Central American Indians and Blacks Carry on King’s
Dream of Struggle for Civil Rights
By Wendy Griffin-- Revised January 2015
In the 1960’s Dr. Martin Luther King was marching,
leading, writing and preaching to encourage US Afro-Americans to fight for
their civil rights like the ability to vote, to travel in unsegregated public
transportation, to be able to eat anywhere, to go to desegregated schools, and
fair labor hiring practices. This past year 2014 was celebrated as the 50th anniversary of him receiving the Nobel Peace
Prize. Other US Black leaders built on his call and that of Marcus Garvey to
not trust people of other races to tell your history, calling for
documentation and teaching of US Afro-American
history. The year 2014 marked the 100th
Anneversary of his birth. Their stuggle also led to a change in aesthetics
as in the slogan “Black is Beautiful”,
among other things. We celebrate these men, their struggles, and their visions
on Martin Luther King Day every year in January and continuing through February
in Black History Month in the US, but similar celebrations now also exist in
Central America.
The US Civil Rights Movement Inspired the Indians and
Blacks of Central America and Beyond
Central American Blacks like the Garifuna of Honduras,
Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua, Black English speakers, sometimes called
Creoles of Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, and Spanish
speaking Afro-Mestizos of Central America also heard about these struggles and
victories through different means. There
are sizable communities of Central
American Blacks in US cities like New York, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, and
Los Angeles who traveled back and forth
to Central America and called frequently to their families back home telling
the stories they heard on the news or participated in in person. Many Central
Blacks like Garifunas and Black English speakers from Honduras worked on ships
as merchant marines that were in and out of the US and where many of the other
sailors were also Blacks from the Caribbean.
Dr. Martin
Luther King’s vision built on the visions of a Jamaican Marcus Garvey, whose
work still influences human rights struggles in places like Belize, Honduras,
and even in Austrailia among the the Aborigines who worked on the docks with
the West Indian sailors. Also Honduran radio, TV and the written press carried
the stories of the US civil rights movement, as did the media in other Central
American countries.
In the 1960’s Honduran Garifuna Erasmo Zúniga was
working as a radio operator for the Honduran military during the so called
Soccer War between Honduras-El Salvador.
The Honduran military used Garifunas, who speak their own language
called Garifuna, to send messages over the radio about troop deployment s and
things, so that the Salvadorans would not be able to understand the
messages. This same technique had been
used by the US military during the Second World War when they used Navajo
Indians who spoke Navajo as radio operators to send messages so that the
Japanese could not understand them. A
few years ago the story of the Navajo code talkers was made into a movie and
shown in theaters in the US, but the story of the Garifuna code talkers mostly
remains unknown.
Early Garifuna Organization to Protect Land
The Garifunas had formed several different types of
collective action organizations prior Erasmo Zuniga’s founding of OFRANEH (The
Fraternal Organization of Honduran Blacks) in 1985. In the 1880’s the Garifunas of Trujillo, the
site of significant banana cultivation for export, requested land titles for their lands to protect them
from then Honduran President Luis Bogran.
They had to walk to Tegucigalpa 15 days through the mountains with no
hotels or restaurants, just making campfires at night in the forest to keep
wild animals away, said Rosalina Garcia, a Garifuna of Trujillo.
They got to Tegucigalpa, saw the President and asked
for the land titles. He asked, Are you organized? Do you have a president and
secretary and a formal structure, etc.?
They said, No. He said, “Come
back when you are organized.” They did
not give up. They walked 15 days back
through the mountains, organized and went back and asked for land titles. And he gave them one, which they still have
today, to “La Puntilla”, the spit of land near Trujillo, Honduras where Puerto
Castilla is and the Garifuna agricultural lands of Barranco Blanco, and other
little communities like Inaya which no longer have Garifuna residences. The organization they formed-- La Comunidad
de Morenos de Cristales y Rio Negro (The Community of Garifunas of Cristales
and Rio Negro) still exists today and is Honduras’s oldest Garifuna
organization and probably one of the oldest Afro-Latin American organizations
still in existence today.
After the first
land title, they requested 4 more land titles around Trujillo and became a
legally recognized organization receiving “personaría juridical” (a corporate
charter) in the 1920’s, as I report in my book Los Garifunas de Honduras
published in 2005 by the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras (CEGAH) with
funds from the Edwards Foundation and the American Jewish World Service, both
of New York (Griffin and CEGAH, 2005).
