Today marks the 10th anniversary of Berta Cáceres’ Siembra (sowing), honoring the life, legacy, and enduring struggle of the Lenca Indigenous leader, environmental defender, and co-founder of Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras (COPINH).
In the Lenca worldview, Siembra is not simply remembrance. It is planting. It is continuity. It is the understanding that what is rooted in community cannot be extinguished.
For most of her life, Berta organized to defend rivers, forests, and Indigenous sovereignty in Honduras. She challenged dams, mining projects, militarization, and the political and economic interests that advance them. Through COPINH, she helped build one of the most powerful Indigenous resistance movements in the Americas.
Berta was assassinated for defending the sacred Gualcarque River from the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project, a project imposed without the free, prior, and informed consent of Lenca communities. She understood what so many movements across the world continue to confront: extractive projects backed by powerful political and economic interests often move forward through dispossession, militarization, and violence.
This week, Global Exchange is in Honduras accompanying COPINH and Lenca communities as they mark her 10-year Siembra, not only to remember, but to recommit.
Investigations and independent experts have made clear that the assassination was not an isolated act, but a crime linked to powerful economic interests, including members of the Atala Zablah family and financiers connected to the Agua Zarca project, as well as complicity within sectors of the Honduran state.
Accountability must extend beyond gunmen and intermediaries. It must reach intellectual authors, financial backers, and the political structures that enabled the violence.
It must also include international accountability.
U.S. security assistance, military training, diplomatic backing, and development financing have long strengthened institutions in Honduras that have failed to protect land and human rights defenders. International banks that financed extractive projects cannot evade scrutiny. Global North capital cannot remain insulated from consequence.
But the extractive model she confronted remains intact.
Across Honduras and throughout Latin America, land and water defenders continue to face threats, criminalization, and violence. Projects imposed without free, prior, and informed consent still advance. Communities defending territory still risk their lives.
We join COPINH, the Cáceres family, and communities in resistance in calling for:
• Full truth and accountability for Berta’s assassination — including intellectual and financial authors
• Accountability from the Honduran state and international actors who enabled or financed the project
• Protection for land and human rights defenders
• Respect for Indigenous sovereignty and free, prior, and informed consent
• An end to extractive violence and impunity
¡Berta no murió, se multiplicó!
Berta didn’t die. She multiplied.