Land Problems in the Miami, Tela area and the Punta Sal National Park where it is located

The Relation of Miami, Tela Honduras and the Paintings of Garífuna and Ladino Painters

The Painting done by Garifuna artist Cruz Bermudez and  owned by Dr. James Loucky of Western Washington University is of  the Garifuna village of Miami, west of Tela and San Juan, facing the Micos Lagoon, as it used to be before the projects of Tournasal, Bahia de Tela, Micos Lagoon and Resort, and  now the Tela Bay Project. Signed by Cruz Bermudez.  Bought in Limon, Colon, on the occasion of Garifuna Day(12 April 2013) where Cruz Bermudez had  a painting exhibition. He says he has participated in painting exhibitions for all the Garifuna Day celebrations since 1997 which was the bicentennial of the Garifunas’ arrival in Honduras. Other Garifuna and Ladino painters of the Tela area also have done many paintings of the Miami area.  In the 2001 Ethnic Census there were 19 Garífunas living in Miami, but this low number reflects the effects of Hurricane Mitch in 1998 on the area.

 

The Start of Punta Sal National Park Where Miami is Located

By Wendy Griffin (2013) Revised December 2014

Tela had a woman who interested in the environment.her name was Jeanette Kawas, daughter of the owner of la Casa colorada a import store and distributor of the powered milk Milex in Honduras. They are Palestian Arabs. After the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Summit the Honduran government almost overnight (de la noche a la mañana) created 104 protected áreas, including the Punta Sal National Park west of Tela which includes the área of the Garifuna villages of Miami, Tournabe, and Rio Tinto.

 

 The Garifuna village of Miami existed because some Garifunas from Tournabe opened an entrance to the Laguna de Micos there. It is not clear to me if they lived there full time.  In Trujillo, a number of Garifunas had  thatched houses in the área of Guaymoreto lagoon where they lived during certain periods of the agricultural cycle, but their permanant home was in Trujillo. This continued in the Trujillo área until hurricane Mitch in 1998.  I was told the reason only 19 Garifunas showed up in 2001 Ethnic Census as living in Miami, as at the time of the census they were in their other homes in Tournabe. Miami at the time of hurricane Mitch had no roads toget there, itwas necessary to go by boat, there were no latrines. There was no electricity.  People lived in traditional style Garifuna houses, such as caña brava (maburu in Garifuna) with palm thatch. In Tournabe in the 1940’s, the Garifunas lived in palm thatch walls and roof houses, that you could putyour fingers through the walls of people’s houses, just like a dugu house. Tournabe is now primarily cinder block houses.

In the 1992-1993 period I met an American woman who worked at the US Embassy in USAID. I probably met her at the Union Church which is the Englishspeaking church in Tegucigalpa and I would occassionally go to church there. I was trying to interest USAID in funding part of bilingual intercultural education, especially books about the environment, because if you work with rainforest indians or reef people like the Garifunas and the Black Bay Islanders, they  have a lot of ideas and vocabularly about reef fish and animals or rainforest animals and plants. Save the rainforest was a big idea then.  So this American USAID woman raved about the work of Jeanette Kawas as someone who was really doing something to protect the environment. Her organization was called PROLANSATE (Lancetilla, Punta Sal and Texiguat), so she was responsable for protecting Miami and Punta Sal park. In 1995 I wrote a newspaper article on her work based on the USAID woman’s report, and sent it into Honduras This Week in English and translated it into Spanish and sent it tinto to a Spanish newspaper. I don’tremember which one.

By happenstance, Honduras This Week, which came out on Saturdays, published my story on the same day the Spanish newspaper probably El Heraldo also published a report on her. The Spanish newspaper did not publish my translated article,but rather did their own article, taking into account what I had said. On Tuesday Jeanette Kawas was shot dead in her home while talking on the telephone. It is presumed it was by profesional gunmen, maybe Guatemalans. The crime was never solved. I do not know if my articles were part of the reason she was killed, and it concerned me a lot about what to do then.