No one is sure how the Honduran Garifunas got the idea
to ask for land titles for their Trujillo lands. Some think it might have been
the influence of Spanish Jesuit Missionary Manuel de Jesus Subirana. Padre Subirana was able to get legally
recognized and surveyed land titles for Pech Indians in Olancho (formerly known
as Payas) and Jicaque or Tolupan Indians of Yoro before his death in the
mid-1860’s. He worked with the
Garifunas, too, founding the church in distant Sangrelaya, Colon which even
today is only accessible by canoe and donating a saint’s image to the Garifunas
of Sambo Creek , near La Ceiba, which they still have in their Catholic Church,
but he did not request land titles for them.
But his example may have inspired to ask for them themselves. Until the 1990’s no other Honduran Garifuna
community had legal registered land titles.
Garifunas Active in the Movement Labor and Go on to
Found Other Organizations
According to Santos Centeno, a Garifuna employee at
CURLA, the national university in La Ceiba, Honduras, some of the first Garifuna organizations that existed
before OFRANEH were labor organizations within the unions of the US banana
companies like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the mechanics workshop in La
Ceiba. These Garifuna labor
organizations together with other Honduran labor unions carried out a major
months long general strike against the US owned banana companies United Fruit
(now Chiquita) and Standard Fruit (now part of Dole) in 1954, which led to a
number of concessions by the banana companies.
This strike is considered a watershed event in Honduran social
history. Several books have been written
about it and there is a huge monument to remember the strike in the Honduran
town of El Progreso. In 1954 there was
also a related strike of the American owned New York and Honduras Rosario
Mining Company, which led to the closing of the San Juancito mine near
Tegucigalpa, open since the 1880’s, by
the company. This is the same year as the United Fruit inspired coup against
Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, documented in the book Bitter Fruit. These
and other events led to the retirement of controversial United Fruit Company
President Samuel Zemmuray.
The then Honduran President Juan Manuel Galvez was
years later asked why he did not put down the strike? He said, How could I have
put it down? Thousands of workers were involved, many more the total Honduran
Army. The banana companies later mechanized and moved their headquarters and
closed some ports like La Ceiba and Tela, so that two-thirds of the workers
lost their jobs and almost all Garifuna invovlement with the banana companies
ended except as sailors. The radicalized
unemployed banana workers formed the core of peasant (campesino) associations
like the Campesino Leagues, the National Association of Campesinos, etc. which
soon organized to demand Agrarian Reform in Honduras which was carried out to
some degree.
Honduran Indians like the Pech and the Chorti Indians
also formed part of Campesino organizations demanding land titles or land, and
participated in literacy campaigns which emphasized liberation theology's
perspective on the problems of social injustice in Latin America.. Honduran
Garifunas and some other Honduran Indians were also active within Honduras's
traditional political parties, especially Honduran Garifuna mayors and
teachers. The latter all belong to teachers' unions which were also
significantly political during the Sandinista/Contra War period and are still
one of the most active unions in Honduras, today.
During the Cariato, the presidency of Tiburcio Carias,
unions were illegal, in order to help the US banana companies, but there was a special worker's wing within
the Nationalist Party which allowed the workers to practice organizing to
demand reforms, reported US historian Louise Donnell. In spite of unions being
illegal, at least 15 strikes were carried out in Honduras against the banana
companies before unions became legal, such as the 1939 Dock Workers strike. Sometimes
revolutions on the Coast combined with strikes such as the revolution that
brought Manuel Bonilla to power in 1912 and the 1932 revolution that caused the
changes in immigration laws and that ultimately led to the closing of the
Truxillo Railroad, a United Fruit (now Chiquita) subsidiary.
In Belize, too the legalization and formation of
unions among Belizeans, including the Garifunas of the Pomona Citrus Factory,
lead to union labor leaders becoming political leaders, and forming the
government and finally obtaining independence from Great Britain, according to
Belizean Garifuna Sebastian Cayetano, in his article in Tomas Alberto Avila’s
book Black Carib-Garifuna, available on Amazon.com.
Mutual Benefit and Cultural Preservation Organizations
Founded by Honduran and Belizean Blacks
Other early Garifuna organizations in both Belize and
Honduras such as those founded by T. V.
