Garifunas Carry on Martin Luther King's Dream Part II

Garífunas Carry on Martin Luther King's Dream Part II

Human Rights for Indians, But What About Human Rights and Funding for Blacks?

 

The fact that the UN declared the Year and Two Decades of the Indigenous People and guaranteed the rights of Indigenous People, but not Blacks did not pass unnoticed in Honduras or in other places.  Not only in Honduras are the lands of African descent people under pressure, whether for tourism, peasant farming by the mestizos, development for export agriculture or cattle ranching, etc.  For example, the struggles of Afro-Columbians who make up the majority of Chocó Department have been denounced internationally. Susan Stonich’s book “The Other Side of Paradise” is about the effects of tourism on the loss of land and culture by Honduran English speaking Blacks in the Bay Islands.

 

The Founding of CABO—Central American Black Organization

 

 Celeo Alvarez Casildo, the Director of the Garifuna organization ODECO, called together leaders of all the other Black populations, including Belize,  in Central America to form CABO  in English (Central America Black Organization) or ONECA in Spanish in 1995.  In Celeo Alvarez’s office there is a huge photo of Martin Luther King, so he is definitely inspired by his work. The leaders of CABO meet yearly in different Central American countries or sometimes in New York such as in 2008, to include the members of their ethnic group who now live in New York and to talk to UN, development banks, and even African Union officials. ODECO’s  Diploma Program in the Formation of Afrodescent Leaders in Human Rights for young Afro descent people which has had 13 classes graduate has included not only Garifunas, but also Afro-descent youth from Argentina, Guatemala, Chile, and Nicaragua among other places. The motto of ODECO is “we are searching for voices to silence the silence.” (http://www.odecohn.blogspot.com)

 

The task that has absorbed OFRANEH during most of its history is to fight for the preservation of traditional Garifuna lands.  For example, in its proclamation for the Celebration of the Arrival of the Garifuna People in April, 2012 OFRANEH denounced the selling of the Garifuna lands in Trujillo, Santa Fe, and Guadelupe, Honduras to a Canadian businessman. Some of the land is being sold to Canadians for retirement homes, but the almost complete removal and destruction of the Garifuna neighborhood of Rio Negro, Trujillo where they have lived since 1797 was for the purpose of putting in a cruise ship dock. 

 

They have also denounced Honduran plans to put in a Model City, like a mini-state with its own laws and courts, between Puerto Castilla and Sico, Honduras, an area that includes the most traditional Garifuna communities with tens of thousands of Garifunas and most of those who still speak Garifuna fluently at home.  (www.ofraneh.org ). They also recently denounced plans to allow commercial fishing within three miles of the coast and to prohibit artisanal fishing, which will strongly affect Garifunas who traditionally were fishermen. ( www.ofraneh.wordpress.com)

 

There is a link to the OFRANEH website from www. BeingGarifuna.com, a New York based Garifuna blog by Teofilo Colon,  to help Garifunas in the US keep up with news of the struggles back at home. Garifunalinks.com is another popular website for Garifuna news. There is also GariTV.com an Internet TV station which is where Ruben Reyes of the Garifuna in Peril movie got his start in front of the camera as host of Sasamu Show, a talk show bout Garifuna community issues. Other Garifuna Internet sites like www.garinet.com also kept Garifunas in the US connected to what was happening in the communities back home.  Garifuna Coalition, a non-profit social service agency in New York City, organizes international meetings of Garifuna leaders which are sometimes in the US and sometimes in Central America like Honduras.

 

Other Honduran Indian federations also spend significant amounts of time fighting for land rights, and several Indian and Garifuna  leaders have been murdered or shot at because of their work in the struggle for land rights including Maya-Chorti leader Candido Amaya Amador, Pech leader Blas Lopez and Tolupan leader Vicente Matute. The Tolupan  or Jicaque Indians have lost 50 leaders over the last 20 years due to land disputes, the most recent three deaths being related to an antimony mine and proposed dam in their area in Yoro. The Garifuna president of OFRANEH Gregoria Flores left Honduras and moved to the US after someone shot at her near Central Park in the Center of La Ceiba, Honduras's third largest city and the headquarters of OFRANEH, in the middle of the day.  Honduran Indians and Garifunas also have fought for bilingual intercultural education that was illegal before 1992 in Honduras but is now law and internationally funded.

