What the murder of an environmentalist leader reveals about democracy, feminism and Hillary Clinton
 
Berta Cáceres was a woman who stood up for feminism, indigenous rights and the environment. When she won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize last year for her work fighting the Agua Zarca dam, she said, “We must shake our conscience free of the rapacious capitalism, racism and patriarchy that will only assure our own self-destruction.”
On March 3rd, Berta was assassinated in her home in Honduras. She and other members of the group she founded, the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras, had been in conflict with the dam operators, local government, police and military. In her speech, she appeared to foreshadow her death, saying, “Giving our lives in various ways for the protection of rivers is giving our lives for the well-being of humanity and of this planet.” Foreign Policy in Focus even wrote a profile several years ago called “Berta Cáceres is Still Alive”.
It was another woman, Hillary Clinton, who as U.S. Secretary of State in 2009 backed a coup in Honduras that ousted the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya.
Journalist Greg Grandin has described Zelaya as a president who was “remarkably supportive of ‘intersectionality’ (that is, a left politics not reducible to class or political economy)”. For example, he tried to legalise the morning-after pill. But after the coup, Honduras’s coup congress – as Grandin points out, the one legitimated by Hillary Clinton – passed an “absolute ban on emergency contraception,” criminalising “the sale, distribution, and use of the ‘morning-after pill’” and punishing women who used it in the same way as if they had obtained or performed an abortion, which in Honduras is completely illegal.
Clinton’s emails, Grandin writes, have “revealed the central role she played in undercutting Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president, and undercutting the opposition movement demanding his restoration. In so doing, Clinton allied with the worst sectors of Honduran society.” He adds: “Such is the nature of the ‘unity government’ Clinton helped institutionalise. In her book, Hard Choices, Clinton holds up her Honduran settlement as a proud example of her trademark clear-eyed, “pragmatic” foreign policy approach.
Since the coup, femicides – murders of women – have skyrocketed, as have torture and murder by military and paramilitary security forces. The end goal, as Grandin describes it, is “the wholesale deliverance of the country’s land and resources to transnational pillagers” – like the Canadian company building the dam. The Guardian reported that environmental activists are more likely to be killed in Honduras than anywhere else, and more than 80 per cent of murders go unpunished: “Part of the problem, according to the IACHR, is that the military has taken on roles that should be left to a civilian police. They tend to work in conjunction with powerful interests, while human rights activists are criminalised.”
Today, the United States continues to fund the Honduran military. Meanwhile, the Honduran government has apparently asked the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to help it with its investigation into the death of Berta Cáceres. Here’s one clue that might help them out. The London Review of Books reported that “the official government statement lamenting the murder and promising to find those responsible was at first dated 1 March, two days before Cáceres’s death.”
Like Hillary, Berta was a woman. She was a wife. She was a mother. But Berta is dead and Hillary is alive. And Hillary’s “pragmatic” foreign policy, modelled on that of her hero (and war criminal) Henry Kissinger, is to blame.
Berta said in the same afore-mentioned speech, “Let us wake up! We’re out of time… Our Mother Earth – militarised, fenced-in, poisoned, a place where basic rights are systematically violated – demands that we take action.”
Not only do I challenge Hillary Clinton’s credentials as a feminist: I challenge her to answer for the death of Berta Cáceres.
In memory of Berta Cáceres, the NGO Cultural Survival is collecting donations for the organisation she led, Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (COPINH), whose members have been detained and threatened because of their opposition to the dam. You can donate here: https://www.culturalsurvival.org/donate/berta.
UPDATE

Image from: http://goo.gl/s7XlTI