Issues of the
Honduran Park or Protected Area System and Indigenous peoples of Honduras and
Its Relationship to the Issues should Afro-Hondurans be given political asylym ?
By Wendy Griffin March 6, 2015
In 2013 the University of Arizona Press published a
book about the Garifuna land problems in the Sambo Creek área near La Ceiba and
the small islands in front of La Ceiba known as Hog Keys in English and Cayos
Cochinos in Spanish. The author is Dr.
Keri Vacanti Brondo, currently professor of Applied Anthropology at the
University of Memphis. It is based on her research for her doctoral thesis at
Michigan State University from the period 2002-2005, with some attempts to
update the material based on a later field trip to Honduras and actually
includes some of the best early warning signals of the Model Cities or ZEDE
issue in the Trujillo área of Honduras.
The book is called “Land Grab: Green Neoliberalism,
Gender, and Garifuna Resistance in Honduras”.
There are a lot of good things in this book. Its review of the
literature on the issue of women not being taken into account by laws or policies
is good and very thought provoking. Her honesty about limits in her own
positionality in the issues of Garifuna land loss as related to tourism are
also noted. I think she does a very good job about researching Garifuna women’s
roles related to land management and the differences of management and
development styles between the two main Garifuna organizations OFRANEH and
ODECO. I wrote a nice review of the book for Amazon.com.
Since it was ODECO who helped craft the declaration
that came out of the First World Summit of Afro-Descent People in La Ceiba,
2011 which will be used in the policy making of UN agencies for the UN Decade
of Afro-Descent People which began January 2015, this difference may have
worldwide effects where there are Afro-Descent People. When the First World
Summit of Afro-Descent People was being held, OFRANEH as part of CONPAH
(National Confederation of Autochtonous Peoples of Honduras) published their
own declaration on the Civil Society website in Honduras. Dr. Brondo’s raising
of some issues about male and female leadership styles helped me focus and
figure out what really were the leadership roles of Garifuna society and how
are they are articulated and how are they different from the men’s roles. See
my article on Garifuna Women’s dance clubs in this blog.
While in general I am excited about the book and very happy that it is published and has sold well, and I have mentioned it frequently in HondurasWeekly.com articles, I have some issues with the historical data in the
book, which is, however, not her fault, as she was mostly quoting other people,
who for some reason found different results than I did.
Unfortunately there is no good way to say that her review of the literature about the actual situation of Honduran protected áreas and the indigenous people of Honduras was sadly lacking.This is not because there has not been a lot of work done on the issue. On the North Coast and Bay Islands of Honduras most of the people who have done research on the issue are women, which is a nice commentary on how safe it traditionally has been to work in these communities. For the study of Bay Islands protected áreas, which are most similar to the Hog Keys protected área she was studying, I had written a number of articles for the newspaper then online Honduras This Week, I have written a book on the Bay Islanders which is available free on the Internet which includes their land problems, and Dr. Susan Stonich of UC-Santa Barbara has written two books. Keri Brondo does include Susan Stonich’s 2000 book “The Other Side of Paradaise: Tourism, Conservation, and Development in the Bay Islands” and her other book on southern Honduras which also has protected áreas “I am Destroying the Land: The Political Ecology of Poverty and Environmental Destruction in Honduras”, but not her 2001 editted book “Endangered Peoples of Latin America: Struggles to Survive and Thrive” which also includes sections on the Honduran Moskitia and the Tzutzujil’s in Guatemala.
I finally
ordered a copy of “The Other Side of Paradise” from Amazon.com which costs
around $80 with shipping and a month later it still has not arrived. The University of Pittsburgh which teaches
about Afro-Latin Americans could not be bothered to have this book about Black
Bay Islanders at its Pittsburgh campus, so I have not been able to read it there. I actually like the introductory essay by
Dr. Susan Stonich of “Endangered peoples of Latin America” better than her Bay
Islander case study in that book because in her introductory essay, she points
out that the vulnerability of the ethnic people can result in ethnocide (loss
of a way of life), ecoside (destruction of the environment, which then makes it
impossible to continue the old way way of life), and genocide (death of an
entire people). To some extent, I think Afro-Hondurans and the
Honduran Indians are in danger of all of these in the current crisis.
Unfortunately there is no good way to say that her review of the literature about the actual situation of Honduran protected áreas and the indigenous people of Honduras was sadly lacking.This is not because there has not been a lot of work done on the issue. On the North Coast and Bay Islands of Honduras most of the people who have done research on the issue are women, which is a nice commentary on how safe it traditionally has been to work in these communities. For the study of Bay Islands protected áreas, which are most similar to the Hog Keys protected área she was studying, I had written a number of articles for the newspaper then online Honduras This Week, I have written a book on the Bay Islanders which is available free on the Internet which includes their land problems, and Dr. Susan Stonich of UC-Santa Barbara has written two books. Keri Brondo does include Susan Stonich’s 2000 book “The Other Side of Paradaise: Tourism, Conservation, and Development in the Bay Islands” and her other book on southern Honduras which also has protected áreas “I am Destroying the Land: The Political Ecology of Poverty and Environmental Destruction in Honduras”, but not her 2001 editted book “Endangered Peoples of Latin America: Struggles to Survive and Thrive” which also includes sections on the Honduran Moskitia and the Tzutzujil’s in Guatemala.
My book on Black Bay Islanders is Griffin,Wendy (2004)
The History and Culture of the Bay Islanders and North Coast English speakers (These
are Black or Afro-Antillian English speakers) This is the whole book for free.Developed at request of IHAH
librarian due to student requests. This book can be found at the following URL on the Internet.
.s114101627.onlinehome.us/files/Isleno.pdf
Unlike Dr. Brondo’s professors who recommended reading
and citing only refereed journals, Susan Stonich’s book “Endangered peoples of
Latin America” for both the Bay Islanders and the peoples living in the Rio
Platano Biosphere—Garifunas, Miskitos, Pech, and Tawahkas recommended keeping
up to date on what was happening with them by reading Honduras this Week
articles, whose articles on those peoples and protected areas were principally
by me. I had several articles in Honduras This Week specifically about the
conflict of Hog Keys, including some after the newspaper was available on the Internet beginning in 1995 which it is evident she did not read and did not cite. She did find the newspaper online and cited two of my articles, which makes it all the more mysterious why she did not take into account the Hog Keys and La Ceiba area protected areas and their foundations responsible for them articles or the dozens of articles related to Honduran protected areas.
On the Mainland of Honduras for the North Coast, the
two main researchers of national parks and the ethnic groups there including Garifunas, Pech, and Miskitos and the Ladinos have been Dr. Sharlene Mollett and myself. I am including
Dr. Mollett’s list of publications in the next entry on this blog. She is
currently a Geography Professor and head of Center for Development Studies at
the University of Toronto in Canada, her second job after graduation. Her first
job was in the Geography Department at Dartmouth College in the US.
My articles on the issues of the parks from the Omoa
and San Pedro area, the Tela area, the La Ceiba area, the Trujillo area, the
Mosquitia area which form the Mesoamerican Corredor (a funding iniative, more
than a reality) and the indigenous peoples of Garifunas, Miskitos, Pech, and
Tawahkas, but especially Garifunas written for Honduras This Week span from 1992 to 2006. There were dozens of
them, and included a whole series with personal interviewed all along the North
Coast after Hurricane Mitch including FUCSA, Fundación Cuero y Salado. These environmental NGO's were linked through internationally funded programs like REDES and the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor. If she
had read these articles, she would have also known that the Sambo Creek and Corozal
Garifuna fishermen who she was studying were also in conflict with that
foundation which runs the Cuero y Salado National Park, much of which is
mangrove swamps, good for certain kinds of fishing.
For a Garifuna view of the Sambo Creek area and Corozal Area (these two Garifuna villages merge into each other east of La Ceiba) see Garitv.com's productions La Historia de Sambo Creek and La Historia de Corozal, which include the issue of tourism and shows shots of the little motor launches that take you from Sambo Creek to the Hog Keys. They are also available at www.garistore.com. For an update on the current problems of Hog Keys see the OFRANEH blog www.ofraneh.blogspot.com which has a video of the Garifuna fishermen from Hog Keys, and see the Honduran government's website on Model Cities or ZEDE that will include one in the La Ceiba area which will affect the Garifunas there and one in the Bay Islands which as Hog Keys belongs to the municipio of Roatan, will be affected by the ZEDE there. www.zede.gob.hn.
For a Garifuna view of the Sambo Creek area and Corozal Area (these two Garifuna villages merge into each other east of La Ceiba) see Garitv.com's productions La Historia de Sambo Creek and La Historia de Corozal, which include the issue of tourism and shows shots of the little motor launches that take you from Sambo Creek to the Hog Keys. They are also available at www.garistore.com. For an update on the current problems of Hog Keys see the OFRANEH blog www.ofraneh.blogspot.com which has a video of the Garifuna fishermen from Hog Keys, and see the Honduran government's website on Model Cities or ZEDE that will include one in the La Ceiba area which will affect the Garifunas there and one in the Bay Islands which as Hog Keys belongs to the municipio of Roatan, will be affected by the ZEDE there. www.zede.gob.hn.
One of the problems of leaving people out of your
research who have done research in your area, like me and Sharlene Mollett, is
those are precisely the people who will get asked to review your book. Dr.
