Berta Cáceres 🌐

Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores (1971 – 2016) was a Honduran environmental activist, indigenous Lenca leader, and human rights defender. In 1993, she co-founded the *Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras* (COPINH) to defend indigenous land rights, culture, and natural ecosystems against illegal logging and mining.

Beginning in 2006, Cáceres led an unbroken grassroots campaign against the construction of the Agua Zarca mega-dam on the Gualcarque River, sacred to the Lenca people. Her organizing successfully pressured China's Sinohydro and the World Bank's International Finance Corporation to pull out of the project. In 2015, she was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. Despite facing dozens of death threats, arbitrary arrests, and sexual violence warnings, she refused to back down. On March 2, 2016, armed hitmen broke into her home in La Esperanza and murdered her; subsequent investigations implicated executives of the state-backed dam consortium.