Ramos, were associated with mutual benefit societies where people pooled their
funds to provide funerals and sick care to their members, according to Sebastian
Cayetano. These type of organizations
were common among Afro-Caribbeans and in Honduras one, the Tela Asociación de
la Tercera Edad (The Tela Senior Citizen Association) still exists, notes US
historian Glenn Chambers.
Probably the older Garifuna organizations are the
Garifuna women’s dance clubs which exist in every community to preserve the
culture and organize cultural events like the Fair and Christmas. Honduran Garifuna women’s dance clubs also
collect money at New Years by singing house to house and being given
contributions. Some of these funds are used to help members pay expenses
related to wakes and funerals. These women’s Dance Clubs are probably related
to similar dance clubs in African countries like Ghana. The President of the
Women’s Dance Club had an authority similar to the Mayor in a Garifuna
community and to settle small disputes, the Garifuna women would go to the
President of Dance Club.
In 1985 OFRANEH (Organización Fraternal Negro de
Honduras) was formed by Erasmo Zuniga and other Garifunas to fight for the
rights of all Garifunas in Honduras. The
original reason that inspired its founder to form the organization was to fight
for labor rights, because he noted in Puerto Cortes, a principal port, the
Honduran government often did not hire Garifunas to do public works and other
work in and near their own communities.
The period of the founding of OFRANEH was a dark period in Honduran
history with the military cracking down on people they thought might be
opposing them. Miskito Indians reported
having to leave the Mosquitia because the military was looking for them, the
Garifunas report having to hide Honduran priests because the military was
looking for them, as proponents of liberation theology.
The Contra War was going on and thousands of Miskito
and Sumu Indian refugees flooded the Honduran Mosquitia. The Pech Indians quit
fighting for land rights through Peasant Leagues after the Colombian Priest
Ivan Betancourt who had been advising them to get land titles was massacred and
stuffed down a well with other Honduran peasant and church leaders on the farm
of the father of the former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. This incident is
known as “Los Horcones” for the name of the property where the well was
located, and this incident may mark the end of liberation theology in the
Honduran Catholic Church. . There is a
Wikipedia article about it. During a May Day parade in this period, a UPN
university student leader was "disappeared", until the other students
found him injured in a Tegucigalpa hospital.
Garifunas Join with Honduran Indians to Fight Together
For Rights and Change
In spite of the negative climate, other Honduran Indian
groups began forming ethnic federations between 1985 and 1990—MASTA among the
Honduran Miskitos, FITH among the Honduran Tawahkas, FETRIXY among the Tolupan
or Jicaque Indians of Yoro and FETRIPH among the Pech Indians. The organizations among the Honduran Miskitos
and Tawahkas were directly related to wanting to form organizations to
represent them, separate from the organizations of the Nicaraguan Miskitos and
Sumus who were in armed rebellion against the Sandinista government of
Nicaragua at the time, and residing in the Honduran Mosquitia. International funding for development for
Indians was becoming available and Ladinos in Tegucigalpa formed NGO’s to work
with all the organized Indians and the Garifunas, first COPI and then CAHDEA.
By 1990, the Indians and Garifunas of Honduras were able to win some fights
related to land and resources rights with the help of CAHDEA (Consejo Asesor
Hondureño de las Etnias Autóctonas) Honduran Advisory Council of the
Autochthonous Ethnic Groups. .
The 500th Anneversary of the Discovery of
the Americas and Social Movements in Honduras
1992 with the international celebration of the 500th
anneversary of the Discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus, called
“The Encounter Between Two Worlds” was a
watershed year for Indian and Afro-descent people’s organizations around the
Americas. Beginning a few years before the actual event, Indians protested that it was not a cause of
celebration, that it had not been an “encounter” but a massive destruction of
the native peoples and their cultures and the taking of their lands.
Afro-descent people objected because not only were Europeans and the Indians
brought into contact, but also millions of Africans were brought to the New
World and made to suffer the loss of their freedom, languages, cultures,
religions, and sometimes their lives, because of this event. Regional counter celebrations were held in
Managua, Nicaragua and in Ecuador. In many countries, these
counter-celebrations were coordinated by organizations that represented both
Indians and Blacks like “500 years of Indian, Black and Popular Resistence in
Mexico”.
