Resources for People Trying to Get Political Asylym
for Afro-Hondurans in the US, Especially Honduran Women
By Wendy Griffin March 6, 2015
When I worked
as a bilingual paralegal for political asylym cases in the 1980's, we often
used newspaper articles as a way to substantiate our claims about the general
country situation which put in danger our client. I am going to recommend some
HondurasWeekly.com articles that I wrote which should be of use for your
client.
Living in Honduras
and Being a Woman. If you look for HondurasWeekly.com on google, this is one of
the five articles that comes up that you can specifically go to. This talks
about some of the crimes specifically against women including human
trafficking, rape, murder, and murder by being cut into Little pieces and left
around town, and the issue of are the Honduran government politicians, pólice
and military and the US military in Honduras and the drug traffickers and
other criminals two different groups or una sola molote they are all working
together and in each other's pockets. This article has had over 5,000
hits. I think the lack of pólice follow up about murders of people in
Honduras is also mentioned in this article, and includes information about that
from the US Embassy website of the Tegucigalpa Embassy in Honduras. This issue
of Honduran gangs and women is in this article, mostly in terms of women
being required to pay "impuesto de guerra" the protection money to
gangs if they have small businesses like selling bread and if they do not,
they risk being killed, them and their children.
Is Trujillo
Safe for Foreign Tourists? Trujillo is a town 3 hours from La Ceiba, and
has a mixed Garífuna-Ladino-expat population. It talks about some of the
problems of foriegners but also specifically of the crimes against the Garífuna
who live in Trujillo.
Is Honduras
Safe for Foreign Volunteers? This article which talks about violent crime
also talks about some of the specific murders of Black women,
including the sister of the bishop of the Episcopal Church of Honduras who was
murdered in her patio in Tela, which is located 2 hours west of La Ceiba.
Tela, Trujillo, and Tela are all important centers of Garífuna population as is
Puerto Cortes where the human trafficking of women and selling them into
prostitution for phillipinos and east Indians arrests were made.
I wrote these
last two articles partly in response to a request of information from Dr.
Sarah England who told me Japanese students at her university wanted to go to
Honduras to observe a wáter Project, but her university did not want to
approve their funding to go, because of concerns for their safety. I
believe after my correspondence with her and them directly they were not
permitted to go. The University of Kansas also does not permit their
students to accompany KU professors who do research in Honduras.
The new
Health problems of Honduran Indians and Blacks. This is both on
HondurasWeekly.com and on my blog in English
These health
problems include the number one cause of death in Honduras is homicide and that
it is not only in the cities, but also in rural áreas like Santa Barbara the
leading cause of death in homicide. The área where I lived Trujillo according
the US Embassy website is in the 3 áreas in Honduras San Pedro Sula,
Tegucigalpa and Trujillo that have even higher than averages of murders of
Hondurans, which I think is up to 19 murders a day in a country with half the
population of New York City.
The statistics
I have seen on the high level and greatly increased levels of femicides or
murders of specifically women in Honduras is in Tanya Kerrsen's 2013 book
Power Grab which is also about the área shortly to the interior of
Trujillo. She is a writer for Food First out of San Francisco. Her
book is not expensive and I also have a digital copy. Sarah England is
monitoring the phenomenon of femicides in Guatemala. Tanya
Kerrsen does answer emails if you have questions for her.
The MASTA
Miskito Indian website has letters that if you push the button you can change
the language to English about going to the pólice in Puerto Lempira 75 times
and getting no response, of the Honduran military attacking Miskito Indians and
causing them health problems serious enough to have to go to the hospital in
Puerto lempira and saying we are doing this on the orders of Honduran President
Juan Orlando hernandez and the gringos. They talk of older Miskito women dying
of heart attacks and high blood pressure due to an attack due to stress when
hearing gunshots or seeing their village attacked. Both the Miskitos and
Garífunas are Afro-Honduran and are being demonized by the current Honduran
government. OFRANEH (Fraternal Organization of Blacks of Honduras) on their
blog
talk about
this. This is serious enough that Dr. Jorge Amaya Benegas of the UPN is doing a
historical study of demonization in Honduras and what were the consequences to
the groups demonized. Some of the other groups he has studied includes the
Black English speakers of Honduras (forceably removed from Honduras after a
house to house search in the Trujillo'puerto Castilla área in the 1930's and
repatriated and Blacks were not allowed in Honduras from 1934-1949 even
as tourists or even as Harvard researchers. That is the subject of Dr.Glenn
Chambers' book Race, Nation, and the Anglo-Antillans in Honduras
1890-1940. Another group that was demonized was the Chinese of Honduras,
at the same time they were in the US which also caused laws against the
immigration of Chinese, Arabs, Jews, East Indians, malaysians in Honduras in
the 1930's.
