'The river told her so'. Narrating human-environmental relations in indigenous Lenca territory

Abstract

In Honduras, a country still heavily depending on fossil fuels, the government decided to commit itself to reduce its ecological footprint in the light of climate change. Since 2009 the country opened up towards foreign investors willing to finance sustainable development projects among others. At the river Gualcarque, the hydroelectric Agua Zarca Project, which until recently was co-financed by the Dutch Development Bank FMO and Finnfund, initiated a battlefield of different perspectives on sustainable development. Berta Cáceres, leading the indigenous Lenca resistance in defense of the river, was assassinated in March 2016. About this case Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous people, wrote that there exists tension between global development aspirations and local needs. In this research, the Agua Zarca Project at the river Gualcarque functions as the catalyst for narrating different types of human-environmental relations occurring in indigenous Lenca territory.