 

The Problem of Official Policies that Made Invisible the History or Contributions of Central American Blacks and Indians

 

After the original organization of CONPAH in 1992, some other Honduran Indian groups have been helped to organized by professors and students of UPN and they petitioned to become members of CONPAH, including the Maya-Chorti Indians of Honduras and the Nahua Indians of Honduras.  While the Honduran government recognized the Chorti federation, they have not yet fully legally recognized the Nahua Indians of Olancho, according to Cordelia Thewen’s research.For example, on the Honduran Ethnic Census of 2001 it was not possible to choose Nahua as an ethnic group, according to William Davidson’s book on the 2001 Ethnic Census of Honduras.  Honduran anthropologist Lazaro Flores has also been trying to document the culture, history and population of the Indians of Texiguat and Liure, El Paraiso, as a previous step to them being legally recognized.  Most of the Indian tribes which inhabited the El Paraiso Department in the colonial period, were also not on the 2001 census, such as Nahuas or Matagalpas or Chorotegas.

 

Some US Indian tribes have this issue of the lack of federal recognition, especially if they have lost their language and/or their land base. One Indian tribe in Louisana has been turned down 4 times for federal recognition, reported Tulane linguist Judith Maxwell. The Wampanoags who met the Pilgrims in Massachusettes had been turned down for federal recognition. Many of the tribes in the Eastern US who have trouble being recognized as Indians, are significantly mixed with Blacks, such as the Shinnecock Indians of Long Island, New York.

 

In El Salvador it was national policy that there were no more Indians in El Salvador after the 1932 Massacre of an estimated 32,000 Indians after an Indian uprising related to losing Indian lands due to coffee plantations, until 1992 when US anthropologist Marc Chapin wrote an article on the 500,000 invisible Indians of El Salvador, according to Virginia Tilley in her book Seeing Indians. In Nicaragua, it was argued for decades that there were no Indians in the Pacific side of Nicaragua, a policy known as “mestizaje”.  El Salvador also describes itself as a 100% mestizo country, even though there is significant document on colonial era Blacks in El Salvador who intermarried with the rest of the population. “Mestizaje” and “Españolización” were also policies in Honduras.

 

After 1992 there has been significant organization among Nicaraguan Indians and El Salvadoran Indians on the Pacific as well as the Atlantic coast, for example the Wikipedia article reports 79,000 registered Matagalpa Indians in Nicaragua. The Central American countries also denied that there were Blacks left in their country, dropping the categories of race from the censuses after 1930, and basically rewrote their histories leaving out the contributions of blacks who were the largest non-Indian group in Central America at the end of the colonial period, notes Dr. Dario Euraque of Trinity College and Dr. Justin Wolfe of Tulane.

 

How can you write the history of Yoro or Atlántida two north coast of Honduras departments where United Fruit (now Chiquita) and Standard Fruit (now Dole) were active, leaving out the Indians and the Blacks, if there were only 3 Spanish families there at the end of the colonial period? Obviously the main actors in the history of that area before the banana companies came were the over one thousand mulattos of Yoro and the over 17,000 free Indians, known as Jicaques. The colonial era Jicaque Indians probably represent a combination of Mesoamerican Indians, probably Nahua speakers also called Acaltecas, now remembered in the place name Agalteca, Yoro, and Tolupan Indians who were hunting and gathering people. Acaltecas may have been Nahua speakers who immigrated from Mexico to Central America under the Toltec King Ce Acalt Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl. Honduran Garifuna historians have been researching the history of the North Coast of Honduras and redefining it as using the Muscles and People of African descent to Develop the North Coast and support transnational corporations in the area.

 

The Trend of Free Blacks and Indians Intermarrying in Zones of Refuge

 

This mixing of different tribes of Indians in “areas of refuge” also happened in the US where among Seminole Indians, whose name means Renegade, there is evidence of at least two different Indian langauges including Muscogee Creek, so the Indians ran away all the way from Georgia to the Everglades to avoid being removed by the Americans during the era of Indian Removal of the Indians in the East. In the Everglades there were also Blacks who had run away from the Spanish  or the Americans and so that is why many Seminoles are now Black Indians. A Garifuna anthropologist Joseph Palacio has likened the situation of the Garifunas whose language is a mix of Arawak and Carib Indians, but have dark skins from African ancestors to that of the Seminoles.

