To honor slain Honduran activist Berta Cáceres, and to stop the cycle of violence that led to her death, Oxfam and its supporters are calling on all investors and companies involved in the Agua Zarca dam project—which Cáceres fiercely opposed—to withdraw their funding and involvement now.
“Berta’s death must be the last,” said Ed Pomfret, the head of Oxfam’s land-rights campaign, in a statement on Sunday. “The only good that can come of it is for her people to emerge successful in their struggle for rights to their lands and resources.”
Cáceres, an Indigenous Lenca activist and winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize, was assassinated in her home on March 3. She had long opposed the Agua Zarca dam, and had recently led a successful effort to pressure the World Bank and the largest dam company in the world, Chinese state-owned Sinohydro, to pull out of the project. “Tragically, because other financial interests are always waiting in the wings to plunder for profit,” Other Worlds co-founder Beverly Bell wrote last week, “the dam is still under construction.”
The day after Cáceres’ death, the group she co-founded—the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, or COPINH—issued a statement that read in part:
Some of those very same entities are targeted by the Oxfam campaign.
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