Ecological Injustice
By Olvin J. Abrego Ayala
NEWS | LESSONS | FILMS | BOOKS | ACTIVISTS
Central America serves as a poignant example of environmental injustice. Despite its minimal contribution to global carbon emissions and greenhouse gases, the region bears a disproportionate impact of climate change. This disparity has resulted in significant environmental obstacles, such as droughts, pests, loss of biodiversity, depletion of resources, and food shortages. The Central America Dry Corridor (CADC) emerged as a meteorological term following the El Niño event in 2009, highlighting the severe consequences of extreme droughts in the region. This situation exacerbates pests and reduces yields for rural farmers. Coupled with natural disasters like hurricanes and floods, Central America is in a precarious state. These countries lack the infrastructure required to implement effective mitigation strategies. Similar challenges are faced by other nations in the Global South, including Bangladesh, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Palestine.
Canada, the United States, and China are exploiting Central America’s rich natural resources — leading to conflicts over land rights, mining, deforestation, and other extractive industries. Central American governments, with the support of international entities, have utilized various tactics, such as surveillance, harassment, and legal prosecution to suppress dissent and silence activists.
In some cases, activists have been subject to extrajudicial killings or forced disappearances perpetrated by state agents, paramilitary groups, and criminal organizations. Such was the case of Goldman Environmental Prize winner Berta Cáceres, a Lenca environmentalist murdered for defending the Gualcarque River from a hydroelectric dam.
Indigenous/campesino leaders, community organizers, and grassroots activists are key in mobilizing their communities and leading environmental campaigns. Their leadership often stems from traditional governance structures, communal decision-making processes, and collective solidarity. These groups have faced marginalization, discrimination, and dispossession of their lands and resources, and bear the brunt of environmental injustices. Environmental activism becomes a means of asserting their rights, reclaiming their territories, and challenging systems of oppression. For Central Americans, the climate crisis is not a problem of the distant future; it’s a current reality.
Despite migration stereotypes casting economic pressure as the main reason many people flee their homes, many Central Americans have to leave their communities due to drops in crop yields, floods, and natural disasters like hurricanes forcing them to migrate north. Their migration is invisibilized, and proper wording like “climate refugee” has not reached a formal definition, recognition, or protection under international law. Climate refugees face violations of their rights during migration, including discrimination, exploitation, and lack of access to basic services and protection.
NEWS RESOURCES
Postales Climáticas- No Ficción
This is a Spanish-language website, but built-in Google features can adequately translate the website into English.
LESSONS
Beauty and Eco-Relationships in the Natural World of Central America
In this lesson for K–8th grade, students learn about three different animals — a bird, a frog, and a butterfly (the motmot of El Salvador, the exquisite spike-thumb frog of Honduras, and the owl butterfly from Guatemala). All these creatures are indigenous to Central America and help us understand the region’s ecosystems. Using visual art, the lesson gives students the opportunity to explore in-depth facts about each animal, while integrating an arts component where students are encouraged to draw the animals and design their own books to scaffold learning.
Introduction to Central America
This lesson for middle and high school introduces students to key people in Central American history through a short interactive, introductory activity. Several of the people featured are environmental activists.
FILMS
Resistencia: The Fight for the Aguan Valley
HIGH SCHOOL/ADULT
When a 21st century coup d’état ousts the only president they ever believed in, these Honduran farmers take over the plantations with no plans to ever give them back.
Beginning with the first coup in Central America in three decades, Resistencia: The Fight for the Aguan Valley picks up the story of the farmers who responded to the coup by taking over the plantations of the most powerful man in Honduras. The camera follows three of the movement’s protagonists and one brilliant journalist from the capital city over the four years between the coup and the elections that the farmers hope will return democracy to Honduras. Produced by Makila Usine Médiatique and Naretiv Productions.
Patrol
HIGH SCHOOL/ADULT
PATROL is a character-driven documentary that follows communities on the frontlines of an intensifying environmental conflict in Nicaragua. The Rama Indians, in alliance with the Afro-descendent Kriol community, are fighting to stop illegal cattle ranchers from destroying the virgin rainforests of the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve.
Gold or Water? The Struggle Against Mining in El Salvador
HIGH SCHOOL/ADULT
Gold or Water? The Struggle Against Mining in El Salvador explores how residents in the northern Salvadoran community of Santa Marta are fighting U.S. and Canadian mining companies eager to extract the rich veins of gold buried near the Lempa River, the water source for more than half of El Salvador’s 6.2 million people. The film streams for free online in English and Spanish.
Yochi
HIGH SCHOOL/ADULT
Yochi, a 9-year-old selectively mute Mayan boy, guards a nest of endangered Yellow-Headed Parrots in Belize's pine savannah. When his beloved older brother, Itza, returns from the city, Yochi learns that he’s in debt and has turned to poaching — setting the brothers on a collision course. 24 minutes.
