The Guardian recently reported that international investors plan to pull $44 million in funding from the Agua Zarca dam megaproject in Honduras—a project opposed by Indigenous and social movements for years. According to COPINH, however, investors have not yet withdrawn their funding for the dam.
Grassroots International recent ten-member delegation to Honduras included activists that were already at the forefront of awareness-building and funding around policy advocacy campaigns at the U.S. and international levels through their own political organizations. This composition of activists is key to following through on the delegation's commitment to its Honduran allies: getting the work done at the policy level requires a double-edged sword of root cause analysis and donors willing to speak that truth to power.
Following the brazen murder of activist Berta Cáceres, Grassroots International created an emergency fund and was able to raise over $50,000 for activist movements in Honduras.
Two of the fiercest Native battles in the Americas today are closely connected. They are led by the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota and by the Lenca people in Honduras, organized through the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH).
On November 10, 2016 six Garífuna youth were violently arrested in the Garífuna community Guadalupe, Colón.
In September 2016 eleven of our partners, grantees and allies flew to Goiás, Brazil to participate in a learning exchange of peasant movements that Grassroots International organized along with our friends at IDEX/Thousand Currents.
A jornada de Miriam Miranda de Honduras para a Cúpula da Justiça Climática do Povo a colocou na frente de milhares de pessoas em Nova York em setembro de 2015. Líder da Organização Fraterna Negra de Honduras (OFRANEH, parceira da...
With heavy hearts, Grassroots International mourns the death of Lesbia Yaneth Urquía Urquía, a member of COPINH (Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras), who was brutally killed on July 6, just 4 months after the assassination of Berta Cáceres. Lesbia Yaneth defended the rights of Indigenous communities and opposed the privatization of rivers in La Paz, Honduras. Since the 2009 military coup in Honduras, over 100 environmental activists (including Indigenous Peoples, peasant leaders, and more) have been killed, and thousands criminalized and jailed.
This Father’s Day we celebrate three men who courageously strive to overcome adversity and improve the lives of their families and of their communities: Carlos Marentes, Sr., Antonal Mortimer, and Alfredo Lopez.
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Berta Cáceres – indigenous, environmental, and human rights defender and fierce feminist who was assassinated in Honduras on March 3rd, 2016 – was, among so many other things, a mother in resistance. She inherited this from her mother, who was an inspiration to her, and she passed this down to her own daughters and son.
Berta’s mother, Austra Bertha Flores Lopez, worked as a midwife and served as mayor of their town and then governor of their state. She taught her daughter about fighting for justice from the time she was a child. During the period of intense violence of the 1980s, Austra took in and cared for refugees from El Salvador, showing her children what real solidarity looks like.
This Mother’s Day we celebrate three women who find the courage to overcome the great adversity they face as they work to improve the lives of their families and of their communities. Juslene, Esperanza and Samiha are three inspiring mothers who, working with Grassroots International’s partners in Haiti, Honduras and Palestine, are key leaders within their communities.
This month Grassroots International has been able to make several grants to movements in Honduras that are organizing in response to the assassination of Berta Cáceres, an indigenous environmental leader who was killed on March 3. Plus, we’ve added our voice (and thousands more!) to calls for justice for Berta and her community – and several financiers have pulled out of the controversial dam project threatening the Lenca peoples’ sacred and beloved Gualcarque River.
This year Grassroots International is dedicating International Women’s Day – March 8 – to Berta Cáceres, courageous indigenous Lenca leader and coordinator of the Civic Council of Indigenous People’s Organizations in Honduras (COPINH). Just days ago we learned that Berta was assassinated in her home. A leader in the Lenca community, Berta helped organize a powerful movement to stop the construction of the Agua Zarca dam and to protect the Gualcarque river basin. For more than a year the Lenca people maintained a human blockade to stop trucks from entering the dam construction site and thus halted its construction.
Last night indigenous rights leader and social justice warrior Berta Cáceres was murdered in her home in Honduras. This follows weeks of mounting threats and years of violence and aggression targeting indigenous peoples, women, small farmers and environmental activists in Honduras and throughout Central America.
In this moment when it is vital to assert that Black lives matter, the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance honors Black and Afro-Indigenous farmers, fishermen, and stewards of ancestral lands and water with the 2015 Food Sovereignty Prize.
The two prize winners are the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in the U.S., and the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH). The prizes will be presented in Des Moines on October 14, 2015.
The award honors both groups as a vital part of food chain workers, who together are creating food sovereignty, meaning a world with healthy, ecologically produced food, and democratic control over food systems.
By Lydia Simas
Grassroots International has been in close contact with our partners in Honduras throughout the recent elections there. Many offered first-hand reports that election observers and agrarian reform activists were intimidated, ballots were not collected, and people were threatened with violence and even killed. The report below from the Real News.com (Honduran Elections: Another Chapter of the Ongoing Coup) describes irregularities with the elections, including allegations of widespread voter suppression that ultimately failed the Honduran people.
