The daughter of Berta Cáceres, the Honduran human rights defender who was murdered this month, has spoken out about the country’s volatility and called on Europe and the US to stop investing in the controversial Agua Zarca dam.

Mesoamerica, March 17, 2016 - The 691 women human rights defenders (WHRDs) from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Nicaragua who make up the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders (IM-Defensoras) demand that the Honduran government immediately fulfill its obligation to protect the life and integrity of human rights defenders.

AWID strongly condemns the murder of Berta Caceres. We mourn this major loss and stand together with her family and our sisters in Honduras.

It is with deep pain and infinite rage that IM-Defenesoras, expresses its condemnation for the cowardly murder of our compañera Berta Cáceres, a feminist and advocate for the ancestral rights of the Lenca nation.

The moment was symbolically powerful on multiple levels. As thousands of women marched to the National Congress, the seat of formal political power in Brazil, chanting slogans of resistance— “I do not accept my place in the kitchen”, “I want to be in the revolution”—you could not un-see us or un-hear us. At one point, you could not see the streets for all the people filling it.

In a lecture in Argentina, Ariel Dulitzky, president of the United Nations’ Working Group on Forced or Involuntary Disappearances, said that Working Group currently has 43,000 cases of disappeared persons across the world. AWID spoke with journalist Marta Dillon and popular feminist educator Claudia Korol to learn more about the history of this phenomenon and how it affects women in particular.

The Marcha das Mulheres Negras is a march against racism and violence and in support of wellbeing, and represents years of collective organizing by Black women as part of broader Black peoples’ movements in Brazil.

We note that the Anti-Blackness happening in Brazil is not new and we welcome the mobilization of our sisters and family in this historic March of Black Women towards exposing and challenging this violence.

AWID spoke with Alejandra Burgos and Morena Herrera about the new wave of slander attacks that their organizations have been receiving from religious fundamentalist groups in El Salvador.

Amid a rising tide of widespread violence in the country the State of Mexico issued its first-ever Gender Alert. AWID spoke to Maria Luz Estrada and Patricia Bedolla of the National Citizen’s Feminicide Observatory to discuss what this means for women human rights defenders in Mexico State.