Berta Didn’t Die, She Multiplied!
HIGH SCHOOL/ADULT
Berta Didn’t Die, She Multiplied! is a documentary on the legacy of Berta Cáceres, the Indigenous Honduran environmental activist whose defense of her people’s lands successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam at the Río Gualcarque. After winning the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015, she was assassinated on March 3, 2016. The film highlights not only her legacy but also that of other influential leaders like Garifuna activist Miriam Miranda. In Spanish with English subtitles. View online for free. 30 minutes.
Sipakapa Not Sold
HIGH SCHOOL/ADULT
The transnational company Glamis Gold (now Gold Corp. ) operates a gold mine in Guatemala. The Maya People of Sipakapa defend their autonomy against the advance of the great neoliberal projects.
Keepers of the Future: La Coordinadora of El Salvador
HIGH SCHOOL - ADULT
In a fertile floodplain in El Salvador, a peasant movement puts down roots — growing resilience in the scorched earth of exile and civil war. But soon these farmers and fishing folk discover new challenges, and this time they are global: climate crisis, exacerbated by an economy of ruinous extraction. Viewers learn how the community relies on organizing and running for political office to protect the environment and their humanity. Beautiful cinematography and an engaging story. 2018. 24 min.
Favela in Paradise
HIGH SCHOOL/ADULT
The crown jewel of tourism on Honduras’ Caribbean coast hides an uncomfortable truth. Unbeknown to most visitors, the only cay entirely inhabited by Garifuna islanders is a shanty town where residents live in dire need locked in a nonstop battle against the sea, forgotten by the state and treated as a stumbling block for development. 22 minutes.
BOOKS
Activists
Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores was an environmental organizer. In 1993, Cáceres became a student activist and cofounded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) to help Lenca Indigenous communities like hers improve their livelihoods, gain territorial rights, and fight illegal development. In 2006, residents of Rio Blanco asked COPINH for help to fight against the Agua Zarca Dam on a sacred Lenca river. They lodged appeals to state, national, and international authorities, but the government forged ahead. In April 2013, she organized a road blockade to prevent access to the dam site. For over a year, the Lenca people used a system of alerts to stay informed and maintain a peaceful presence at the site.
They received death threats and were attacked by security contractors and the Honduran army. But she liked to say, “They fear us because we’re fearless.” On March 3, 2016, Berta Cáceres was murdered in her home. COPINH continues to help the Lenca people reclaim ancestral lands and stop environmental damage from mining, dams, and logging operations. The Agua Zarca Dam has not been completed.
Lorena Cabnal is a Maya-Xinka from Guatemala and an advocate of community feminism. Originally from Santa María Xalapán, Cabnal is the daughter of the Xinca Maya cosmogony and co-founder of the community-territorial feminist movement in Guatemala, the Network of Ancestral Healers of Community Feminism Tzk’at (in Mayan Quiché). For Cabnal, it is essential to work to heal our bodies that have been made sick by the patriarchal system in order to fight for our emancipation.
Miriam Miranda is a Garífuna activist who advocates for the rights of the Garínagu. The Garínagu are descendants of West Africans who escaped the slave trade in the early 1600’s and intermarried with Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. Today, the Garínagu live primarily in coastal communities along Honduras and other Central American countries. Through her role as leader of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), Miranda has coordinated efforts to counter land theft by mega-tourism enterprises, reclaim ancestral territory, promote sustainable environmental practices, counter drug traffickers, and support community leadership development. Miranda has received the Óscar Romero Human Rights Award, the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance's International Food Sovereignty Prize, and the Carlos Escaleras environmental prize. Read more.
Bernardo Caal Xol is a Maya-Q’eqchi teacher and environmental human rights defender member of the Peaceful Resistance of Cahabón. He says his community’s deep attachment to their lands, hills, and rivers inspired his own activism and argued for tougher controls of corporations’ environmental and human rights impacts. He was jailed for his defense of the land.
Fredi Onan Vicen Peña is a coffee farmer in Honduras. His family farm has produced quality coffee for a very long time, but recently, his farm has faced extreme weather patterns like he's never seen before. Climate change has wiped out entire harvests, disrupted growing cycles, and promoted the spread of pests. His plants are now plagued with coffee rust.
His brothers and children have fled north in a desperate attempt at survival, leaving their coffee farms abandoned.
For small producers like himself, there is no way to get ahead of this. He has been learning about other species that are more resistant to disease and drought, and has started working with other crops like cacao and avocados.
More Activists
This is a Spanish-language website, but built-in Google features can adequately translate the website into English.
Podcasts
This is a Spanish-language podcast, but built-in Google features can adequately translate the transcript into English.