Sharlene Mollett has written a review of “Land Grab” which is in over 170
libraries who form part of WorldCat, for the Journal of Peasant Studies which
apparently has not been published yet. Somehow Garifunas and Peasants are not
two words that I would generally put together, even though Garifunas farmed,
and farmed a lot. I look forward to
reading it.
Other Subsistence Fishing Problems of the Garifunas of Sambo Creek and Corozal
Other Subsistence Fishing Problems of the Garifunas of Sambo Creek and Corozal
OFRANEH did a newsletter about the history of the
conflict with FUCSA, that Cuero y Salado had been Garifuna land, but they lent
it to the Hermanos Vacarros who started Standard Fruit, and they kept it, used
it over 60 years, and then returned it not to the Garifunas, but to the
Honduran state as a national park.
The Garífunas of the La Ceiba área used the waters in the Cuero y Salado for fishing since they moved into the La Ceiba área about the 1850's, but have been in conflicto with FUSA over continuing to use its waters for subsistence fishing, Apparantly OFRANEH leaders and the people of Sambo Creek and Corozal
chose not to share that newsletter with Dr. Brondo. My Honduras tThis Week articles about these La
Ceiba area agencies which ran the protected areas of Cuero y Salado-FUCSA and
Fundación Pico Bonito were also linked to the SidewalkMystic.com website, which
is about how to visit Honduran ethnic groups. They were published as part of a one year after Hurricane Mitch series of articles I wrote in 1999-2000 for Honduras This Week.
Why did the
Hondurans Really Start the Protected Areas in the Garifuna Areas?
The way Dr. Keri
Brondo treats the problem of the Garifunas in Hog Keys, which is now under the
management of a private foundation in Honduras and which at times during the
Garifuna conflicts with the Honduran state was administered by the Smithsonian
Tropical Research Institute of the US government, distresses me in different ways, but the key problem seems to be that she
assumed that basically, deep down, the purpose of creating the protected areas
in Honduras was to help the Honduran people, including the Garifunas. I do not believe that this is true.
This ignores where the understanding of parks at the international level comes from--deer parks of the rich to keep peasants out like in Robin Hood stories which shows how well that idea played out in medieval Europe. This ignores the power issues involved in why Honduras would declare a park, such as USAID, World Bank, Germany, IDB promise money if they will declare such and thus many parks like this and Honduras does it because it needs the money. Her treatment of the Hog Keys land struggle ignored the whole history of the land struggle of the Hog Keys Garifunas in which the Honduran government vehemently tried to argue that there were no Garifunas on Hog Keys, even though there was a 10 year old school there with 35 Garifuna children enrolled.
Her book downplayed issues like the Honduran Navy caused the death of a Garifuna fisherman by leaving him at high sea and taking his canoe for fishing where he has always fished, and did the same with other Garifuna fisherman who was thankfully rescued by his companions. She notes it as "a reported human rights violation." It could also be called Murder by Honduran military forces of innocent fisherpeople. In the Tela area and Trujillo area, Garifunas have also been shot for fishing, and in a confrontation with PROLANSATE in the Tela area a young Garifuna died as the result of these fishing related confrontations. People are dying on the North Coast about the right to eat. If the Garifunas do not supplement what they grow--chiefly things high in hydrocarbonhydrates with fish or meat, they will be seriously malnourished, and this is happening in Honduras, and CARE and the Catholic Diocese of the North Coast have documented it and denounced in Honduran newspapers.
This ignores where the understanding of parks at the international level comes from--deer parks of the rich to keep peasants out like in Robin Hood stories which shows how well that idea played out in medieval Europe. This ignores the power issues involved in why Honduras would declare a park, such as USAID, World Bank, Germany, IDB promise money if they will declare such and thus many parks like this and Honduras does it because it needs the money. Her treatment of the Hog Keys land struggle ignored the whole history of the land struggle of the Hog Keys Garifunas in which the Honduran government vehemently tried to argue that there were no Garifunas on Hog Keys, even though there was a 10 year old school there with 35 Garifuna children enrolled.
Her book downplayed issues like the Honduran Navy caused the death of a Garifuna fisherman by leaving him at high sea and taking his canoe for fishing where he has always fished, and did the same with other Garifuna fisherman who was thankfully rescued by his companions. She notes it as "a reported human rights violation." It could also be called Murder by Honduran military forces of innocent fisherpeople. In the Tela area and Trujillo area, Garifunas have also been shot for fishing, and in a confrontation with PROLANSATE in the Tela area a young Garifuna died as the result of these fishing related confrontations. People are dying on the North Coast about the right to eat. If the Garifunas do not supplement what they grow--chiefly things high in hydrocarbonhydrates with fish or meat, they will be seriously malnourished, and this is happening in Honduras, and CARE and the Catholic Diocese of the North Coast have documented it and denounced in Honduran newspapers.
The Garifunas
of the Tela area and the La Ceiba area and the Hog Keys areas fished in these waters off the shores of the Atlántida Department where Tela and La Ceiba are located at least by the 1840's before the Honduran state had
any presence whatsoever in the areas. There are a whole series of treaties from
the mid-19th century which made Northern and Northeastern part of
Honduras, as well as the Bay Islands and Hog keys part of Honduras, so the Garifunas and Miskitos and Pech and Tawahkas, actually have
treaty rights which are currently being violated,such as guaranteeing them the right to peaceful enjoyment of their lands (haciendas in the treaty of 1843).
The second treaty in this series was the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty between the US and Great Britain, that among other things says that neither the US nor Great Britain can have fortified or military positions on the Central American coast. A summary of this treaty is found the 1887 Honduran general census on googlebooks under the Islas de la Bahia, (Bay Islands). The US is currently in violation of this treaty. A final treaty between Honduras and Great Britian in 1859 and then Honduran laws decreeing departments in the areas of the Bay Islands, the Mosquitia, and in the 1880's Colon, and Atlántida departments are formed thus completing the process of legally integrating the Garifuna area into the state structure of Honduras. Note that the Garifunas are already in all of these departments before they become part of the Honduran state which qualifies them as Black Caribs to being indigenous to the Honduran state under ILO convention 169.
The second treaty in this series was the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty between the US and Great Britain, that among other things says that neither the US nor Great Britain can have fortified or military positions on the Central American coast. A summary of this treaty is found the 1887 Honduran general census on googlebooks under the Islas de la Bahia, (Bay Islands). The US is currently in violation of this treaty. A final treaty between Honduras and Great Britian in 1859 and then Honduran laws decreeing departments in the areas of the Bay Islands, the Mosquitia, and in the 1880's Colon, and Atlántida departments are formed thus completing the process of legally integrating the Garifuna area into the state structure of Honduras. Note that the Garifunas are already in all of these departments before they become part of the Honduran state which qualifies them as Black Caribs to being indigenous to the Honduran state under ILO convention 169.
It is not a rumor that the US has military bases on
the North Coast of Honduras, including in Caratasca Lagoon in the Mosquitia and
on Guanaja in the Bay Islands and also deploys with the Honduran Navy from time
to time to out of Trujillo/Puerto Castilla. On Realnews.com you can see the
signs (Tarea conjunta Bravo-Joint task Force Bravo, the US Military in Honduras
and in Central America, since there is also a naval base in El Salvador) for
the Estado Mayor (General Staff) in Puerto Lempira and the base itself on the
Caratasca lagoon. It is also on the maps of Honduras in Tanya Kerrsen’s book “Power
Grab” about the conflict in the Lower Aguan Valley.
On Realnews.com, you can see Honduran military people in uniform saying “Yes, there is a US naval base at the end of the Caratasca Lagoon.” This is a protected area. In one RealNews.com video from 2011 the Miskitos are shown carrying their belongings, while the voiceover says, “the people in the zone are leaving almost voluntarily.” In another Realnews.com video from 2012, the president of the Honduran Association for the Disappeared says directly in front of the camera, "The people are leaving almost voluntarily. If they are being pushed out, what other option do they have besides leaving?” On the 2014 Telesur video Tierra negra (Garifunas) on YouTube, an episode of the Causa Justa (Just Cause) TV show, the Ladino lawyer who presented the Lenca's and Garifuna's cases of inconstituionality of ZEDE to the Honduran Supreme Court says, "Those who do not meet the usages assigned to their lands will have to be expelled from their territories." The Minister of toursim was interviewed and she confirmed about zoning lands like "vocación turística" ( for Tourism use) or of forestry use (vocación forestal, such as according to Julian Lopez Lopez's book on Guajiquiro, la Paz 95% of the land in the Lenca municipio of Guajiquiro where the Guajiquiro Biological Reserve is protecting the 7 species of pine in Honduras).
On Realnews.com, you can see Honduran military people in uniform saying “Yes, there is a US naval base at the end of the Caratasca Lagoon.” This is a protected area. In one RealNews.com video from 2011 the Miskitos are shown carrying their belongings, while the voiceover says, “the people in the zone are leaving almost voluntarily.” In another Realnews.com video from 2012, the president of the Honduran Association for the Disappeared says directly in front of the camera, "The people are leaving almost voluntarily. If they are being pushed out, what other option do they have besides leaving?” On the 2014 Telesur video Tierra negra (Garifunas) on YouTube, an episode of the Causa Justa (Just Cause) TV show, the Ladino lawyer who presented the Lenca's and Garifuna's cases of inconstituionality of ZEDE to the Honduran Supreme Court says, "Those who do not meet the usages assigned to their lands will have to be expelled from their territories." The Minister of toursim was interviewed and she confirmed about zoning lands like "vocación turística" ( for Tourism use) or of forestry use (vocación forestal, such as according to Julian Lopez Lopez's book on Guajiquiro, la Paz 95% of the land in the Lenca municipio of Guajiquiro where the Guajiquiro Biological Reserve is protecting the 7 species of pine in Honduras).
