Photo by PBI-Spanish State of Zúñiga Cáceres being interviewed by Sarah Babiker at El Salto in Madrid, Spain.
The Spanish alternative newspaper El Salto reports: “Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres, together with Camilo Bermúdez, visited several Spanish cities last June as representatives of COPINH [the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras], hand in hand with the Peace Brigades International (PBI).”
Bertha Zúñiga told El Salto:
“For us it is very important to highlight COPINH’s vision of struggle, which is expressed in its founding documents, which is to improve the quality of life of the communities. …We, as part of the movements to fight against dams, or of the people affected by dams, always say: energy for what, energy for whom, what is really doing that energy transition model and how to build an energy transition that is just. And obviously we defend the rights of indigenous peoples. Banks deny these fundamental rights, such as the right to prior informed consultation. They are entities that reproduce colonialism, that reproduce discrimination.”
“It is very important for the communities, the Indigenous peoples, to reinforce the construction of an alternative model of life in which it is understood that the peoples are capable of building our own models of development and that it is possible to have models of development different from the one offered to us by capitalism.”
“I think that all the organizations that do community struggle, many times we face what we say, monsters so big and so powerful that they have all the capital, that they have weapons, that they have control over the justice system, that they have control over politicians, so for us our strength is also our spirituality.”
“This model of life that we were talking about requires increasingly authoritarian governments, where there is no real democracy in which communities decide on our future, where there is more imposition, more violence, more military presence, more weapons, which is the logic of war. That the business of war continues to grow in weapons, in military forces, even in video games, which are also consumed to put the conception of war in our brains.”
“The issue of Hondurasgate [in which Israeli money allegedly helped secure US President Donald Trump’s pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández], this Trump scandal, came up, where they talk about, for example, the role that Israel has had in its intervention not only in Honduras but in other Latin American countries [including Colombia and Mexico] so that they give the go-ahead to this proposal of war and discrimination that is being made, to genocide. So that they support that militaristic vision and occupation and dispossession of the peoples.”
“It is important to be able to connect the different experiences of resistance [in the global south and the global north] and also to connect the different processes, the different perspectives. Also hear about what is happening in other parts of the world.”
The full interview can be read at: Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres: “Es posible tener modelos de desarrollo distintos al que nos ofrece el capitalismo” (interview by Sarah Babiker, El Salto, July 3, 2026).
Photo: PBI-Honduras accompanies Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres in Tegucigalpa, March 2, 2026. Photo by PBI-Canada/Brent Patterson.
