Bertha Zuniga
Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras [COPINH] – Rio Blanco, Honduras
Bertha Zuñiga is an environmental and indigenous rights activist in Honduras. She is the daughter of the late Berta Cáceres, an award winning environmentalist and indigenous rights leader who was murdered a week after receiving threats for opposing a hydroelectric project. Co-founded and formerly led by her mother, Zuñiga is now the leader of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), an indigenous rights organization that works to defend the environmental, cultural, economic, social, health, educational, and indigenous rights of the Lenca people.
“If I could tell my mother anything now, it would be ‘don’t worry: your fight lives on in me, in my brothers and sisters, and in our community.’”
Extractive industry companies hold concessions on more than 30 percent of Honduras’s land. With her siblings, Zúñiga Cáceres went to marches and protests – she learned young how to best avoid breathing in tear gas – read about racism, and spent time in the Indigenous communities that were her mother’s focus. The experience forever shaped her.
According to COPINH, the organization has stopped at least 50 logging projects and 10 hydroelectric dams that have threatened Lenca communities. They have also pressured the government of Honduras into signing the International Labour Organization Convention 169 on the Rights of Indigenous People. But just as Zuñiga continues with her mother’s legacy, she too is receiving threats for her environmental justice activism.
Zuniga has worked on the investigation into her mother’s death, and further plans to continue her mother’s work to advocate for the Lenca people against the dams.
“To make the ancestral struggles of the communities yours, is to assume a way of seeing and being in the world.”
Video 1) Demanding justice & defending territorial rights (Spanish with CC)
Video 2) Recovering democracy in Honduras (Spanish with CC)