Punta Sal’s name was officially changed to Jeanette Kawas National Park. Parts of the park including part of the park around Miami, were officially protected also under the Ramsar Treaty on protected wetlands. Some of those wetlands were recently filled in to build part of the Indura beach resort, part of the Tela Bay Project, where the Honduran president and Latin American buisnessmen recently stayed in Miami.  An 18 hole golf course in the Tela Bay designed by an international golfcourse designer was also built for this Project. On the first day of taking office, the new Honduran president authorized the building of a new Airport in Tela, even though the San Pedro Sula Airport is only 50 minutes away by car and there is a good highway to get there.

How Did Miami Become a Tourist Resort in the Tela Bay Area in 2014 if the Garifunas lived there in 1992?

While most Hondurans are willing to admit that there were Blacks in Honduras, and that these included Garifunas, Black English speakers and Miskito Indians, the subject of blacks having married into the best families of Honduras or certain towns having been famous as mulato towns into the early 20^th century, is not widely discussed in Honduras, and is definitely not taught in Honduran schools, so that even the Garifunas or the mulatos themselves do not know if the two groups are related or different, and what the history of the mulatos of Honduras is.

The lands of all of these Afro-Honduran groups were not titled in the colonial period of Honduras, either because the areas where these groups lived was not part of Honduras or because colonial land laws did not have any category of land that could be titled to people of mixed race or Black. This situation often did not improve much in the 19^th century, with only vague promises of respecting the lands of the people under the Miskito king, or under the British crown, in treaties that made the Bay islands, the Mosquitia, and North Coast of Honduras legally part of Honduras.

Land Problems of the Garífunas in the 20th Century 

 In the 20^th century US banana companies began to claim lands which the Indians and Afro-indigenous and Blacks claimed as their own, but since they usually did not have legal land title to them (because the law had not allowed them to register the land or they did not acknowledge the control of the Honduran government), the Honduran government mostly ignored their  complaints and gave the land away in return for promises of railroads, rubber plantations, techniques for improving cattle ranching, etc.

 

The lands of the Afro-Hondurans should have been partly protected from the banana companies because there was an 1890’s Agrarian reform Law that prohibited the sale of land within 40 miles of the coast for sale to foreigners. Why this law was left out of the official recompilation of Honduran land laws published in 1911 is not currently known, but immediately after that the Honduran government gave land away in areas near the coast in quantities.

 

Since 1982 and the new constitution approved then, this 40 mile limit from the coast or from the borders (which helps the Miskito Indians and Maya Chorti Indians who live along the borders) which prohibited foreigners from buying land went back into effect, and is known as Article 107 of the Honduran Constitution. The only original exception to this blanket prohibiting of foreigners owning land was a small clause, that in regards to urban areas, there would be special legistlation.

 

In addition to this Article of the Honduran constitution, the Garifunas as partial descendants of the Arawak and Carib Indians, and Miskito Indians as the partial descendants of Miskito Indians, since 1995 have had special land rights as Indians, because the ILO Convention 169 on the Human Rights of Indians and Tribal peoples in independent countries was approved by the Honduran congress and then ratified by the Honduran Ministry of Foreign Relations in Geneva, Switzerland.

 

The ILO or International labor organization is a UN agency, and so UN associated agencies like the World Bank and UNDP have given funds to help do the legal work to land title lands, particularly for Garifunas and some Honduran Indian tribes, but generally not for Miskitos and not for Bay Islanders.

 

These laws to protect the coasts and the borders came into direct conflict with Honduras’s plans to open the country for tourism, something they were encouraged to do by International Development agencies, to generate foreign exchange to repay their loans to the development agencies. These development agencies also encouraged forestry and marine resource protection through protected areas, similar to parks, and to encourage export industries such as frozen fish and seafood, frozen beef, wood, mining, African palms, etc. These projects, and the projects to land title land for the Ladinos who did not have land titles, often worked at cross purposes with each other and with the mandates of ILO Convention 169 to respect Indian habitats, whether they were resources where they lived, or just where they used them, such as in forests or on coral reefs or in rivers and streams.

 

The Honduran government has tried different techniques to get around this limitation of Art. 107 of the Constitution. They have tried outright deleting the Article from the Constitution after Hurricane Mitch, which caused a massive demonstration by Garifunas in Tegucigalpa. They have said Honduran corporations can own the land, so foreigners formed fake corporations with Honduran partners, and the corporations own the land.

