Women's Day - A Celebration or a Call to Arms?

Today is International Women’s Day, and to me, it has never been more important to celebrate women, and to continue the fight for equal rights.  Growing up in Canada, in a household in which both mom and dad shared the burden of working and raising children fairly equally, I was blissfully unaware that in many countries of the world being born a female means being born into a silent war.  A war to have a voice, to live free of fear, to have the right to earn a living wage, to own one´s own body, a war simply to be able to walk down the street and be respected. Since arriving in Honduras, I am constantly being reminded of the long road to equality for this country and the word. It seems to me perhaps we are celebrating prematurely; we haven't won anything yet.

Gender based deaths in Honduras have reach epidemic levels, with 12 of every 100 000 deaths being labeled “femicide.” Most crimes remain unpunished, with an impunity rate as high as 98%. Abortion is criminalized, as is the morning after pill, and access to birth control methods are limited due to religious pressure and beliefs. There is also a “narco” culture, which is represented by powerful, armed, violent men, drinking, taking drugs, with a posse of available women hanging off their arm.  Unfortunately, this image becomes an ideal to young men who see no other representation of masculine power. Women are told that if they dress a certain way, they are inviting men to harass them.  Even I have noticed that if I wear a dress, on my walk to work, I am apt to receive twice the comments from men than if I dress in pants.

Quoting an article from Honduras Weekly:
But of course women can be blamed for machismo!" exclaims María Eugenia de la Vega. "Look how they treat their children: a crying girl is comforted, but a little boy who cries gets scolded because real men don't cry. A boy squatting down to pee is told that he shouldn’t, he’s not a girl! And you should see how sons are being served like princes at dinnertime, often by their own sisters!" If there’s someone who knows about machismo, it is María Eugenia de la Vega, a woman from Chile with fifteen years of experience in the gender field, now working for the United Nations in Tegucigalpa. 

There is little solidarity among women here, and little education for both young women and men, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t strong men and women fighting for equality and human rights. 

I want to write about a woman who, to me, was the embodiment of female power in Honduras, and the world.  I want the world to remember her, and take up her fight for the planet, for indigenous rights, and for women’s rights.

On March 3^rd, 2016, Berta Caceres, an indigenous Lenca women and environmental activist, was shot and killed in her own home. Berta co-founded and coordinated the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations in Honduras (COPINH), and won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 for her successful fight against the world’s largest dam builder, Chinese owned Sinohydro, who pulled out of the Agua Zarca Dam. The 4 large dams were planned to be built upon the Gualcarque River, sacred to the Lenca people, which to them not only represents the female spirit, but provides drinking water, irrigation, fish and sustains their way of living.  This dam was planned with no consultation whatsoever of the Lenca people, and in 2012 the Honduran Company Desarrollo Energeticos SA (DESA) started construction of the dam, destroying Lenca property and fields. Berta Caceres and COPINH started a successful street blockade, and raised awareness that the dam had broken international law by failing to consult the Lencan people. In 2013, the Word Bank Group and Sinohydro pulled out of the project due to human rights concerns.

Berta Caceres received multiple death threats during the street blockade and subsequent protests in the capital. She was not cowed however, as she said “I bathed in the river, and she spoke to me, and told me that I will succeed”.

 During her acceptance speech for the Goldman Environmental Prize, she said “We must shake our conscious free of the rapacious capitalism, racism and patriarchy that will only ensure our own self-destruction.”

I hope the world will listen.