Berta Cáceres Flores is the “seed of freedom” for her indigenous Lenca people of Honduras and all who pay tribute to her legacy by continuing her struggle for indigenous liberation. Cáceres’s assassination, near midnight on March 3, 2016, was orchestrated by employees at the hydroelectric dam company Desarrollos Energéticos (DESA), after Cáceres and her community disrupted the dam’s construction on their ancestral lands and sacred Gualcarque river. Just this week, over five years later, the former head of DESA was convicted for her murder.
Liability at the individual and executive level for corporate-sponsored terrorism, assasinations, forced and trafficked child labor, or other human rights violations is, for the most part, largely non-existent. Now-former DESA President Roberto Castillo hired seven hitmen to carry out Cáceres’s murder, two of whom were trained by the US military. All seven were already tried and convicted in November 2018. Overwhelming evidence was also brought against DESA executives for their “knowledge and consent” and commission of Cáceres’s murder, yet most remained unhopeful at the chances of liability given historic and ongoing corporate immunity in courtrooms.
Castillo’s conviction shows that occasionally those responsible for human rights violations are actually held accountable. Yet, as the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH)—the organization Cáceres co-founded—writes, Castillo is “just one piece” of the “entire murderous, criminal structure” that is responsible for Cáceres’s murder and the ongoing struggle for Indigenous and Black liberation in Honduras. While accountability is necessary, justice for Cáceres—and Tomas García Domínguez, Nelson García, and so many other indigenous and environmental community organizers murdered for the same work—can and should go beyond simple prison sentences and individual liability.
Berta no se murió; se multiplicó
The Lenca people are a rural peasant class indigenous to Western Honduras, a land rich in natural resources, sacred rivers, and forests. The region has become a site of intense militarism, corporate land-grabs, mega-projects (such as dams and logging), foreign investment, and one of the deadliest places for environmental activists defending their homeland.
Berta Cáceres was a mother of four, the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize winner, and a fierce organizer against militarism, environmental and land destruction, racism, and patriarchy. Much of Cáceres’s drive and fight came from her mother, Austra Bertha Flores López, who supported thousands of refugees from El Salvador fleeing a civil war, provided healthcare to indigenous people who crossed the mountains every day to see her, and was a midwife to over 5,000 children.
The organization Cáceres co-founded, COPINH, helped build indigenous power and agency in a time where the Honduran government did not recognize their existence and multinational corporations and the government were increasingly stealing and privatizing their communal lands. At its core, COPINH is a people’s movement dedicated to ending what it describes as the “model of continuous occupation,” in which “state resources were plundered while sovereignty was consistently handed over to the North American empire in exchange for power and impunity for the national elite.”
In 1994, Cáceres and COPINH worked with the Black Garífuna community, students, peasants, and others to mobilize a massive demonstration at the capitol demanding the demilitarization of Honduras by both North American and Honduran forces and an end compulsory military service. They were successful: less than one year later, the Military Service Law was repealed and soldiers were removed from state institutions in response to the ongoing demonstrations.
Committed to rooting out patriarchy at the state and community level, Cáceres built the House of Healing and Justice of the Women of COPINH in 2015, which provided shelter and space for domestic violence survivors, promoted “Women’s Courts” to develop collaborative strategies around care and resistance against gender-based violence, and successfully halted the construction of the El Tigre dam after organizing countless marches led by women carrying their children and machetes in their hands.
Cáceres and COPINH’s work make clear that global militarism, a state monopoly on violence, intercommunity gender-based violence, and corporate greed all collude to criminalize, assassinate, destroy, and repress the protection of indigenous communal land and water. A single hydroelectric dam executive will now sit in prison for his role in this collusion, yet the ongoing violence against COPINH members and their land will continue, the DESA will resume building dams and forcibly displacing indigenous people (held to be illegal under international law), the US military will continue to train assassins-for-hire, and Honduran grave plots and prison cells will continue to house environmental activists. The system that killed Cáceres—and will continue to kill those after her—will continue to exist without system-change.
Much like former police officer Derek Chauvin’s unexpected conviction for the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, lauded by many Black activists as a “scapegoat” used only to restore faith in the system that killed him, COPINH encourages us to resist a similar urge of feeling that justice has been served simply with Castillo’s jail time. A conviction like Castillo’s will only ever be an exception to the rule, used to placate all who Cáceres inspired and who continue to take up the struggle in her footsteps. Corporate liability can and should extend beyond individual liability and, more importantly, justifying the existence of prisons that only always disproportionately will harm poor communities and communities of color by legitimising their use. Rather, corporate liability should instead include reparations, dismantling of mega-projects and the corporations that build them, and other forms of systemic, transformative justice.
As Honduras remains the most deadly country in the world for environmental, indigenous, and land-based defenders, corporate liability must expand beyond carceral-confined imaginations. Cáceres and COPINH demand that this “model of continuous occupation” ends at a system-level, and that we all must take action. As Cáceres urged us in her 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize acceptance speech in San Francisco, “We must shake our conscience free of the rapacious capitalism, racism, and patriarchy that will only assure our own self-destruction” and in its place imagine and build a world without state and corporate violence.
Hoda Katebi is a Legal Intern at Corporate Accountability Lab.