 

They have tried redefining what is an urban area, like all areas apt for tourism are urban areas, including an island with no people, and Miami, a Garifuna village near Tela that had no roads, no electricity, and before Hurricane Mitch no latrines. So Miami under Honduran law is a urban area and foreigners couldown up to3/4 of an acre in an urban area. The Honduran government forced the Garifunas between tournabe and Miami to sell most of their lands to the Honduran government for a song, and the Garifunas sold because they were given to understand that if they did not sell, they risked losing the landcompletely without receiving anything, because it was not clearly titled to them. In every case of where I have heard of a lot of Garifunas selling land like Punta Farollones outside ofLimon to Miguel Facusse, the Tournabe toMiami area near Tela and Rio negro neighborhood of Trujillo where the new cruise boat dockhas gone in the issue of not having good land titles and risk losing land and not having any money to relocate was a large factor in deciding the issue in favor of selling. The land in Tournabe area was estimated as worth $19 million. I think allthe Garifunas altogether got under $500,000. 

 

 The Honduran government following World Bank dictates has tried forcing the indigenous peoples and Garifunas to substitute collective land titles that can not be sold, for individual land titles which the people could take mortgages out against and sell, a program called PATH by the World Bank and is mentioned in the Garifuna in Peril movie, and in that way permit the transfer of land from indigenous and Garifunas to non-indigenous and other non-Honduran people.

 

In law 90-90 passed during the Adminsitration of Rafael Callejas they changed the limit for land in urban areas that can be titles to foreigners from three-quarters of an acre to allowing large tracts of land. That law actually spent several years in legal review by the Supreme Court, but eventually was declared constitutional which OFRANEH, the Garifuna organization, said would be like a tsunami for the Garifunas. And they were right. This is the change that is letting Canadians buy up housing developments and cruise boat docks in the Trujillo area and letting resorts by acres of land by the sea.

 Model City Legistlation in Honduras

This however was still not aggressive enough, for the last Administration of Honduras, for which the current president elect of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez was the president of the Congress.  They decided to back an idea called “model cities” (ciudades modelos) in Spanish and charter cities in English. The new law which governs these is now called ZEDE’s and can be seen on the Internet. The person who started the idea of charter cities, US Liberatarian Paul Romer, formerly a professor at a New York university has a website www.chartercities.org. These Model cities will be mini-states within Honduras. They will have their own laws. Honduran laws will not have affect in these mini-states. This means all those annoying Honduran laws like you can’t own more than a certain limit of land, the protected area laws, collective land titles for Garifunas and Indians and ladino peasant cooperatives, you can’t build a road or hydroelectric dam without an nationally approved environmental impact statement, ILO Convention 169 will probably not apply in this mini-country. According to the maps on the Honduran government website about Model Cities www.zede.gob.hn the Tela area is not scheduled to begun a Model City, but the Puerto Cortes, La Ceiba, the Trujillo-Santa Fe, and Rio Platano areas where Garifunas live are scheduled to become Model Cities.

 

Maybe this sounds like paradise to foreign or Honduran investors, but wait. It gets better. They promise there will be little or no taxes, good schools, safe streets, good medical care in these mini-states. How are they going to pay for good schools and the teachers and books for them? How are they going to pay for the police for the safe streets and the good medical care without taxes? They have not been clear on that part yet.

 

And anyone who wants to enter the Model city can. People will be able to vote with their feet. What is to stop every gang member in San Pedro Sula from electing that they would like to live in the Model city? Honduras does not know how they are going to feed the prisoners they have. People stop me on the streets and say don’t I know some program to get food to the Honduran prisoners because the government does not have money to feed them?  Having safe streets costs money.

 

These mini-states are perceived by Paul Romer that they are going to be cities, maybe big huge cities, like 10 million people. But there is a basic rule about cities, which they seem to have ignored. All the people in the city have to eat, and to eat you need farmland, and you need farmers. The Maya Chortis have a sign in their office that I love, It says, “It is simple. If there are no farmers, there is no food.”