 

Marches to Tegucigalpa by Honduran Blacks and Indians Beginning of Recognition

 

Honduran Indians had had similar problems that the Honduran government did not recognize that they existed. In the 1990’s   Honduran Indians and Afro-Hondurans organized several marches in Tegucigalpa where they stayed for weeks under the National Congress right in the middle of downtown Tegucigalpa which gained recognition from the Honduran government and the Honduran press that Honduran Indians and Afro-Hondurans actually  existed and they eventually received promises of significant reforms and development projects (Griffin and CEGAH, 2005), although the initial response of then President Reina was disbelief that they were Indians, saying “We are all mestizos”, the essential message of the "mestizaje" policy which has been researched in several countries such as Nicaragua by Jeffrey Gould and Justin Wolfe and in Honduras by Dr. Dario Euraque and Dr. Jorge Amaya Banegas.

 

 

Honduran Garifunas, Hurricane Mitch, and Organizing to Recover from Disasters

 

Some new Honduran Garifuna NGO’s appeared after Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and other Honduran Indian and Bay Islander organizations received significant funding as part of the rebuilding after Hurricane in Honduras..  Hurricane Mitch which was a category 5 hurricane and one of the worst in the 20^th century stalled for 3 days in front of the Honduran Garifuna community of Limon, Department of Colon.  More than 16 Garifuna communities are located in Colon, including very traditional communities where most people still farmed and houses often had palm frond roofs. In the Garifuna farming community of Barranco, about 11 km from Trujillo beside the Guaymoreto Lagoon, most of the houses also had walls of cohune palm leaves, locally called “manaca”.

 

With Hurricane Mitch it rained around 23 inches a day for more than 3 days and continued raining for most of a week with high winds.  The eye of the hurricane passed over Barranco. The destruction was devastating. Only one house was left habitable in Barranco.  In Trujillo, 13 Garifuna houses were destroyed and many more lost roofs.  In nearby Barra de Aguan and Santa Rosa de Aguan, over 400 acres of land was lost due to the sea swallowing two blocks of houses and the Aguan River changing course and joining the lagoon, which caused 39 deaths of people, and of over 3,00 head of Garifuna cattle. Dozens of houses were destroyed, even cement houses, because the containers of Dole floated in the river during the floods and acted as battering rams against the houses. Other Garifuna communities were also affected like Limon where wooden houses were lifted up off their foundations (Griffin and CEGAH, 2005)

 

Even more critical was the agricultural damage.  The Garifunas primarily grow root crops like manioc or yuca, sweet potato (camote),  and yams and banana like plants (guineos, chatas, platanos), which rotted in the ground in the rain and the part of the plant needed to replant also rotted.  There was a serious possibility of long term hunger in the Garifuna communities of the Department of Colon.  Yet when the Garifuna leaders of Trujillo asked the Honduran government for help for the Garifunas of Colon, they said, “We are busy in the South and Tegucigalpa. We can not help you.  Find your own help.”  Other indigenous leaders of other groups like the Miskito Indians were told the same.

 

So the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras (CEGAH) was formed by the Garifunas of Trujillo to get help for stricken villages.  They had to rent canoes to get food out to isolated villages.  They hiked one and hour into the mountains to find yuca stocks needed for planting that had not rotted and then had to carry them out of the mountains again. They were able to raise enough money to rebuild 13 houses in Trujillo, but to this day in 2013 there has been no Honduran government project to rebuild the community of Baranco, even though the nearby Pech Indian villages of Silin and Moradel have had 3 housing projects since Mitch. In Griffin and CEGAH, 2005 and in many Honduras This Week Online articles (http://www.marrder.com/htw)  there are stories by me of Hurricane Mitch devastation and rebuilding after Hurricane Mitch from all over Honduras. Hondurans in New York, including Garifunas, and in Connecticut also formed organizations, such as SHANY (Sociedad de Hondureños Activos en Nueva York) to raise money and collect donations for the people affected by Hurricane Mitch. The Brooklyn, New York NGO GROOTS (www.groots.org) and the American Jewish World Service (www.ajws.org) and another Jewish NGO Mazon were active in helping the Garifunas recover after Mitch.

