sábado, 3 de enero de 2015

Garifunas Carry on Martin Luther King's Dream in Central America, US, and in the World Part I


Central American Indians and Blacks Carry on King’s Dream of Struggle for Civil Rights

 Part I Garífuna Organizations Founded  to Obtain Different Types of Goals 

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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