The old name for Honduran agency in charge of forests
and protected areas and marine parks like Hog keys was COHDEFOR. The new name
is ICF (Instituto de Conservación Forestal) with exactly the same functions which as noted in my talk on the Search for Ciudad blanca Part IV video on Youtube includes exporting wood. It has a
website with maps of where all the protected areas are. Look at those maps and
then look at the official Honduran government ZEDE or Model Cities maps on its www.zede.gob.hn website. You will notice many
protected areas including the Bay islands, La Ceiba area including Sambo Creek
and Corrozal, the Trujillo-Puerto Castilla area, the Rio Platano biosphere
Reserve, the parks behind Omoa are included in these ZEDE. In the Search for the Ciudad Blanca part IV video Garifuna guide Roberto Marin from Plaplaya does an amazing critique of Honduran protected area management that the money is spent in offices and personel and cars in the city and every day the situation in the Mosquitia it is worse. See the video on Vimeo.com Paradise in Peril to see the same area of the Rio Platano Biosphere reserve 9 years later, cattle ranches and the Biosphere burning up. This is the area that the London Telegraph, the Manchester Guardian, the National Geographic, Yahoo! News, Honduran newspapers La Prensa and La Tribuna have been trumpeting the "untouched Ciudad blanca" has been found over the last week. Even Bloomburg Financial Services ran a note Honduran White City found but not found over the last week. Can pushing the indigenous people out of this sacred area, which is why it was undisturbed, be far behind as happened for example in Copan Ruinas? The Miskitos said last year, the Honduran government wants to sell the Ciudad Blanca and they had not even found it. Now they know where they can give the tourist concession.
In Honduran ZEDE the law that will operate with Common
Law, which separates subsoil rights from the ownership of the top of the land.
That issue in Common Law caught a lot of US people who got affected by fracking
by surprise. In Padre Fausto Milla’s
book on medicinal plants,there is a Honduran peasant saying, I am interesting
in the soil, and an Uncle Sam dressed businessman saying I am interested in
subsoil. Pay attention to that distinction as you read below about oil and gas
exploration and explotation and gold and silver and iron and copper mines. The
cases under litigation in the ZEDE will be tried in Mauritius. Now remember
that this is Honduras that has no money to pay the police gas money to come and
investigate murders. Really, Mauritius? Where Survivor is filmed in the Indian
Ocean? Survivor type programs are also filmed in Hog Keys in Honduras, and they
use this as an excuse to keep people off the island where they might for
example get bait to go fishing, which is of course illegal. You know protecting
the “fauna”, using the Honduran and US Navy and money to stop people from
getting bait and feeding their families? This is part of why the Garifuna organization OFRANEH classifies the Model Cities, initially an idea of US Liberatarian economist Paul Romer, as "Liberatarian delirious dreams."
The Issue of Native Peoples Being Pushed Off land, including for Parks, is Worldwide
The Issue of Native Peoples Being Pushed Off land, including for Parks, is Worldwide
Witness.org is partnering with Amnesty international
and say that 15 million people a year are displaced worldwide and they have
materials in 7 languages to talk about the theme (of course they put that
information on a webpage only in English). Two of the case studies they are
using include Latin American countries of Brazil (World cup and Olympics) and Mexico.
Mexico was literally required by the US government to take away the validity of ejidal lands of Mexican Indians which they had literally held since before the Spanish Conquest as a requirement to become part of NAFTA. The World Bank has helped push through the Ley de Propriedad (Property Law) in Honduras which does away with collective titles and is very frightening to OFRANEH if it would actually be implemented, and the World Bank property project in Honduras PATH (Programa de Administración de tierras en Honduras) has its own website. PATH is mentioned in the Garifuna in Peril movie by the British investor of the hotel resort that is in the movie, set in the Garifuna towns between Tela and La Ceiba of Triunfo de la Cruz and La Ensenada, now the site of an all-inclusive tourist resort.
Mexico was literally required by the US government to take away the validity of ejidal lands of Mexican Indians which they had literally held since before the Spanish Conquest as a requirement to become part of NAFTA. The World Bank has helped push through the Ley de Propriedad (Property Law) in Honduras which does away with collective titles and is very frightening to OFRANEH if it would actually be implemented, and the World Bank property project in Honduras PATH (Programa de Administración de tierras en Honduras) has its own website. PATH is mentioned in the Garifuna in Peril movie by the British investor of the hotel resort that is in the movie, set in the Garifuna towns between Tela and La Ceiba of Triunfo de la Cruz and La Ensenada, now the site of an all-inclusive tourist resort.
Potential investors in Honduras have felt
uncomfortable watching the Garifuna in Peril movie, but it is important to remember just for a
moment that maybe the Honduran government might be lying to foreign investors
about how easy it will be to get land, if only those invisible Indians and
Blacks could be gotten off of it. I also think the foreign advisors who are
whispering in the Honduran president’s ear that ZEDE’s are the solution are
lying to him through their teeth, and sometimes he suspects this because he
says things like, "When I am out of the country I take advantage to tell the
investors to come, and I tell the tourists to come and they say, No, not now." This was part of his 100 days in office interview in El Heraldo, a Tegucigalpa conservative paper. I
think the Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez in his speeches last year
was more than a little aware of US double standards about who pays the real costs for US policies in Central America, and
what are the priorities that the US tries to convince the Honduran government and other Central American countries and the Dominican Republic who are part of PARLACEN and CAFTA-DR (Central American Free Trade Agreement-Dominican Republic) that they should adopt.
I had at one point thought about a career in the
diplomatic service. Then I was told the purpose is to represent US interests
(read military and business interests) in the area and not to help the Honduran
people or whatever country you are in. In fact, one US Ambassador to Honduras was
recalled while I was in Honduras because it was thought he was paying attention
to Honduran interests and not those of the US government, US businesses, and
US military objectives in the area which is part of Southcom. I tried to talking to the
representative of IDB (Interamerican Development Bank) in Honduras about the need to protect the rainforest, the
water quality, and the reefs of Honduras so that Indians and Afro-Hondurans could have access to
the resources they needed for their cultures, and I was verbally cut off at the knees. The IDB representative to Honduras in a meeting with Hondurans, me, and the USAID person for the Environment said clearly, “We
are not lending money to protect the rainforest for the Indians, we are
protecting it because we do not know what is there.” Now 20 years they have
bookcases of studies, some of which are mandated to qualify for ILO Convention
169 protection of land like my book, and not only are they going to change the
land laws, but with the Transpacific Trade Pact iniative, they are going to change
the Intellectual Property Laws, and all that information collected in good
faith, will suddenly be at the disposition of any corporation willing to pay a
Spanish translator. Much of that information is only in English and was not made available to the Honduran Indians themselves. USAID in Tegucigalpa has a ceiling to floor bookcase of such studies. The Pech are livid about such privatization of their information, which is then kept from them.
Why are Business
people and Banks Active in Honduras Mascarading as Environmentalists?
Dr. Keri Brondo in her book quotes OFRANEH leaders about "Businessmen mascarading as Environmentalists". Why did the World Bank and IDB start funding global
protection strategies for rainforest about the same time as the Indians
organized in 1992? One reason might be the Global Summit in Rio de Janeiro,
after which Honduras almost from morning to night wrote the Law of the
Modernization of Agriculture and declared 104 protection areas, including at
least 2 the El Carbon Anthropological Preserve of the Pech Indians in Olancho, and
the Montaña de la Flor Anthropological Preserve of the Tolupan Indians in
Francisco Morazon, the Indians already had full PRIVATE titles to.
In most cases these protected areas were put willy knilly on top of indigenous peoples from the Guajiquiro Biological Reserve and Montecillos National Park (both Lencas), to the Rio Platano Biopshere (At 50,000 inhabitants between buffer zone and nuclear zone and not 2,000 like the Wikipedia article), at least 24 Garifuna communities and Ladinos. Dr.Tulio Mariano when he was studying the Cuero y Salado national Park commented, "There is a Ladino who has cattle that are just eating their way to the sea there." Cattle ranching was not an illegal actitivity there and it is not an illegal activity in the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve. Honduran newspapers from time to time have discussed the possibility of expelling the Indians as well as the Ladinos from the Rio Platano Biosphere even though for some Indian groups in the Mosquitia, the Walpatara, large painted rock on the Rio Platano marks the place where their people first came up to this earth, it is their umbilical cord.
The Relationship of Intellectual Property and Protected área funding, including in Black areas
In most cases these protected areas were put willy knilly on top of indigenous peoples from the Guajiquiro Biological Reserve and Montecillos National Park (both Lencas), to the Rio Platano Biopshere (At 50,000 inhabitants between buffer zone and nuclear zone and not 2,000 like the Wikipedia article), at least 24 Garifuna communities and Ladinos. Dr.Tulio Mariano when he was studying the Cuero y Salado national Park commented, "There is a Ladino who has cattle that are just eating their way to the sea there." Cattle ranching was not an illegal actitivity there and it is not an illegal activity in the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve. Honduran newspapers from time to time have discussed the possibility of expelling the Indians as well as the Ladinos from the Rio Platano Biosphere even though for some Indian groups in the Mosquitia, the Walpatara, large painted rock on the Rio Platano marks the place where their people first came up to this earth, it is their umbilical cord.