 

After months of arguing in the Honduran press about the constitutionality of the Model City and important Ladino lawyers bringing the law case against the constitutionality of the reform to the Honduran Supreme Court, the Honduran Supreme Court actually voted last year that the Model City project was unconstitutional. This is very surprising as the Honduran Supreme Court is made up entirely of political appointees of the political party currently in power.  The Garifunas seemed saved. But in a surprise move, the Honduran government fired four of the Honduran Supreme Court judges for their decision.   When the new Supreme Court judges were named this year (2013), they declared the Model City legislation constitutional, and recently the Honduran government approved the Model City project. And now the person who has done everything possible to make Model cities happen including changing the constitution and firing the Supreme Court judges, is  President of Honduras.

 

I am sorry to say that some foreigners living in Honduras did not care much. Oh well, if the Garifunas lose their land that is too bad. La Prensa published maps of where the proposed model cities might be, and one that they included was from Betulia in Santa Fe to the Patuca River in the Mosquitia as one possible Model city. The Pepe Lobo administration already signed a memorandum of Understanding for  Model city projects in the area between Betulia and Puerto Castilla, according to Keri Brondo’s book land Grab.

 

Another Model City will include Puerto Cortes area. The Minister of Tourism said first we determine what type ofland it is for example of tourist use (de vocacion turistica, vocacion forestall,etc.) andthen we will determine what can done with it.And the people there like the Garifunas can be displaced she said clearly on Telesur’s “Causa Justa” TV showinthe segment “Tierranegra”which iso n youtube.

 

If Model cities have new land laws, this may not only affect  the Garifunas, and the Ladinos, the Miskitos and the Pech rainforest Indians, it could also affect foreigners who own land in this area, which includes American,  European, and Canadian citizens, and the majority of these US citizens are actually Garifunas who worked 35 years in the States, then retired home, and own land in a Garifuna community.

 

In the 19^th century, Honduras could not do enough to encourage foreigners, especially Europeans, to come to Honduras and invest.  Some German families developed large distribution networks for warehouses that they had in Amapala in Southern Honduras. Other German families owned coffee plantations.  When the Second World War came, Honduras declared war on Germany, confiscated all the German businesses and lands, and sent the Germans themselves to concentration camps in the US, not a widely known story in the US.

 

The Hondurans then turned around and sold all the confiscated goods and lands to Palestinian Arab families, mostly in the San Pedro Sula area, for L1,000 (then $500). This story is in the book Los Alemanes de Honduras (the Germans of Honduras), in Cesar Indiano’s book Los hijos de infortunio (the sons of Misfortune), available in the US on the Internet from Literatura de vientos Tropicales, and I have heard it from some of the descendants of Germans who returned to Honduras. Cesar Indiano believed this was  the beginning of the rise of San Pedro Sula’s Arab-Palestinian economic elite.  The issue of what has happened with the lands confiscated from the Cachiros drug trafficking family also pops up in the Honduran press. Who will benefit from the election of Juan Orlando Hernandez is not yet certain, but that his presidency will negatively impact Afro-Hondurans is almost a certainty.

 

Effects of the Tela Bay Development in the Area

 

Aerial photos of the Punta Sal National Park show that significant áreas have now been so deforested that they look like White beach sand. The new boutique hotel and golf course in the Tela Bay área Indura Beach dried up part of the wetlands in the park, even though these were protected by the RAMSAR treaty, according to OFRANEH. 

The Micos Lagoon has been the site of tradgedies since the founding of the Punta Sal Park.  A Garífuna boy was killed in an incident between Garífuna fishermen and PROLANSATE about fishing in the Lagoon. Also a Frenchman in his yatch with his granddaughter pulled into the Micos Lagoon when they had problems during a storm, even though they said that they knew Micos Lagoon was dangerous.  Their boat was boarded and the grandfather was killed and the granddaughter threatened with being raped.  The two incidents of French people in yatchs being killed in Honduras, the other at Swan Islands (Isla de Cisne) may be related to these áreas being used as drop sites for drugs and being at the wrong place at the wrong time. 