One of the
principal voices against the Chinese and the Blacks in the 1930's rose to be
president of Honduras in the 1970's before there was a miltiary coup against
them. Another group that became demonized were Salvadoran immigrants which
exploded into a brief war with El Salvador known as the soccer war. Both the
soccer war in the 1960's and the throwing Blacks out of Honduras in the 1930's
were preceded by personal attacks on Salvadorans and Blacks, with people dying
such as the 1,500 Black English speakers sought refuge in the British Embassy
in Trujillo and not finding it tried to escape and went 16km away and got on a
Norweigan ship in Puerto Castilla, but still one Jamaican died.
Look at the
video of the Garífunas of Barra Vieja, located west of Tela. The people who are
moving the 450 Garífunas away from their homes are the
Honduran military, the Honduran pólice, in flack jackets
and bullet proof riot gear, and behind Honduran peasants. This video in on
the OFRANEH blog
www.ofraneh.wordpress.com
If you have some doubt about whether the Honduran government is involved in the
Garifuna's current problems, this video is extremely powerful in convincing you
that they are the ones doing it.
On the
HondurasWeekly.com website there are articles about the Garífunas currently
land problems, that the Honduran government is trying to declare their villages
as part of Model Cities. There are a number of articles related to the Model
Cities or ZEDE (Zones of Economic Development) on the HondurasWeekly.com website.
The Honduran government's oficial website for ZEDE is located at www.zede.hn. You will
notice that most of the main Garífuna áreas Puerto Cortes, la Ceiba,
and Santa Fe-Trujillo-Puerto castilla and the villages in Iriona
and Gracias a Dios, an área in the Sico Paulaya ZEDE are included in the
proposed ZEDE, for which the Honduran government has to get the Garífunas off
the land to be able to give it to others who "will do something productive
with it". They are trying a number of different techniques--taking away
personaría jurídica or corporate charters of organizations, which the Garífunas
own their lands jointly under organizations with corporate charters which has
also affected Black Bay Islanders, the environmental organization that Works in
Trujillo and environmental orgranizations that help the Lencas and the Chortis
like Red Comal and IHNESCO, the Honduran government is not recognizing the
elected leadership of these organizations like the Comunidad de Cristales y Rio
negro (Trujillo Garífunas) and the Tawahkas, and declaring ZEDE which
means Honduran laws will not be in effect in the ZEDE and all previously
extended land titles will either not be recognized or the lands will be taken
by Eminent Domain because the land is of "Tourist Vocation" and the
Garífunas and Bay islanders are using the land to live on and plant and have
forest which would be de Vocación agrícola or Vocación forestal, kind of like
zoning. The áreas where they live have been rezoned as tourist áreas and urban
areas by law, even villages that had no electricity, road or running wáter like
Barra vieja área.
The case of
the assistant of the head of IHNESCO a ladina woman is a propos of your
client's case. She was followed, her house was ransacked while she was gone.
Her boss Honduran priest Padre Fausto Milla was called and he was threatened as
her boss and she was threatened. She finally fled the country and asked for
political asylym in Spain and was granted it. Similar things have been done to
Miriam Miranda, the female head of OFRANEH who appears in the video Tierra
negra on YouTube. She and the previous head of OFRANEH Gregoria Flores
have been shot at. Gregoria had been shot at in broad daylight in Central
Park in la Ceiba in front of the municipal building. Nothing was done. She took
refuge in the US. The InterAmerican Human Rights Court also issued
preventative measures for the protection of Miriam Miranda, the head of the
lenca organization COPINH Bertha Caceres and a reporter of the jesuit radio
station in El Progreso, the latter of whom was killed anyway reported the
website of COPINH. There is a document about the Human Rights situation
in Honduras commissioned by the Human rights Committee of the Society for Applied
Anthropology which is on their website. It is now 2 years old and the situation
has worsened since the 2013 election which brought Honduran president Juan
Orlando hernandez to power as I said it would in the a series of articles in
HondurasWeekly.com about the election including Afro-Honduran situation likely
to worsen after election and Réquiem for two Afro-honduran towns.
On YouTube in the video Tierra Negra done by Telesur, the Ladino lawyer who took the case of the Lencas and the Garífunas aboout the Inconstitutionality of the Model Cities or ZEDE laws begins by saying, he who does not conform to the land use of the Model cities or ZEDE will have to be thrown out (expulsado) from their área or the country. The Minister of Tourism talks about the how the land will be zoned, such as de vocación turística (for tourism use) and the land will have to be used for that.