The Relationship of Intellectual Property and Protected área funding, including in Black areas
I think that the real reason was not the great desire
for oxegen and rain that were the arguments of the people in Rio de Janeiro,
but that this was the time when drug companies like Ely Lilly were making
millions on traditional “indigenous” knowledge, although actually the knowledge
was often held by African Blacks instead of Indians. Some African healer in
Madcascagar said, "Yes, I know there are 18 kinds of periwinkles here, but only
two are good for the sickness of the blood." They tested them and one kind cures
childhood leukemia,the other kind adult leukemia. Did the African healer get $5
out of it? I doubt it.
Where do all those famous drugs that revolutionized
mental health treatment come from? A lot of them came originally from
indigenous knowledge, and again African knowledge. An English Lord became sick
with schizophrenia in Africa in the 1920’s and since Europe had no treatment
for schizophrenia at the time his family let the local plant doctor treat him
and he got better. From that plant, thorazine for schizophrenia was developed.
One of the first drugs to treat manic depression was Valporic acid. The reason
it looks like the plant name Valerain in English and Valeriana in Spanish is
that was the original treatment. Lithium for manic depression was a known US Native
American cure and when people had that they were sent to Lithia springs like in
Oregon to take the waters. According to Wikipedia African healers and midwives use 2-3,000 species of megaflora and fauna in their medicinal treatments in Africa. Just one Black bush doctor in Belize knew plant medicines for over 1,000 medicinal plants, more than all the medicinal plant lore left in Europe, noted UNAH ethnobiologist Dr. Paul House. At least 300 medicinal plants are known to be used by Miskitos and Garifunas in the Honduran rainforest, and some animals and even a fish and chicken are used medicinally.
How to Steal
Land and Intellectual Property information?
Maybe the Investment Banks were thinking, “What if we
could have our cake and eat it, too?” First we get people to collect all this
information and we will promise them something-maybe land titles, maybe
bilingual intercultural education, maybe language documentation, maybe money for
plant nurseries. We get the information, and then WE CHANGE THE RULES.
Yes, you the Garifunas of Trujillo have land titles,
but we changed the rules and your organization is no longer legally recognized if
you have no corporate charter or we don’t recognize your representativees. Yes
you the Garifuna of Trujillo have land titles, you have 5 land titles, but you have collective land titles and our
new laws only accept individual titles.
Yes,yes we know you the Garifunas of Trujillo have a single
land title for 5,000 hectares, but it has a deficiency. I the government could
fix it, but when I do, I the government will give you a land title for 990
hectares and give the rest to other people, and keep Capiro and Calentura
Mountains Park and Guaymoreto Lagoon Park for me the Honduran government (and my associates).
But wait I the
government decided you the Garifunas of Trujillo still have too much land and
so I make you give 20 hectares for
housing for poor starving Ladinos. And then you can’t pay your lawyer’s fees,
so you will sell more land to a Canadian developer or a New Zealand hotel
builder who offers to sweeten the deal
for you personally.
But I the government still have special needs, So now I will use eminent domain (this has been used already and is part of the ZEDE process as well) and rezoning (es de vocación turista no residencial) this land is zoned for tourism not living houses for the poor, and voila I can have it all and the Intellectual Knowledge of how to use it and it was not even expensive and it took me only twenty years to get.
If I as a researcher of Honduran ethnic groups had read the book of Murdered in Central America by Ed and Donna Brent earlier I would have seen this type of process had already been done in the jungle area of Guatemala, where the Guatemalan military got the majority of the land, and that the priest who encourage the Indians to do it was murdered and the Indians forced to leave. There are now more Mayas in the US than any single tribe of Mayas in Central America and Mexico. The way land and resources were taken away from US Indians was also an ever cascading changing of the rules has been shown by a law professor from Yale. That one of the known socios or partners of the Honduran ZEDE is a real estate company in Guatemala, should not surprise us. It is easy to make money selling land that does not belong to you. The Ley Monsanto on Intellectual property rights in Guatemala was passed slyly while everyone was focused on the World Cup in Brazil. The US Secretary of State John Kerry was trying to force El Salvador to abandon their Food Sovereignity Program which has led to food self sufficiency in under 10 years in El Salvador in basic grains by linking $220 million in Millenium Goals funding to letting "US seeds (read Monsanto genetically modified seeds) compete at the same level as Salvadoran seeds," even though the importer of Monsanto seeds in El Salvador is former Right Wing President of El Salvador Cristiani linked to death squads in the Salvadoran Civil War. It was after protesting that that I got death threats related to my work in the Trujillo area of Honduras.
But I the government still have special needs, So now I will use eminent domain (this has been used already and is part of the ZEDE process as well) and rezoning (es de vocación turista no residencial) this land is zoned for tourism not living houses for the poor, and voila I can have it all and the Intellectual Knowledge of how to use it and it was not even expensive and it took me only twenty years to get.
If I as a researcher of Honduran ethnic groups had read the book of Murdered in Central America by Ed and Donna Brent earlier I would have seen this type of process had already been done in the jungle area of Guatemala, where the Guatemalan military got the majority of the land, and that the priest who encourage the Indians to do it was murdered and the Indians forced to leave. There are now more Mayas in the US than any single tribe of Mayas in Central America and Mexico. The way land and resources were taken away from US Indians was also an ever cascading changing of the rules has been shown by a law professor from Yale. That one of the known socios or partners of the Honduran ZEDE is a real estate company in Guatemala, should not surprise us. It is easy to make money selling land that does not belong to you. The Ley Monsanto on Intellectual property rights in Guatemala was passed slyly while everyone was focused on the World Cup in Brazil. The US Secretary of State John Kerry was trying to force El Salvador to abandon their Food Sovereignity Program which has led to food self sufficiency in under 10 years in El Salvador in basic grains by linking $220 million in Millenium Goals funding to letting "US seeds (read Monsanto genetically modified seeds) compete at the same level as Salvadoran seeds," even though the importer of Monsanto seeds in El Salvador is former Right Wing President of El Salvador Cristiani linked to death squads in the Salvadoran Civil War. It was after protesting that that I got death threats related to my work in the Trujillo area of Honduras.
Historical Precedents for the Current Way of
Alienating Indigenous Peoples from their Lands
I also should not have been surprised that this change
was going to happen in the laws, because the 19th century Hondurans
did similar things with the ejidal land of Honduran Indians, but especially the
cofradía land. The first law confiscating cofradía land, by saying land titles
of “tierra en mayordomía” (stewards of the land) were no longer valid land
titles was during Francisco Morazon’s government in the 1820’s. Another was
issued during the Liberal Reform in the 1880’s. Another was issued more
strongly in the 1920’s under Paz Baharona when Honduran coffee really took off.
That one actual made headway, although thousands of Indians died in the Wars to
prevent it.
In 1994, the
last piece of Lenca cofradía land in Yamaranguila, Intibuca was taken away from
its status of tierra del santo, land belonging to the Saint, by the mayor the
same year over 40 Lencas died of starvation in the area. So while it is true
that the Honduran government did eventually gain control of all the Lenca and
Chorti and Nahua cofradía land, how many wars did they fight to do it and how
many years did it take them? A lot
longer than most US investors want to wait.
But in the search for resources, Tanya Kerrsen in her book “Power Grab”
quotes someone as saying, “In the current search for the last resources, we are
having to destroy whole societies.”
Where were the Bibliographic Resources
about the Issues of Honduran Protected Areas and Indigenous Peoples in
Honduras? Why aren’t US Grad Students and Professors Finding them?
All of the
problems that Keri Brondo’s book missed the mark on why there were parks in tHonduras in the
first place and whether they were ever intended to benefit the local people, could have been included if she had either
read my dozens of Honduras This Week articles about national parks in Honduras (online
until 2013) or my 2005 book “Los Garifunas de Honduras: Cultura, Lucha, y
Derechos Bajo el Convenio 169 de la OIT”
(The Garifunas of Honduras: Culture, Struggle, and Rights Under ILO
Convention 169) which gives in detail
the various Garifuna land struggles in Honduras, including Hog Keys, the only
Honduran land struggle that reached the point of asking the ILO to intervene
under ILO Convention 169 on the Human rights of indigenous and tribal peoples
in independent countries, a point she did not mention in her book.
The in depth coverage of the Hog Keys problems in my
book and my articles includes interviews and conference presentations by the
former OFRANEH leaders who actually sat at the negotiating table with the
Smithsonian and the Honduran government and petitioned the ILO to investigate
including Gregoria Flores (shown speaking in the book) former president, Horacio
Martinez, former president, and Felix Caballero, former Fiscal. Dr. Tulio
Mariano Gonzales of CIDH (Centro Independente de Desarrollo de Honduras) who
went on to be PARLACEN Deputy and Minister of Culture also spoke in Trujillo
about ILO convention 169. I have heard current Garifuna president of OFRANEH Miriam
Miranda and the ILO Representative in Honduras and Rigoberta Menchu and the
head of CONPAH when a Tolupan Indian woman was president all speak on ILO
Convention 169 in Honduras when it was first introduced. The head of the Bay
Islands schools, responsible for opening the school at Hog Keys, was my friend
Professor Fausto Miguel Alvarez who went on to become head of bilingual
intercultural education for the Garifunas, member of the curriculum committee
for that project in Trujillo, and founding member of the Garifuna Emergency
Committee of Honduras (CEGAH) which co-authored the book “Los Garifunas de
Honduras”. The father of the Garifuna teacher who taught in Hog Keys was also a
Trujillo resident who I knew and discussed the case with.