According to an Angelfire article cited in Wikipedia article about Tela, inside the Punta Sal National Park Honduran businessman Miguel Facusse now has a private protected área with high walls around it, for which he won an environmental prize as the first private protected área in Honduras. The Law of the Modernization of Agriculture (1992) which established the categories of protected áreas or parks in Honduras does not include possibility of private protected áreas, and certainly not inside of already established government protected áreas. On the Wikipedia article about Miguel Facusse there is also the report that there are rumors in Honduras which connect Miguel Facusse, most famous for his African palm oil businesses which extend into the Garífuna áreas of Colon, to the death of Jeanette Kawas. She stated that she was working on fighting against the planting of African Palms in the Punta Sal Park at the time of her death. So some of the struggles about who controls Miami may .be about who controls the sea Access to the Micos Lagoon for less than honorable uses. The Micos Lagoon is famous for its aquatic birds and is commonly visited by tours by boat given by Garífuna Tours of Tela, owned by an Italian immigrant and not the Garífunas.

The Garífunas in the San Juan and Tournabe áreas have also had land struggles with Honduran businessman and politician Jaime Rosenthal.  Besides the fact that Miguel Facusse and Jaime Rosenthal are among the 10 wealthiest people in Honduras and some of its most powerful people, the Bay of Tela has received $400 million for development which has been used for purposes like a new branch of the highway which goes to the Tela Bay área without going through Tela. Both Honduran Banks like FICOHSA and international Banks of Panama and Guatemala have been involved with the financing of the Tela Bay projects of which the only result so far is one boutique hotel. If the Garífunas of the Tela área had had access to even a small percentage of what the Honduran government has spent to develop the Tela Bay área, who knows what things they might have been able to do.

The Honduran government bought the land between Miami and Tournabe, mostly agricultural lands of the Garifunas of Tournabe at signficantly below the market value of the land. Garífuna painter Herman Alvarez of San Juan said that people sold their land to the Honduran government at these prices, because if they did not they were afraid their lands would be taken and they would get nothing. The Garífunas who sold land in Punta Farrallones, Limon, Colon to Miguel Facusse and the Garífunas of Rio Negro, Trujillo who sold to Canadian Randy Jurgensen for the tourist dock of Trujillo reported similar stories.  

 

Who are the Garifunas?

 

In the movie “Garifuna in Peril” Ruben Reyes plays the role of Ricardo, a Garifuna language teacher in Los Angeles who is worried about the loss of the Garifuna language.  Not even his own son speaks Garifuna.  The Garifuna language is spoken by the Garifunas, an Afro-Indigenous group, who live on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Their language is mostly an Amerindian language related to the Arawak Indian language which was spoken throughout most of the Caribbean, for example by the Tainos in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. The Garifuna language also has words derived from the Carib Indian language, Spanish, French, English, and African languages.

 

 The Garifunas are the largest Afro-Indigenous group to still speak their own language in the New World, but there are other Afro-Indigenous groups that speak an indigenous language including the Miskito Indians of Honduras and Nicaragua and Black Seminoles and Black Cherokees in the US.  In the US, the Indians who are the result of the mixture of Blacks and Indians are now often called Black Indians, and were the subject of an award winning show on the national TV network ABC by Native American film producer Richard Heape called Black Indians, which is still available in DVD form on the Internet.

 

The Garifunas people resulted from the inter-marriage of the local Carib and Arawak Indians on the Island of Saint Vincent in the Caribbean Sea, north of Venezuela, with African blacks who arrived there through a variety of means over several hundred years. Previously the Garifunas were known as Black Caribs (Caribes Negros), Morenos, or in Belize just as Caribs. The Caribbean Sea is named for the Carib ancestors of the Garifunas. 

 

 The story of how the Garifunas fought two wars against the English for the control of St. Vincent, their chief Satuye was killed,  they lost the war, and were then exiled to Central America in 1797 is shown in the movie Garifuna in Peril as a play within a movie, which the son of Ricardo acts in. This play, written by William Flores of the Garifuna Writers Group in Los Angeles is a tribute to the first play written by a Black man and produced by a Black theater company in the US, The Death of King Shotaway.  This play, written and produced in the 1820’s, was also about the death of the Garifuna Chief Satuye, called Joseph Chatoyer by the English. It is thought the writer was a Garifuna from Saint Vincent who made his way to New York. The Garifunas currently live in Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, Nicaragua, and the US.