In 1992 ODECO
(Organización de Desarollo Comunitaria), a Garifuna NGO, was founded in La
Ceiba, Honduras(www.odecohn.blogspot.com).
Also in 1992 all the recognized Honduran Indian
federations and the Garifuna
organization OFRANEH joined together to found CONPAH (Confederación Nacional de
los Pueblos Autóctonos de Honduras)
which eventually combined with CAHDEA (Griffin and CEGAH, 2005).
Garifunas join Together with Indigenous People
Worldwide to Fight for Rights
In 1992 the Garifunas applied and were accepted to be as part of the World
Council of Indigenous People(Avila,2009), as were all the members of
CONPAH.. After the Black Civil Rights Movement
in the US, there was a less well publicized activism among US and Canadian
Indians, such as the taking of Alcantraz, the founding of the American Indian
Movement (AIM), and Wounded Knee, in South Dakota among the Lakota Sioux. American Indians fought for and in many cases
obtained bilingual (Indian languages-English) education programs, school
materials more sensitive to the Native American perspective, and long legal
battles related to Indian lands and treaty rights.
After a Canadian Indian visited the Maori people in
New Zealand, he had the idea of combining the struggles of indigenous people in
Canada and US with those of other countries.
First the National Indian Brotherhood was formed in Canada, uniting all
Canadian First Nations. They applied for and were accepted as representatives
of Indigenous Peoples as UN observer status and then they worked to incorporate
other indigenous peoples in their organization which was called the World
Council of Indigenous Peoples, a human rights organization founded by Canadian
Indians that fought for the rights of
indigenous people all over the world and at one time represented
60,000,000 people. In response to the
massive protests by Indians, the UN declared 1993 The International Year of the
Indigenous People, and then declared two decades of the International Decades
of the Indigenous People (www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/world_council_of_Indigenous_Peoples).
The Joining of the Indigenous Land Rights Movement and
the Environmental Movement
In 1992 was also the Rio de Janeiro Summit on the
Environment in which world governments and the UN agencies promised significant
funding to protect the environment. As
studies by US Geographer William Davidson and his students showed where there
are forests in Central America, there are usually Indians and where there are
Indians, there are usually forests. This
is thought to be because the Indians know techniques to preserve the forest,
often it is part of their religion to protect the forest, and because they rely
on the forest for resources, according to US geographer Dr. Peter Herlihy, a
student of Dr. Davidson.
This was also a time when medicinal plants were
becoming important commercially. Although most attention has been paid to
Amazonian rainforest plants, the first big commercial success story in
medicinal plant was with two African plants. An African healer in Madagascar
told researchers that there were 18 types of periwinkles on Madagascar, but
only these two types cured leukemia. Researchers tested them and in fact 80% of
all leukemia cases are now treated with the medicine derived from these two
types of periwinkles, a multi-million dollar business for the Eli Lilly
pharmaceutical company, according to ethnobiologist Paul House. Africans use
over 2,000 species of flora and fauna in traditional healing in Africa notes
Wikipedia and over 1,000 medicinal plants were known just by one “bush doctor”
among the Blacks in Belize, which is more than all the medicinal plant
knowledge for all of Europe in one head, noted Paul House. Dr. House did not
know how much the African healer got for telling researchers how to cure
leukemia. Often researchers pay less than $5, while the drug companies make
millions, which is why Indians are upset about biopiracy.
So after 1992 there were significant levels of funding
for projects in favor of Indigenous peoples in general and Indians and the
environment in particular from agencies like the World Bank and the
Inter-American Development Bank(Tilley, 2005 ). Whether projects were actually
developed to help the Indian or Afro-Indigenous
peoples in these communities or the environment or if they were
effective are separate widely debated issues. See for example, Keri Brondo’s
new book from the University of Arizona Press called Land Grab, about the
Honduran Garifunas and my articles in Honduras This Week on the Internet.
Search Garifunas Honduras Wendy Griffin.