Before I asked Dr. Keri Brondo why she had not read my
book or articles, I did look up to see if you look up ILO Convention 169 does
my book come up. Yes, it is one of only 16 books in all of Latin America in
WorldCat of what US university libraries hold that are case studies of ILO
Convention 169. I tried looking up
Garifunas and ILO Convention 169 and only two books come up—mine and Dr. Keri
Brondo’s. These are also the principal books that are the studies of ILO Convention
169 of any ethnic group in Honduras. It
is surprising that if there is only one other book exactly on the topic you are
researching, especially if it is by someone you have heard of, since she cites
two of my Honduras this Week articles,
that you would not read it for a book that has been published.
Dr. Brondo said that most of the research for the book was done in the time period of her thesis which is to say until 2005, and so that is the reason she did not find my book, not in US libraries until 2006. She also said the other researchers who study Garifunas who reviewed her book and thesis for her did not mention my book for her to look at, which is especially interesting as one of them knew me personally from meeting in Tegucigalpa. Book reviews of my Garifuna book are still on www.garinet.com (Garifunas), www.afrocuba.com, and the official website of the Taino Indians on the Internet. If her professors said she could not quote newspaper articles, and I have heard similar stories from other US graduate students who were researching Lencas, then there is not much incentive to look for them. In Honduras there is almost no where else to publish, as there are almost no academic journals. The lead times for books and referreed articles is often 10 years before they appear, as was the case with her own book, so if you are studying something that is happening now or recently, you need to look at the newspaper.
Is the fact that US Grad Students and Professors not finding the materials a Training Issue?
Dr. Brondo said that most of the research for the book was done in the time period of her thesis which is to say until 2005, and so that is the reason she did not find my book, not in US libraries until 2006. She also said the other researchers who study Garifunas who reviewed her book and thesis for her did not mention my book for her to look at, which is especially interesting as one of them knew me personally from meeting in Tegucigalpa. Book reviews of my Garifuna book are still on www.garinet.com (Garifunas), www.afrocuba.com, and the official website of the Taino Indians on the Internet. If her professors said she could not quote newspaper articles, and I have heard similar stories from other US graduate students who were researching Lencas, then there is not much incentive to look for them. In Honduras there is almost no where else to publish, as there are almost no academic journals. The lead times for books and referreed articles is often 10 years before they appear, as was the case with her own book, so if you are studying something that is happening now or recently, you need to look at the newspaper.
Is the fact that US Grad Students and Professors not finding the materials a Training Issue?
Some librarians in SALALM mention being embedded in
the research classes at their university as they find the students are unable
to find where the data they might need might be. I asked Dr. Dario Euraque why
he did not include my Garifuna and Bay Islander books in his bibliography of
resources available on Afro-Central Americans in his 2013 book, and he said he had not looked on
the Internet, and did not know they had been published, or in the case of the
Bay islander book which has a lot of information on the land issues there, also
not cited by Dr. Keri Brondo were available for free on the Internet. So I
thought one issue was a training issue and I have been trying to work with the
Latin American librarians of SALALM on the issue. I have taught study skills to Honduran university students, and that was one issue there.
Why is some research that is done invisible to US researchers?
Why is some research that is done invisible to US researchers?
Dr. Keri Brondo also did not cite a single book or
article by Dr. Sharlene Mollett who has studied the Garifuna land issues and
national parks in the Tela area (Master’s thesis), Trujillo area (Silin, Capiro
and Calentura National Park), and the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve. As noted
in the next blog entry, most of Dr. Mollett’s published works also started appearing around
2006. Because she studied at a Canadian
University, her Master’s and Doctoral
thesis’s are invisible to most US or Honduran researchers, because unlike
US Doctoral and Master’s thesis, they are not available through www.PROQUEST.com . Also a lot of her
materials are articles inside of books, and they are harder to identify by
regular searching means than books, so I asked her to make available a list of
her materials so that researchers could find them more easily.
The relationship of Dr. Sharlene Mollett's work on protected areas and the causes of Afro-Honduran immigration to the States increasing over the last two years.
The relationship of Dr. Sharlene Mollett's work on protected areas and the causes of Afro-Honduran immigration to the States increasing over the last two years.
While I have not read most of Dr. Mollett’s work, she
looks at some issues that are crucial for understanding the issues raised in
Dr. Keri Brondo’s book. Also because she looks at how Hondurans characterize
each other racially and use this to legitimize claims to resources over the
rights of the other race, her work is essential for understanding the process
of “othering” and even “demonizing” (demonización)
that the Honduran government is currently doing in Honduras, especially to its
Afro-Descent groups the Garifunas and the Miskitos.
As writers like Eckard Tolle in the new Earth, governments and religions and leaders have used this process to dehumanize the other group, to make us not see our common humanity, and thus we don’t feel bad when we take their resources, steal their land and make them become displaces, bar them from accessing resources (fish, water, trees, rainforest animals and medicinal plants, seafood like conch, turtles, shrimp, seafan coral used as a strainer in the Bay Islands, Black coral used for jewelry across the North Coast, land where these are) we would like to reserve for our use or even our potential use later, or we would like to have a different resource there like African palms for biodiesel which no one in Honduras uses, instead of what the local people value like deer, peccaries, armadillos, green or black iguanas, turtles, tepescuintes, guatusas (paca, agouti, rabbit in Bay Islands English), medicinal plants, firewood, craft woods, woods for drums and canoes, and canoe paddles, etc.
As writers like Eckard Tolle in the new Earth, governments and religions and leaders have used this process to dehumanize the other group, to make us not see our common humanity, and thus we don’t feel bad when we take their resources, steal their land and make them become displaces, bar them from accessing resources (fish, water, trees, rainforest animals and medicinal plants, seafood like conch, turtles, shrimp, seafan coral used as a strainer in the Bay Islands, Black coral used for jewelry across the North Coast, land where these are) we would like to reserve for our use or even our potential use later, or we would like to have a different resource there like African palms for biodiesel which no one in Honduras uses, instead of what the local people value like deer, peccaries, armadillos, green or black iguanas, turtles, tepescuintes, guatusas (paca, agouti, rabbit in Bay Islands English), medicinal plants, firewood, craft woods, woods for drums and canoes, and canoe paddles, etc.
Dr. Mollett also talks in her research about how
difficult it is to say this land belongs to one race, even if the race is
clear, and not to another race. This is also true in the US for example only
57% of the housing on the tiny Lummi Indian reservation outside of Bellingham,
WA has even one Native American in it, and that Native American may or may not
be of the Lummi tribe. In Honduras
ethnic identification is not necessarily clear, and something both the
claimants are Afro-hondurans or indigenous Hondurans. The Honduran state has also had conflicting
visions of the relationship Indigenous land and protected area land. A classic
case was when they went to give the Lenca Indians land titles near the Montecillos
Park, they realized the very next day, the limits of the park were going to be
legalized on top of most of the land in a land title not even 24 hours old. The
Triunfo de la Cruz Garifunas vs Honduras in the Interamerican Human rights
Court is partly about the placing of Punta Izopo Park directly on top of their
subsistence lands and against their overt and vocal and public opposition.
How is the
Issue of Invisibilization of Afro-Hondurans Related to being at Risk?
Instead of demonizing the Black Bay Islanders, the
Honduran government has just discounted them from the get go, as “we don’t know
who you are, where you came from”, and ignore them as existing at all. I am
excited the Honduran government under SEDINAFROH and under Pepe Lobo’s
government published a book on the History of Bay Islands by a Black Bay Islander
Artlie Brooks’s Black Chest, but not only is it in English and so most
Hondurans who need to read it can not because they do not speak English, but
also no copies have been made available anywhere in the country, and letters
sent to the Mayor of Roatan, who is also the Minister of the Baptist Church of
Coxen Hole and has lived in the departmental his whole life and used to have a
TV show on Bay islands TV CRN, at City Hall, Roatan are returned as
undeliverable as addressed, which also happens if you write to the official
address of the Coxen Hole Methodist Church. It is getting hard to make contact
with Hondurans. SEDINAFROH has been downgraded from a Ministry to a Directorate
part of the Ministry of Social Inclusion, under Honduran President Juan Orlando
Hernandez which means they no longer have a website where they can post what is
happening with them and the Indians and Blacks that they represent. “Inclusion”
as exclusion. The invisibilization of Afro-Hondurans as to whether they exist
at all or have any rights or contributed anything positive to the country is a
constant theme in the writings of Dr. Dario Euraque, a historian at Trinity
College in the US.
Other Countries that Make their Afro-Descent Groups Invisible
Other Countries that Make their Afro-Descent Groups Invisible
Honduras is not the only country that does this.
