Guapinol River defender Dalila Argueta lives in exile at the Basoa Defenders’ House near Bilbao, Basque Country

Photo: Dalila Argueta in the Basoa Defenders’ House library. Photo by J. Marcos.

The digital news outlet palabra. reports on Guapinol River defender Dalila Argueta in this article available in both English and Spanish.

The article highlights:

“Dalila’s struggle is the resistance against the iron mine that has polluted her homeland for five years, after the Honduran company Inversiones Los Pinares obtained the permit to mine the Botaderos Mountain.

As soon as construction work began around the mine, Dalila threw herself into the fight that would change her life and ultimately force her to leave her country.

In her community, the water turned into “pure mud” and stopped working to quench thirst.

A few months before her arrest, Dalila managed to leave Honduras.

To stay in Spain, Dalila had to prove that her life was in danger in Honduras.

Victims of social repression are not usually recognized as candidates for asylum. Ironically, the countries that deny asylum are frequently the same ones that caused the conflicts which forced activists to leave their homeland in the first place.

[She] is [now] one of the first residents of Basoa.

The Basoa Defenders’ House [is] a community and self-managed space built a few months ago some 25 miles from Bilbao [in the Arratia Valley (Bizkaia) in the heart of Euskal Herria] in northern Spain.

Photo: Basoa House. Photo by J. Marcos.

The house serves as a meeting space and has four floors, fifty beds, and a large kitchen with its many pots and pans. It has bathrooms and showers, a fireplace, library, bright windows and a large garden with trees.

More than 40 ecofeminist activists from different countries in Latin America, Spain, and Senegal are gathered to weave transnational alliances “against corporate power.”

This is the mission of the organization, Peace with Dignity, who started the house.”

We encourage you to read the full article by J. Marcos and Mª Ángeles Fernández at A Place of Refuge or Refugio.

For more: BASOA, la Casa de las Defensoras en Arratia necesita echar raíces y florecer. Desligado de la dependencia institucional y vinculado a la Red de Acogida Artea, Basoa es un punto de encuentro que apuesta por el Ecofeminismo y la horizontalidad.

The Peace Brigades International-Honduras Project continues to accompany the criminalized defenders of the Guapinol River. More on that here.