 

Hurricanes Accelerate Immigration of Central American Garifunas to the US

 

Many Hondurans got legal permission to come to the US after Hurricane Mitch under a temporary immigration permission program called TPS. There are now enough Hondurans living in Atlanta to warrant that the Honduran government has opened a Consulate here and some of these Hondurans are Garifunas. Many of the Garifunas in Atlanta had been in the US before Hurricane Mitch, and moved here from other US cities especially New York and Miami. Garifunas had had a presence in New York City since the 1930’s, legally immigrating as merchant seaman. Hurricane Hattie in Belize in 1960 also devastated Garifuna villages there and led to increased immigration of Belizean Garífunas.

 

Southern Honduran towns like Choluteca and the relocated village of Orogüina had new houses within a year of Mitch.  It took years to get housing projects for the devastated Garifuna communities of Barra de Aguan and Santa Rosa de Aguan which had to be relocated. The housing projects required the Garifunas buy land to build the new houses and donate some of their agricultural land for houses for Ladinos from a nearby community of Vuelta Grande, whom the Garifunas considered land invaders. Funders required a road be put in to move the housing materials to the new location of Santa Rosa de Aguan.  The Honduran government said, We will provide the machinery, but the Garifunas have to provide 100 barrels of gasoline for the machinery.  These Garifunas had lost everything.  They had been poor before they lost everything. The Comite de Emergencia Garifuna bought land, and helped pay for materials. Garifunas in the US helped.

 

The housing project finally had to be built without a bridge ever being built over the river that crossed the road, and the Garifunas had to ferry the materials over the river to rebuild Santa Rosa de Aguan. With Witness, a NGO in New York the partners with people and organizations to use videos for advocacy, the Garifunas of CEGAH and an American-Trinidadian advisor made two videos, one about Hurricane Mitch and Santa Rosa de Aguan through the experiences of Garifuna children  and Lucha Garifuna (Garifunas Holding Ground) about an illegal highway through Garifuna lands above the drinking water project for 14 communities, including 4 large Garifuna communities in Colon. Lucha Garifuna won first place in a Latin American Environmental Video Festival at Tulane University. The illegal highway they protested about is now a major drug highway out of the Honduran Mosquitia. These videos in either English or Spanish are available from Witness (www.witness.org). On www.Vimeo.com there are 159 videos about Garifunas, including one on the Comite de Emergencia Garifuna (CEGAH).

 

When Garifunas Control Their Own Development Through Their Own NGO’s They Win Prizes

 

CEGAH became part of GROOTS and Huairou, international organizations working with grassroots women’s organizations.  GROOTS (www.groots.org) in particular was interested in the question of how grassroots women’s organizations respond to disasters, because they had a theory that international aid after disasters should be funded through grassroots organizations, especially women’s groups and women’s groups of ethnic minorities, instead of governments who often do not get the aid to the people or do not spend it on what people identify they need. Through GROOTS Garifuna women from CEGAH and/or their American Trinidadian advisor traveled to Turkey, Spain, and Africa discussing recovery after disasters with other grassroots women’s groups. They went to Sri Lanka and India to tell about their experiences recovering from Mitch and giving suggestions on how to recover from the tsunami. They went to New York and spoke to UN agency UNDP about women’s groups and ethnic minorities and recovery  after disasters. American Jewish World Service sponsored exchanges for Garifuna farmers helped by CEGAH who are usually woman to learn, talk about, and exchange experiences with peasant farmers from Mexico and Central America.