Compare the opening of Dr. Reid Andrews’ book on Afro-Argentinians in Buenos
Aires about seeing actual Afro-Argentinians in and around Buenos Aires, and the
table on page XV of “Endangered Peoples of Latin American: Struggles to Survive
and Thrive” on the Ethnic Composition of
Latin America that shows 0, not one single Afro-Argentinian. An activist in
Argentina who has the Traditional Ethnic Toy Museum in Neuquen, Argentina says
that now during the UN Decade of Afro-Descent People and the previous UN year
of Afro-Descent People 2011, that the Argentinian government would rather
accept money for Afro-Uraguayans living in Argentina than for
Afro-Argentinians, because if they accepted money for projects for the
Afro-Argentinians, they would have to first admit that they existed, and they
have chosen to not do that. If whole groups of people disappear from your
statistics, then if you do something that make them physically disappear, and
say they end up in the Bronx and Harlem or New Orleans or Los Angeles, no one
will ever know. It will not even appear as a blip on a screen. The part of Argentina where the Ethnic toy Museum is located was part of the area obtained through The Conquest of the Desert (La Conquista del Desierto) campaign in the late 19th century which is noted as one of the 10 worst cases of genocide in the linked Wikipedia articles about genocide and ethnic cleasening. Blacks, Indians, and gypsies had run away to that area in Argentina, just as they had in the Mosquitia and Atlántida and Colon areas of Honduras which were not really even accessible to the Honduran government until the US banana companies of Standard Fruit and United Fruit and Cuyamel Fruit built railroads into the area.
The Honduran government published now famous books like Propoganda pro-Honduras in 7 languages in 1929, including French, trying to encourage the immigration of energetic white immigrants to Honduras. As maybe Arabs in Palestine at the time read either English or French, they got Arab immigrants instead, and whatever else you can say about them, energetic defines them to a T.With the exception of a few Jewish and Spanish last names of families that were previously Jewish, most of the people on the list of 223 Honduran millionaires are of Palestinian Arab origin. Those books like that of Mr. Komor described Northern and Northeastern Honduras as uninhabited since forever. This was not true. If the Honduran government would lie then to get foreign investors would they do it again today?
When the Garifuna lawyer for Human Rights of SEDINAFROH of the Honduran government under Pepe Lobo read my second Garifuna in Peril related article in HondurasWeekly.com which talks about racist theories of development and that you have to take land away from blacks and Indians and give to someone who will do something productive with it, he said, "That part should have been set apart and put in bold letters", he thought it was so true.
The Honduran government published now famous books like Propoganda pro-Honduras in 7 languages in 1929, including French, trying to encourage the immigration of energetic white immigrants to Honduras. As maybe Arabs in Palestine at the time read either English or French, they got Arab immigrants instead, and whatever else you can say about them, energetic defines them to a T.With the exception of a few Jewish and Spanish last names of families that were previously Jewish, most of the people on the list of 223 Honduran millionaires are of Palestinian Arab origin. Those books like that of Mr. Komor described Northern and Northeastern Honduras as uninhabited since forever. This was not true. If the Honduran government would lie then to get foreign investors would they do it again today?
When the Garifuna lawyer for Human Rights of SEDINAFROH of the Honduran government under Pepe Lobo read my second Garifuna in Peril related article in HondurasWeekly.com which talks about racist theories of development and that you have to take land away from blacks and Indians and give to someone who will do something productive with it, he said, "That part should have been set apart and put in bold letters", he thought it was so true.
The Legal Controvery over Being Afro-Hondurans versus
Garifunas (Black Caribs)
ODECO through
its Declaration of the First AfroDescent Summit which asked governments to keep
statistics on its Afro-Descent people, and so the Honduran government obliged
and counted in the 2013 Census Afro-Hondurans, that was the entrance to a
controversy that on one hand the Garifunas as Afro-Hondurans had no more rights
than other Afro-Hondurans like those that are descended from the colonial era
Blacks which includes from former Honduran presidents Mel Zelaya and Pepe Lobo
on down, and on the other it led to the Honduran government stating in the 2014
Interamerican Human Rights case in Costa Rica of the Garifunas of Triunfo de la
Cruz vs Honduras that the Garifunas were Afro-Hondurans and not Indians, and so
they are not eligible for rights under ILO Convention 169 and the UN
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIP). The legal key to this
case in particular according to the Interamerican Human Rights Court is “prior,
free, informed consent”, which is actually a guarantee of DRIP.
I believe the Garifunas may still be eligible for ILO
Convention 169 even if the DNA samples taken with out prior, free and informed
consent and made available to the University of Kansas to prove where the
Garifunas come from show that they are Africans, because the Europeans
committed genocide against the Taino/Arawak and Carib Indians from whom they
are descended and so there are no living Island Arawaks and Caribs to compare
them to. The Case of St. Vincent vs England for the genocide of the Garifuna’s
ancestors is in British courts. ILO Convention 169 includes the possibility of
indigenous or tribal blacks, and has been ratified in Dominica and in the
Central African Republic, and the legal precedents for the Garifuna case in the
InterAmerican Human rights Case includes the Blacks of Surinam and the
Afro-Columbians who were recognized as having rights under ILO Convention 169.
The article on the Garifuna Women’s Dance clubs might help them as they can
show they are still organized under traditional leadership, and still function
under traditional laws, as well as having a separate religion and languages and
culture. There are issues with being declared Tribal in the 21st
century when for example Dr. Tulio Mariano you have a Ph.D. and give
conferences internationally for being a recognized leader in your field, but
the Garifuna culture and society would qualify for legal protection under ILO
convention 169.
My book Los
Garifunas de Honduras particularly documents which elements of the Garifuna
culture are indigenous, because given Honduras’s long history of racial
injustices, it did not surprise me more than 10 minutes that the Honduran government in their written arguments would declared
the Garifunas Afro-Hondurans and thus not eligible for ILO convention 169 in their Interamerican Human rights court case arguments. I
literally wrote the book to have that information available to them if they ever
needed it. OFRANEH, ODECO, Tulio Mariano Gonzales's organization CIDH and Salvador Suazo and the National Garifuna Folkore Ballet were all given copies in 2006 and also when it was first written in 2002 before publication so it is again interesting that they chose not to tell her about the book Los Garifunas de Honduras. Dr. Brondo has written the friend of the court letter for the Garifuna's court cases of Triunfo de la Cruz Garifunas vs Honduras, and there are three other Human rights abuses cases following it involving Honduran Garifunas including Hog keys and Sambo Creek, the towns studied in her book.
Is Declaring
Garifunas Afro-Hondurans another step towards declaring them not Hondurans? Are
they in danger of genocide and being permanently pushed from the country?
Some Garifuna
intellectuals like Celestino Green are concerned that declaring Garifunas afro-Hondurans is actually a step towards
saying they are not Hondurans at all, and like the Black English speakers of
the early 20th century, the Honduran Germans in WWI, and the
Salvadorans on the eve of the Salvadoran-Honduran 1969 war known as the “soccer
war” who were first physically attacked as individuals and then physically
thrown out of the country, the Garifunas and Miskitos and Black Bay Islanders
and North Coast Black English speakers are being displaced off their land and
out of their regions and out of the country of Honduras. The lawyer who helped them file the unconstitutionality case and was interviewed for Tierra negra video seems to think this is a possibility.
If the ZEDE or Model Cities actually go through, the
exodus will be worse, however, the US Department of Defense is ready The US department of Defense espent
US government tax dolalrs through Minerva Funding and with US universities to do the
research to study what to do in case a large number of people try to leave an
area all at once. Not only did they study the issue of the US Border, but they
studied the case inside US Cities. If
you want to hunt armadillos, you set fire to their home, and then herd them,
and then shoot when they come out the other side. Look at the videos on
Realnews.com about the Honduran Moskitia and the Paradise in Peril video on
Vimeo, and then look at the video of the Honduran women and children in the
Texas and Arizona detention centers. It works with people, too. One way you know that a country is getting ready to do genocide is that they budget for it. In Honduras's case, right now it is the US government and its military that is budgeting for it. The Canadian government also emptied a museum of WWII era airplanes and sent them to Honduras to train them in "crop dusting" in a country where only 11% of the land is flat, and most people farm under 10 acres, and many around 2 acres. That the only person in Honduras likely to know how to use and fix WWII era planes is Miguel Facusse who got his Bachelors's in aeronautical engineering at Purdue during the Second World War and who has the amount of land that could use crop dusters. However, those who remember Vietnam know there are lots of other things that you could do with airplanes related to plants that many Americans and Vietnamese have still not recovered from. Do napalm and Agent Orange ring any bells?
How to Starve
to Death a whole society with Laws?
There is also the question of Could you even stay in
Honduras and stay alive if you wanted to stay after they have made all of these
changes of lawsd? If the government blocks them from fishing (Honduran law put
into effect in 2013 against artisanal fishing and opening up the 3 mile limit
to commercial fishing), and you take away their land for agriculture, medicinal
plants, and firewood, (See Keri Brondo’s book, my book, Ramon Rivas, the
Salvadoran anthropologist books) and you take away their rights to get
materials to make crafts from the sea (in Keri Brondo’s book she notes Hog keys
fishermen selling crafts from seashells, but the 2013 tourist pamphlets say
specifically selling seashell crafts on the Hog keys is prohibited), and you
take away their water (56 Honduran rivers are being given in concession,
including Rio Betulia beside the Garifuna community of Guadelupe) and their
right to hunt and encourage industries that pollute the water so that the fish
and crawdads die, are the Honduran people who leave and end up in the US really
simply “economic refugees”? Or are we talking about fleeing from genocide
caused by starvation and racial discrimination and violence against a minority
ethnic group? When the Garifunas who lived on Hog keys made the original arguments to the ILO about Convention 169 violations, they called the laws then which prohibited fishing within 5 miles of the islands, "un desalojo tecnico" ( a technical throwing them off the land), because if they could not fish, then they would starve if they stayed there. Much of the Garifuna territory is being treated like "un desalojo tecnico"--don't hunt, don't fish, don't farm. One Garifuna in Trujillo was disgusted. "This country is shit. They don't care if you starve to death here."
