South America

Fiona McLeod, a freelance writer reporting on environmental justice issues, highlights the film “Water For Life” which tells the story of three Indigenous activists in Central and South America as they face threats to their lives in the fight to protect their communities’ access to clean water and ancestral lands from mining, hydroelectric projects, and large-scale agriculture plans. The three activists have all previously received the Goldman Environmental Prize, and include the now deceased Berta Cáceres, a leader of the Lenca people who successfully stopped construction of a hydroelectric project in Honduras; Francisco Pineda, a subsistence agriculture farmer who led a movement that stopped a gold mine in El Salvador; and Alberto Curamil, an Indigenous Mapuche leader in Chile who organized to stop two hydroelectric projects on the sacred Cautín River. The podcast invited the filmmakers to discuss the narratives and stories shared during the film, specifically the human costs, sacrifices, and loss of environmental defenders in Latin America. In the story of Berta Cáceres, they share how she mobilized her community to resist the construction of the Agua Zarca Dam on the sacred Gualcarque River by the Honduran corporation DESA. The river is considered sacred and to be a place where female spirits live, and the dam was planned to be built in the heart of the river. As Berta put forth, the Lenca consider the river and Mother Earth to have rights, sentiments spoken long before the Rights of Nature movement had been used as a legal precedent. Less than a year after earning the Prize, Berta was assassinated in her home. Her death inspired activists around the world to support the Lenca’s fight to protect their ancestral land. Her three daughters, Olivia, Berta, and Laura Cáceres, carry on her work, continuing to raise international awareness of Berta’s work.