 

The results of the 2001 Ethnic Census in Honduras, analyzed and published by Dr. William Davidson, show that probably the US, with an estimated 100,000 Garifuna in New York alone, is now probably the country with the largest Garifuna population, and not Honduras or another Central American country.  Garifuna men played many key roles in Garifuna society including making over 30 types of crafts including all the musical instruments, the canoes used for fishing, and the basket crafts used for making cassava bread.. All the Garifuna musicians are men, as is the case in most traditional societies, because music is related to magic and power.  Garifuna men cleared the crop land for Garifuna women farmers and helped them transport their crops by canoe. 

 

 Certain songs like the semi-sacred curing songs sung without drums which are essential for ancestor ceremonies  arumajani are traditionally only sung and composed by older men. Only Garifuna men tell traditional Garifuna stories called uragas during wakes, held at night before a funeral. Fishing, hunting, and making traditional Garifuna houses were all done by Garifuna men, besides helping to raise the children, especially training their sons. Some Garifuna healers and religious specialists, called buyeis, are also men.

 

 Young Honduran Garifuna men with their eyes on immigrating to the US or towards being a professional in a Honduran big city are generally not actively trying to learn traditional Garifuna men’s skills or form traditional Garifuna families. Most of the makers of traditional crafts like drums or the basket crafts used for making  cassava bread or the story tellers are over 60.  The lack of older Garifuna  men to sing arumajani has been noted in professional reports about the Garifuna religious ceremonies  for decades. 

 

 Traditional Garifuna songs and stories are full of women like sisters and mothers asking their brothers or sons not to immigrate and leave them alone, such as the song “Nitu” (my older brother). The men’s songs talk about immigrating to the US because there is no work here in the Garifuna communities and they say in the US there is work.  One interesting Garifuna song by Honduran Garifuna Aurelio Martinez  called The Letter  talks about his family coming from the US to visit him—his mother, his father, his brothers, his sisters, his uncles, his aunts, his cousins, and he has to prepare something for them. Aurelio Martinez became world famous singing on Stonetree Records’s Parranda album and then touring in the US: There are two CD’s of his music in this exhibition.

 

While often not well known by Americans in the US, Garifuna music in the Garifuna language, accompanied by traditional handmade or electronic instruments and their dances are world famous.  UNESCO declared the Garifuna language, music, and dance a Masterpiece of World Heritage in 2001.  To obtain this declaration, the Garifunas of Belize documented many hours of Garifuna dances and songs and produced a video, which is for sale on garinet.com.

 

 A description of the Garifuna dances and music and ceremonies in English and the documentation process for the UNESCO declaration are in Tomas Alberto Avila’s book Black Carib – Garifuna available from Amazon.com.  Tomas Avila is a Garifuna living in Providence, Rhode Island in the US. Most of the articles in his book are by leading Belizean Garifuna intellectuals who, unlike most of us, know what the songs actually say.

 

Andy Palacio, a Belizean Garifuna punta rock musician who sang traditional songs in Garifuna, but accompanied by modern electronic instruments, and a Garifuna language activitist, won the number one prize at the World Music Expo in Europe together with Ivan Duval, the producer for the Belizean record company  Stonetree Records, for his CD Watiña in 2007. 

 

This CD is described by Amazon.com as one of the most critically acclaimed CD’s in any genre in 2007, a very unusual comment for a CD in an Amerindian language that few people who hear the music can understand.  Andy Palacio was often interviewed by the media, such as on NPR and AfroPop Worldwide, while touring the US and he always talked about his interest in saving the Garifuna language and music. He died suddenly in 2008 and his death was reported in the US and  Europe, as well as in Central America.

 

One use of Garifuna music is to accompany Garifuna ceremonies for the ancestors, such as chugu and dugu. An example of a Garifuna woman in Los Angeles who is called by her Mother to do an ancestor ceremony, going home to a village in Honduras to consult a buyei,  and doing a mock dugu can be seen in Ali Allié’s movie El Espiritu de Mi Mama which is for sale on the Garifuna in Peril movie website-www.garifunainperil.com which also has my article Garifuna Immigrants Invisible about why Garifunas have been important to people in the US. Go to About and Garifunas.