Is there a
long history in Honduras of using Race to Persecute and Exclude Afro-Hondurans?
Yes, Honduras has a long history of Excluding
Afro-Hondurans and threatening to push them out of the country and to
exterminate them that has in the past been focused on Miskito Indians, on
Garifunas, and the worst case, best documented case of the Anglo-Antillans or
Black English speakers of Honduras. People who were vehemently anti-Black and
anti-Chinese in the 1930’s, rose to be Honduran president in the 1970’s. The
race related stories one hears in popular conversation, from a Honduran presidental
candidate asking the mother of Baptist minister in the Bay Islands to bring him
a black woman to fuck, from policemen saying to a Garifuna boy, “Give me that
fish. No one will even notice the death of one more little black boy.” and hearing
about the death of a Jamaican sailor killed by police brutality after being
beaten up in Puerto Cortes and San Pedro Sula for having a little marijuana,” makes
you think that there is an issue of actual physical violence against
Afro-Hondurans, and that this idea that the Garifunas (or Bay Islanders or
Miskitos) are just sitting on the beach watching monkeys in the coconut are
blocking Honduras from its full potential have been heard and repeated from
Honduran politicians who have been presidential candidates, Ministers of
Education, and president of the Honduran Congress.
Some of the current tactics to frighten Garifunas
include that they are being overflown by planes as reported by OFRANEH on their
blog, demonized on the radio (it is the Garifunas who always block the
development of Honduras and Trujillo was part of the argument for destroying
the Garifuna neighborhood of Rio negro, which the Mayor said he would take
through Eminent Domain), that the Honduran police and Army in flack jackets and
bullet proof vests are literally going into Garifuna villages and evicting
Garifunas and tearing down their homes, as in the video about Barra Vieja on
the OFRANEH blog www.ofraneh.wordpress.com,
with Honduran campesinos watching and helping to back up the police, with their
villages on maps to be allotted like on the Honduran government maps on www.zede.gob.hn and look at the Hog keys fisherman video and
see the sea around Honduras including all the area around the Bay islands, Hog keys
and bordering on Belize is being requested by Chevron to do oil and gas
exploration and exploitation, the part that was not given to BP (British
Petroleum) to do oil and gas exploration and exploitation in front of the
Honduran Moskitia, doesn’t it appear that there is an organized Honduran government
policy, against its Afro-Honduran minorities to terrorize them and displace
them? The US Department of Defense is helping Honduras get ready to allott Garífuna and Miskito lands in the Honduran Mosquitia through a mapping Project called Centroamérica Indigena, again being done with US tax payer dollars through the Minerva Initiative which is funding the University of Kansas to do digital maps of the área for the Honduran military, for the US military (Southcom, Joint Taskforce Bravo, Foreign Affairs office Fort Leavenworth, Kansas) and private partners who include the Radiance corporation studying using GPS connected to "nanosatellites" (drones) under three layers of rainforest canopy.
These digital maps are obviously not for the local city halls to manage land, as they do not even have electricity to have a computer to be able to use a digital map. OFRANEH, the Tawahkas and I as a gringo researcher in the area and former UPN professor have filed an ethics violation with the University of Kansas based on the ethics statement of the American Geography Society's statement of ethics who is their partner in this mapping Project. Both the AGS whose president is the primary researcher of the Centroamérica Indigena Mapping Project and the University of Kansas office of ethics have been silent in the almost one year since the ethics violation was filed.
These digital maps are obviously not for the local city halls to manage land, as they do not even have electricity to have a computer to be able to use a digital map. OFRANEH, the Tawahkas and I as a gringo researcher in the area and former UPN professor have filed an ethics violation with the University of Kansas based on the ethics statement of the American Geography Society's statement of ethics who is their partner in this mapping Project. Both the AGS whose president is the primary researcher of the Centroamérica Indigena Mapping Project and the University of Kansas office of ethics have been silent in the almost one year since the ethics violation was filed.
Targetting
the Defenders for Violence and Death and Not Prosecuting their Killers
The situation of the Honduran Lencas of COPINH is
similar with people having already died in the conflicts over the dam at Rio
Blanco, but that is just the tip of the iceberg compared to the other upcoming dam and
mining projects, the latter include at least 15 in the Lenca area, that American researchers are
not seeing via Vimeo. The Jicaques of Yoro have buried over 50 leaders since
the founding of CONPAH in 1992, but now sometimes one village like Subirana,
Yoro is burying three leaders a year.
The Jicaques of FETRIXY do not have their own website, and the Jesuit
radio station in El Progreso reports a lot of horrible things about Honduras,
but I have not seen much coverage of the Jicaques dying. Might be poor
searching on my part.
Reporters at the Jesuit radio station have been murdered even
one under preventative protective measures of the InterAmerican Human rights
Court. Honduras is considered by SIP and the Committee for the Safety of
Journalists one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist
right now. There are more preventative
protective measures of the InterAmerican Human rights Court for Honduras than
any other country in the hemisphere. Some of those with these measures include
the past president of the Lencas of COPINH Bertha Caceres and the President of
the Garifuna organization OFRANEH Miriam Miranda. In the video about the land
problems of the Garifunas of Tela on Realnews.com you can see the burn marks on
the building from the burning of the radio station and hear of the imprisonment
on faked charges of Garifuna leaders. I have done a number of articles on the
Garifunas and the Palestinian Arab descent Honduran Jeanette Kawas who have
died in the Tela area over land use disputes involving the protected areas
around Tela. This is not a minor noise, as it might appear from reading Dr. Brondo's book commenting on "a human rights violation". This is people coming to your house in a Garifuna town or in Tela and
blowing you away while you talk on the telephone or iat the door in front of your kids.
Who is
financing this reign of terror against Afro-Hondurans? Who are the intellectual
Authors?
Under Honduran law, it is theoretically possible to prosecute both the actual people who do the actual killing or steal mahoghany and other woods from the forest, and the Intellectual authors, although for reasons of power and immunitiy granted to certain Honduran officials by law, the latter generally go free. In the case of who are the intellectual authors in the Honduran Mosquitia read the letter of MASTA the Miskito organization—75
times going to the police in Puerto lempira to complain and nothing done,
people dying of heart attacks from the stress such as from gun shots in the
community, actual attacks of the Honduran military of Miskitos serious enough
to put Miskitos in the hospital in Puerto Lempira, and the Honduran Military
saying this is on orders of the Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez and
the Gringos (read US government
military forces) on its official Internet site. Press English to read the
letter in good English if you do not read Spanish. The Realnews.com videos are clear about lots
of US tax payer money, millions and millions of dollars are going into this militarization
of the Honduran North Coast, the Moskitia, and the Hog Keys/Bay Islands area.
While some of it may be glossed as “the war against drugs” people like Annie
Bird of Rights Action think it is really about separating the native people from the resources they
had previously controlled.
If Afro-Hondurans are being shot at or their
apartments ransacked, or threats are made against them, the Honduran government
does nothing. Even if Americans are attacked and die, they often do nothing. See
my HondurasWeekly.com articles, but you don’t need to believe me, look at the
US Embassy website out of Tegucigalpa about unsolved crimes against Americans
and Americans going to jail. One of the worst stories was of an American who
owned the Tobacco Road Tavern and he was escorting his waitress after closing
up in downtown Tegucigalpa. He heard a gang fight. One of the gang members came
towards him and the waitress running. The bar owner, afraid for the waitress,
shot him. Under the gang clothes, he had on a police uniform. He was a
policeman and gang member. The American went to jail, stayed there about 3
months, paid the healthcare of the wounded policeman-gangmember, and lost his business.
So it is not just my imagination that sometimes the police and the Army and the evil doers in Honduras are often all part of the same group, and that the US has been known to ally itself against the ethnic groups, in what they call "the War on the Drugs", and claim "collateral damage". Yes, well sometimes pregnant women and teenage boys get shot up by accident under our orders. But no comment. The videos about the DEA and Honduran military actions against the Miskitos of Ahuas are pretty terrifying, both from Realnews and also on Honduran news sites, but if you look, you will notice all the victims were very Dark skinned. In Honduras being an American citizen and being Black or Garifuna are not mutually exclusive categories. The by far largest number of American citizen voters in the Trujillo-Santa Fe area are retired Garifunas come back from the US or as sailors.
So it is not just my imagination that sometimes the police and the Army and the evil doers in Honduras are often all part of the same group, and that the US has been known to ally itself against the ethnic groups, in what they call "the War on the Drugs", and claim "collateral damage". Yes, well sometimes pregnant women and teenage boys get shot up by accident under our orders. But no comment. The videos about the DEA and Honduran military actions against the Miskitos of Ahuas are pretty terrifying, both from Realnews and also on Honduran news sites, but if you look, you will notice all the victims were very Dark skinned. In Honduras being an American citizen and being Black or Garifuna are not mutually exclusive categories. The by far largest number of American citizen voters in the Trujillo-Santa Fe area are retired Garifunas come back from the US or as sailors.
Are Afro-Honduran at Special Risk for Violence if they
were Returned to Honduras?
There is a well known phenomenon of taking crimes out
on the most vulnerable, and these are often women. Women in Honduras can be
subject to rape, to human trafficking, to being drugged and smuggled out of
their area for the purpose of the sex trade, kidnapped, killed and cut into
pieces and strewn around San Pedro Sula or El Progreso. The sister of the Black
English speaker bishop of the Episcopal church was murdered in her own patio in
the town of Tela. USAID considered this enough of a problem to distribute
pamphlets like comic books about what happen to women who get taken away as
human trafficking victims which I saw in hotels in the La Ceiba area of Honduras last year in 2014.