Over one third of the Honduran Garifuna villages had
part or all of the lands and coastal waters they use incorporated into
“protected areas”, a general term that includes national parks, marine
reserves, wildlife preserves, and Biospheres under the Law of the Modernization
of Agriculture in the 1990’s. The
Garifunas are descendants of rainforest Indians and rainforest Africans, and
their hunting, crafts, and traditional medicine are based on rainforest plants
and animals which are threatened with extinction in Honduras (Griffin and CEGAH,
2005). Other Honduran rainforest Indians include the Pech, the Tawahkas, and
the Miskito Indians. There are more
rainforest Indians or Afro-Indigenous people like the Garifuna and the Miskitos
in the Central American rainforest than Indians in the Amazon rainforest and
the area is smaller and more threatened, yet little media attention has been
given to this area of rainforest.
ILO Human Rights Convention Approved in Honduras
The World Council of Indigenous People was given
observer status in the UN and worked with indigenous groups and with the International
Labor Organization (ILO), a part of the UN, to develop Convention 169 on the
Human Rights of the Indigenous and Tribal People of Independent Countries which
was completed in 1989. The UN sponsored Maya Indian and Nobel Peace Prize
winner Rigoberto Menchu as Goodwill Ambassador to take ILO Convention 169 to
the Presidents (and Indians) of different countries including Honduras during
the International Year of the Indian 1993 to open the discussion for its
ratification. ILO Convention 169 gives a
wide range of rights to Indigenous People such as land rights, bilingual
education , intercultural education for Indians and the general population,
protection for their culture and religions, and labor rights.
Surprisingly
the Honduran Congress did approved or ratified the Convention 169 in 1994 and
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ratified the Convention 169 in the UN offices
in Geneva, Switzerland in 1995 in front of Honduran Indian witnesses(Griffin
and CEGAH,2005). Eventually most countries in Latin America approved ILO
Convention 169. In Honduras, the
Garifuna lands are protected under ILO Convention 169 and they receive
bilingual-intercultural education partly as a result of its approval, because
they are partly descended from Arawak and Carib Indians and resided in Honduras
prior to Independence and before the current borders were established in 1960
(Griffin and CEGAH, 2005). Black Bay
Islander lands are not protected by this ILO Covention, and they were included
in the bilingual intercultural education
program PRONEEAAH (National Education Program for Autoctonous and Afro-Antillan
Ethnic Groups of Honduras) because
Honduran Indians, Garifunas, CONPAH, and their own organization NABIPLA (Native
Bay Islanders Professional and Laborers’ Association) fought for them to be included..
US and Canadian Indians were involved with some of
these processes. As the Contra War was
being resolved, a US Mohawk chief visited with the Miskitos to help advise them
about Treaty Rights. The Miskitos are
the only Indians in Central America that have treaties with the countries where
they reside—Honduras and Nicaragua, probably due to the influence of the
British among them, as this technique of making treaties with Indians was more
a style of the British, Canadians and Americans than the Spanish speaking
governments.
Also thousands of Indian activists from around the
Americas came to Guatemala for the Second Encounter of the 500 years of
Resistance, in spite of the context of the Guatemalan civil war in which over
one hundred thousand Indians lost their lives, reports anthropologist Brent
Metz. Representatives of the World
Council of Indigenous Peoples visited the Honduran Garifuna and Indian
organizations and the Honduran Garifuna and Indian leaders were invited to
participate in international meetings about indigenous rights, funding for
indigenous projects, anti-racism, grassroots women's groups after disasters,
and Indians in Biospheres meetings . Native peoples live in more than 90 of the
110 Biospheres in the world, reports Tawahka Indian Edgardo Benitez.
Sometimes participation in these meetings was
difficult, because it was necessary to fly through Miami, Florida and the
Indians and Garifunas had trouble getting visas, even transit visas. For example, the current Honduran Minister of
Culture Garifuna Dr. Tulio Mariano Gonzales reported that the US denied him a
transit visa to go to a conference in Canada, even though he owns a house, is
married with children in Honduras, was head of an NGO which worked with
indigenous people, had a doctorate degree and had a bonafied invitation to
participate in the conference with all expenses paid. He had to pay a 24 hour
armed guard to watch him in the transit longue in the Miami airport in order to
wait for the connection to his flight to Canada the next day. Other Garifuna activists, for example from
CEGAH, have simply been denied visas to meet with funders or participate in
meetings in New York.US visas are now required even to change planes in Miami,
and even going to Mexico to change planes is difficult without a US visa,
because Mexico generally gives visas now to people with US visas, but otherwise
it is difficult.
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