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.
Cicero Guedes, a former sugar cane cutter turned land rights activist, worked in Campo dos Goytacazes, a settlement in Brazil. There he organized with the Landless Workers Movement (MST) to help families achieve what he had received: legal claim to land as part of Brazil’s agrarian reform movement.
For his tireless work, Cicero was murdered, shot more than a dozen times while he rode his bicycle to the fields. His assassination seemed intended to send a message to other would-be land rights activists: organize and you will pay the ultimate price.
On May 1 of this year, my colleague Saulo Araujo (Program Coordinator for Latin America) and I spent the day with Rafael Alegría, a leader of the Vía Campesina based in Honduras. The video below offers some of his reflections.
Rafael’s message is clear:
They left San Vicente searching for a peaceful place to live, free of the oppressive British colonial powers. Three thousand women, men and children sailing atop the blue waters of the Caribbean Sea were thirsty and hungry. The sun over their heads was abrasive. Many perished before reaching the island of Roatan, Honduras, their new home. Today, many of their Garifuna heirs, an Afro-descendant population in the Caribbean coast of Central America, are still struggling for days of peace, like their ancestors envisioned some 213 years ago.
Despite being denied, again, title to the land on which they have labored, there is no quit in this group of women from El Estribo.
By Alicia Tozour
Below is a letter received from one of our Honduran colleagues asking for support to end human rights violations in the country. As she describes, the situation is worsening. Please visit our action page now to send a letter to President Obama. Thank you.
By Wendy Cruz