The former head of OFRANEH Gregoria Flores was shot at
in Central Park and thus in front of City Hall and the Cathedral in La Ceiba.Honduras’s
third largest city, where OFRANEH’s
office wasin the day time, and nothing happened. She fled to the US for safety.
The Female Assistant of the Catholic priest who works with medicinal plants and
supports COPINH and the peasants of the Bajo Aguan conflict Padre Fausto Milla
was followed, her apartment ransacked, she and he got threatening phone calls
about her, and finally she fled the country and got political asylym in Spain.
Miriam Miranda the current OFRANEH president and
Horacio Martinez the past OFRANEH president have both had their houses ransacked.
The now deceased Garifuna mayor of Limon Lombardo Lacayo had his house
firebombed with his wife and children in it, who thank God got out alive. There
is a photo of his wife and children standing in the firebombed house in Limon.
So even though sometimes the violence is perpetuated
by individuals, or even gangs, who may or may not be connected to the Honduran
government officials, the Honduran government policies of identifying the
Garifunas as the cause of the lack of opportunity for Ladinos, as an obstacle
to progress, as non-Honduras, and treating crimes against them as if they were
of no importance, against people less than equal, less than human, they are
setting up the conditions that lead to violence against vulnerable populations,
minorities and women, and in addition to the nervousness caused by the threats,
there are real well known case of people dying, and dying badly, or suffering
fates worse than death, and nothing was done about it.
If Adolfo Facusse, family member of Miguel Facusse, and uncle of former Honduran president Carlos Flores Facusse, head of the Honduran Association of Industrial Companies, and Fundación and Bank Covelo, says that there is no functioning justice system in Honduras in a Honduran Spanish newspaper article, that he feels, as a member of the 10 families that run Honduras since the 2009 coup, that he can not get an even break in a Honduran court, what chance do poor Afro-Honduran women, children, and men have?
If Adolfo Facusse, family member of Miguel Facusse, and uncle of former Honduran president Carlos Flores Facusse, head of the Honduran Association of Industrial Companies, and Fundación and Bank Covelo, says that there is no functioning justice system in Honduras in a Honduran Spanish newspaper article, that he feels, as a member of the 10 families that run Honduras since the 2009 coup, that he can not get an even break in a Honduran court, what chance do poor Afro-Honduran women, children, and men have?
What Really
Happens if Crime Makes you sick or you need to go to the Police in Honduras?
The Honduran hospitals were less than useless when I
went in 2014 in Honduras, including injecting
me with drugs that kept me awake
all night when I asked for a glucose test to see if my blood sugar was low,
which they never did tell me. I will write separately about what actually
happened when I went to the police related to reports of theft (hurto), robbery
(robo), and attempted murder (intento de homicidio), and concerned that the
person I was staying with had been murdered or kidnapped, as his family had
already once been a victim of a kidnapping, and for now I will just say that
they filed a report, if the computer was up, which it was not in San Pedro, and
if they chose to, which they did not in La Ceiba, and if the person who needs
to file the report is in, which they were not the second and third time I went in La
Ceiba, but took no evidence, asked me to come back, said they would call me,
even though the phone lines to the house where I was staying in Tegucigalpa had been cut and coiled in from the
house’s gate, and the Internet was lost several times and I had no cell phone while in La Ceiba and was literally on the street after my credit cards and cash were stolen and I could not get money out of my bank account and have not been able to learn how to use a cell phone. Exactly how was the police or the Fiscal de la Mujer going to call me? The Fiscal de la Mujer, which is in charge of crimes against women, in La Ceiba refused to take my report, in Tegucigalpa they said, "If the Fiscal de la Mujer has not called you, you can not see him or her." When I went to El herald newspaper to report, they let me sit there for three hours, then I talked to a secretary, who said, no it is better if we visit you at home, we will call you. And how if the telephone lines are cut?
You can not
file a criminal report of cybercrimes in Honduras, because the criminal code
has not been updated in 30 years, and so was written before there were computers
in Honduras. The report I wrote up for the Observatory of Violence at the UNAH
which I tried to send by email disappeared, leaving just the folder. Only the
files I worked on on that computer disappeared. There were files on a hidden
directory my computer that I did not put there that said Finanzas, Mapas and
Viejas (finances, maps, and Old Women probably related to selling drugs. )
If the police won’t help you, and communications are
being cut, and you are nervous and not getting help, and worse if your family
is not there, and you are in the country with the highest murder rate of the
world, would you stay there? The
Honduran government has been playing off and on with Internet connections and
cellphone connections. People will write to me sorry I have been out of touch
for two weeks, no cellphone service in my town, no Internet service in the
country. If you are worried about the safety of your family members you can not
contact, and things seem to be going bad, wouldn’t you say, "Don’t stay there.
Come here." Many Hondurans and even
gringos are afraid to write to me by email in Honduras, since they know it is
monitored, and they don’t want to be the one caught giving information that the
government might become upset about and look for them. Syria and Egypt are receiving a lot of attention, there have been reporters killed or jailed. Honduras has had more reporters killed, generally no investigation is done, and SIP considers Honduras one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a reporter. The Lawyers are murdered. The judges threatened. The District Attorneys get capture requests from the capital and don't go through with them. The Human rights in Honduras study commissioned by the Human rights committee of the Society for Applied Anthropologywhich is on their website is over 2 years old, and the situation has gotten worse over the last 2 years. Several people spoke at the Society for Applied Anthropology conference in 2014 about Honduras's policies of criminalizing the defenders of Indigenous and Black Human Rights in Honduras.
If You have
elite Racist Advisors, Chances are They will Recommend Racist Solutions
Alas both the elite ideas and the money to do this
terrorization of Honduras’s Afro-Hondurans are coming from outside and particularly ideas
from Chile (see the website signed by a UN Official recommending cancelling
corporate charters in 2009, which the Honduran government did in 2014, and I
was told that Chile declared that it had no Chilean Indians because Von Donikan
showed that the Indians of Chile came from outer space and so are obviously not
native Chileans) and the US (see videos on Realnews.com, especially about the
Moskitia and the Wikileaks 2009 memo to do public private development of the
Honduran Mosquitia, an idea that now has moved to the Southcom website of the
US Military) and Guatemala (over 150,000 Mayas dead during the recent civil
war, in most cases massacred and a Guatemala real estate company is a main
mover behind Model Cities in Honduras along with some Reagan and Austrian
economics people.) These, alas, are not places famous for non-racist thoughts or development
theories or anti-violence policies.
When I saw the protest in the US, “Black Lives Matter”, my comment was my
thoughts exactly. But
like I was told that I can not expect Canadian and US businessmen to treat
Honduran Indians better than they treat Indians in their own country, it is
also true that I can not expect them to treat
Afro-Hondurans better than they treat US Blacks. I love Garifuna author
Sabas Whittacker’s article in his book on Africans in the Americas “Land of the
Free—land of the incarcerated” about US Blacks in the US. Realnews.com
stories about the criminalization of Hispanic immigrants in the US, with border
violations now making up over 50% of the criminals in the US Federal Prisons
was an eye opener to me.
Linking of Race and Politics, and if need be
Election Fraud, to get Their Policies Through
I also recommend
the book Dog Whistle Politics to understand how race feeds into politics in the
US. If you elect me I will help you get
what you need to develop, even if it means taking "it" whatever the resources is from “them” or keeping “them”
from gaining or keeping access to it. The things poor people have tend to be their land, their traditional knowledge, and their women. In the Lakota Sioux youth video against Fracking, note that about one fourth of the concerns were about how the indigenous girls were treated. All of Ali Allié's Garifuna films, El Espiritu de Mi mama, and Garifuna in Peril have as an issue how Garifuna women are treated by non-Garifunas. That is what the fight is about in the trailer on the Garifuna in peril website, where the person who works for a resort talks to a Garifuna girl to work there as she is a "Barbie".
If just trying to convince people to vote for you and your policies like Model cities looks
like it might fail, you could either try to intimidating the opposition people
so that they don’t vote like killing 5 Miskitos the night before the election
or killing over 25 Libre party supporters in Honduras related to the 2013 General Elections, or you could steal the election by
fraud, which are the allegations in Honduras related to the 2013 General Election serious enough to go to the Supreme Court, and the video on Youtube of
Fraude Electoral about Honduras was very vivid and clear. Or you could change the rules at the 11th
hour, as happened recently in the Salvadoran election, or as happened before the Honduran Congress in 2014 took their seats with over one quarter of the delegates from non-traditional Honduran parties. Or you could win
by fraud and then change the rules as also seems to have happened in Honduras,
with over 100 new laws between the election and the taking of power of the new
president. If you don’t want the
opposition party candidates to stay in Tegucigalpa and vote, Simple. Don’t pay
them, as also has been happening in Honduras according to Libre candidate spokesperson former President Manuel Zelaya.
¨People claim that Columbian author who grew up in the
banana zone there Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote fiction in a style they call
magical surrealism. In Honduras it does not read like fiction, but more like
reality than things the IMF and Honduran Central Bank say like, "We need to
retain lempiras in the Central Bank. because there is too much money chasing too few goods in
Honduras. Devaluing the Lempira will help the economy. Giving away 30% of
Honduran land for mines is good for your country. It will create jobs and
stability. " Does thousands of Honduran women and children at the US border look like increased stability?
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