman is very much a product of the US culture, where we choose to look at individual action. But Berta Cáceres herself would never have accomplished any of this; it was all done, yes, with her extraordinary leadership, but through the tens of thousands of people who comprise COPINH.

And what happened in this case that actually won her the award is, in a small Lenca community called Rio Blanco, the indigenous peoples woke up one morning, and basically there were bulldozers and other heavy equipment going over their bean fields, and making their way to the sacred Gualcarque River, where they began installing the infrastructure for a dam. This was totally illegal. The river was owned, as much as water can be owned, by that community, and yet they proceeded. So Berta and COPINH fought for quite a while, and no one heard them until they said, “To heck with this, we’ll just take direct action,” which is something that COPINH is great at.

So they set up a roadblock and they cut a trench in the land, and every day for a very long time, every member of the community, from the smallest babies to the eldest, went down and stood in front of that roadblock. And all of us collectively, the big movement part of it, were able to get some international attention and international pressure, and the Honduran government, which was behind this dam, and the company that is partly owned by a Honduras man—who, by the way, is a West Point graduate; the US military has a role all the way through here—responded with tremendous violence, killed three members of the community, macheted three people, kidnapped people, threatened people.

Berta herself had to live underground when there were charges brought against her that basically amounted to sedition. One of the charges was that she was a threat to the national security of Honduras. And there was an arrest warrant out for her, so her life hung by a thread, and continues to, in part because of this work in Rio Blanco.

But they won. Janine, it took a couple of years, but the World Bank pulled out and the largest dam company in the world, which is the Chinese government-owned Sinohydro, pulled out, and the river is free-flowing and it is undammed, and it is back to belonging to the indigenous peoples.

JJ: Many Americans do see themselves as environmentalists, perhaps as frustrated environmentalists, and media I think could serve them better by showing connections not just between what their US government does in other countries and the impact of that, but also showing the connections between their environmental concerns and, sure, what light bulb they use but also, much more so, ways to show support for social movements in, for example, Honduras — to see that as part of what you as an individual can do in terms of your environmental action.

BB: I absolutely agree. One thing that we have to do, if we are going to be global citizens, to really enforce the protection of human life and that of the Earth, is to look at the underpinnings of what environmental degradation is about. Yes, it’s about our driving our cars, et cetera. But it’s also about these US corporations backed by US government that are allowed to run roughshod over peoples’ lands in the name of, again, profit.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Beverly Bell of the group Other Worlds. Find their work online at OtherWorldsArePossible.org. Beverly Bell, there’s a great deal more we could talk about today, but unfortunately we’ll have to end it here. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

BB: Janine, thank you, and I appreciate so much the great work that you all do at CounterSpin.

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