ACTIVISTS & HEROES

VIJAY PRASAD–Now, four years after the assassination of Berta Cáceres, I spoke to her daughter Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres, the general coordinator of COPINH. It is important to mention that when Zúñiga Cáceres returned from her studies in Mexico City to take up the mantle of COPINH, she herself faced an attempt on her life on June 30, 2017. The assassination of Berta Cáceres came alongside the March 15, 2016, murder of Nelson Noé García of COPINH, and the October 18, 2016, murders of José Ángel Flores and Silmer Dionisio George of the Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguán (Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán, or MUCA). It is now well-known that Honduras has amongst the highest murder rates in the world; but that is not why these people are killed—they are killed for what they stand for, and whom they stand against.

MoA—Britain is currently holding an obscene show trial against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The hearing is designed to end with the extradition of Assange to the United States or with his death. In the U.S. he would be accused of a conspiracy to reveal secrets and put in jail for the rest of his life.

ED CURTIN—Times change.  Once in the United States of America, theologians were fêted as important social critics and considered worth heeding.  Two of the most famous in the mid-to-late twentieth century were Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich.  Both appeared on the cover of Henry Luce’s Time Magazine, and Barack Obama was later fond of referring to Niebuhr to justify his violent policies to extend the American empire.  Obama knew his audience, for Niebuhr was noted for a neo-orthodox theological perspective that encouraged “political realism,” popular among the elites who had created and extended the American empire. 

GEORGE WUERTHNER—Collaboration is always a one-way street. It is about reducing the areas protected as wilderness. It is a philosophy of “splitting the baby.” As King Solomon recognized, if you truly love a child (or a wild place), you cannot cut the baby in half and get anything that is alive.

In 25 extreme cases, protesters’ eye or eyes completely burst. And in nine cases, protesters lost an eye completely; it was removed from their head. “As the National Institute of Human Rights we are concerned,” the body said, “that we continue receiving complaints and observing the existence of eye injuries, regarding people who were exercising their right to peacefully protest.”