 

Huairou was so impressed with their work that they put them on the website as examples of “best practices”. GROOTS recommended that they describe their practices in sustainable development to compete for the UNDP Equator Prize for best practices in sustainable development while protecting the environment.  They were one of 24 semifinalists for the prize at the level of the whole world, and two Garifunas of CEGAH gave talks on the best practices of CEGAH in relationship to sustainable development in Malaysia to all the other semifinalists and representatives of the world’s governments attending the COP-7 meeting to discuss the progress made in environmental protection since the Environmental Summit in Rio in 1992. CEGAH continues working in sustainable development, including agriculture and reforestation in Garifuna communities in Colon. There are numerous reports on the Comite de Emergencia Garifuna’s work in the English language newspaper Honduras This Week Online (www.marrder.com/htw) and it is noted throughout the book Los Garifunas de Honduras (Griffin and CEGAH, 2005).

 

Around 1960, after Hurricane Hattie in Belize,  through the Alliance of Progress of President Kennedy, some Honduran Garifunas were allowed to come legally to the US.  There had previously been some immigration of Garifunas to the US since the 1930’s, who mostly came as merchant marines based in the US.  According to Trujillo Garifuna Sebastian Marin, if a sailor had a good record with the company, like United Fruit or Standard Fruit, they would help the person immigrate with his whole family.   United Fruit also helped the children of their English speaking Black employees study in the US, where many stayed, like the children of Rand Garo of Tela.

 

Honduran Garífunas Coordinate the First World Summit of Afro-Descent People in 2011

 

After 15 years of working with CABO in Central America, the First World Summit of  Afro-Descent People, was organized by ODECO’s founder Celeo Alvarez Casildo, and held in La Ceiba, Honduras during the UN’s International year of Afrodescent People in 2011 (www.listas.gsc.hn.hn/cgi-bin/egruposDMime.cgi?).After the World Summit of Afro-Descent Peoples in 2011, the 800 leaders of Afro-descent from 40 countries made a proclamation calling for development while respecting their identities, meaning their cultures. A book in Spanish and English “Primera Cumbre Mundial de Afrodescendientes/First World Summit of African Descendants” was recently published with funds of the World Bank with the results of the World Summit of Afro-Descent Peoples (http://www.sedinafroh.gob.hn/index.php/noticias/617-presentan-libro-sobre-la-cumbre-mundial-de-afrodesncendientes). This website also had a copy of the Declaration from the end of the Summit, but the Honduran government under the current Juan Orlando Hernandez government has downgraded SEDINAFROH to a department within the Ministry of Social Inclusion, are now called DEDINAFROH  and they lost their website.

 

The ODECO leader Celeo Alvarez is distributing this book to development and Honduran government officials as a platform to open discussions about the situation of Afrodescent people and what kind of programs can be developed to resolve the problems. (www.odecohn.blogspot.com) So the Afro-Indigenous Garifunas have had very active roles in the organizing both Indian and Afro-descent organizations on the national, regional and Internacional level.  Partly in recognition of this, Garifunas and Garifuna organizations are the majority of the entries about Honduras in Encyclopedia Caribe (www.encaribe.com), a free Spanish language online encyclopedia sponsored by the University of Havana and the University of Santo Domingo, which was founded because traditional encyclopedias carry little information about the history, cultures, and significant people of the Greater Caribbean Basin.

 

Bilingual Intercultural Education as a Theme for the Struggles of the Garifunas

 

The land issues are still ongoing in Honduras, but many Indian and Garifuna communities now at least have legal titles to parts of the land that they traditionally used.  Likewise, the Honduran bilingual intercultural education program still has numerous difficulties, but in recent meetings with Garifuna teachers, Pech teachers, Maya-Chorti, and Black Bay Islander English speaking teachers, students and national representatives, the teachers say they are teaching bilingual education in these schools, that they are receiving training, there are textbooks and reference materials in indigenous languages in the schools, and there are numerous evidences of teaching the culture such as active folkdance groups and students who sing the National Anthem of Honduras in Pech, Chorti and Garifuna.

 

The Intercultural Education Curriculum was approved by the National Congress of Honduras and was delivered to the schools.  The grandparents of children in Trujillo Garifuna schools and kindergartens say the children come home and speak a little Garifuna to them, even the grandparents of non-Garifuna children. The  Chorti representative Juan Perez has said in 2012 this Minister of Education has been very supportive of bilingual-education, which has not always been the case of other Ministers in the past. However, the Indians and English speaking Blacks are very critical of the lack of Intercultural Education in the classrooms.