I would recommend the following stories for your
case from RealNews.com
Collateral Damage of a Drug War--August 21, 2012
This is an interview with Alexander main of the
Center for Economic and policy Research (CEPR) and show the Miskitos killed in
the 2012 raid at Ahuas in the Honduran Moskitia including shows the dead
pregnant woman and dead 14 year old and the Afrp-Latino coloring and
features are clear. He talks about the US funding for Honduran pólice and
military and that the Honduran head of security forces has been linked to death
squads and there was a formal investigation. Notice the signs that say Tarea
Conjunto. The US military forces in Honduras are called Tarea Conjunto
Bravo in Spanish and Joint Task Force Bravo in English. The Miskito women and
children were killed under the supervisión of US DEA officers and the cover
up continues and includes requests for information from US Congressmen.
Broken Anvil Miskitu Communities fight
Militarization october 30, 2012
Interview with Annie Bird of Rights Action also the
co-author of the Collateral Damage of the Drug War report. Honduran military
officers confirm the presence of three US forward operating military bases
including the one on the Caratasca lagoon. The head of the Honduran
organization of Disappeared people say the people are being pushed off their
land, and they are fleeing to save their lives. A US profesor is quoted about
the 2009 Wikileaks report about a public private development of the Honduran
Mosquitia which is quite extensive and includes US government, including US
military involvement and private businesses including General Electric and
a real estate company.
Honduras' Banana Coast Ripe for Development?
Interviews with Garífunas and a Canadian businessman Randy Jurgensen (the
one who leveled the Garífuna nieghborhood of Rio Negro in Trujillo) about the
plans for megatourism projects on the Honduran North Coast. The Garífunas
show where their radio station was set fire, and talk about falsely being
imprisoned for fighting against the resort being put in their área. October 3,
2014.
There are transcripts available on the website
for all of these reports. There is also a 2011 RealNews report about the
Honduran Moskitia which shows the Miskitos carrying their goods on their
shoulders and a voiceover of a Honduran woman saying, "The people are
leaving almost voluntarily." and then a pan to the sign of
Tarea Conjunto Bravo Laguna de Caratasca of the US Forces of Joint taskForce
Bravo on the Caratasca Lagoon in the HonduranMosquitia.
One of the other forward bases in on Guanaja in the
Bay islands and from there and from the naval base at Trujillo to which US
military deploy, militarization is affecting Garífuna communities and at least
two news stories have been done of the Garífunas of Hog Keys or Cayos Cochinos
directly in front of La Ceiba about the effects of Militazation and also that
Chevron is asking for permission to explore for oil off the North Coast of
Honduras in front of the Garífunas and Black Bay islander áreas, while
BP(British Petroleum) has been awarded the contract for looking for oil off the
North Coast of the Mosquitia and another company got the contract for exploring
and exploiting the petroleum resources in the Honduran Mosquitia's mainland.
Annie Bird says that US money (over $50 million) is being used to forcé people
off their lands to open up resources. That is the whole idea of ZEDE's.
In Tanya Kerssen's book Power Grab, she quotes
someone that in the current search for resources, we are destroying whole
societies. The US has decided some of the societies we could do without are the
Miskitos and the Garífunas, in the name of "development". I
recommend you read the articles in Wikipedia, I think it is on genocide about
the destruction of the Aché of Paraguay in the last decade, that the
Paraguayian government says it is not our fault, all it was was development.
There is a UNESCO book etnodesarrollo etnogenocidio (Development in Ethnic
Areas, Ethnic Genocide). The Miskitos and the Garífunas in these videos both
talk about we are fighting for our survival. The Garífunas in particular think
of the Mayas of the Mayan Riveria of Mexico where Mayas are not allowed on the
beach for 30 miles and whole communities of Mayas who were Fisher people are
gone and we don't know where they went.
Resources on the
Issue of Making Afro-Hondurans “Others” so that it is easier to do violence
against them.
The book A New Earth Awakening to Your Life's
Purpose by Eckhart Tolle (2005) describes pages 72-77 the process by which
others are identified as different from one's one group, and that this process
to say the other group is not part of us, is part of a dehumanizing process
that is often used to justify violence against and even killing members of
another group. He says that this is particularly common in countries that
have long histories of not recognizing people of the other race as part of the
nation or dominant group. This topic have been well researched in the case of
the Blacks,the Honduran Indians, and the Miskitos and other groups in the
Honduran Mosquitia that this "otherness" of the other group was a
reason to try to forcé them to assimilate or in the case of Black English
Speakers and Salvadorans to leave Honduras.
This issue of making Garífunas (and Bay islanders
and maybe Miskitos) Afro-Hondurans or Afrodescent instead of being
Garífunas,Bay islanders and Miskitos was fought against by Garífuna
intellectuals in Honduras on the grounds that it made them seem less
Honduran. They were right that was only the prelude of the Honduran government
declaring the Garífunas as not Indians in the InterAmerican Human Rights Court
Case in Costa Rica in June 2014, and thus not eligible for the Human Rights
Guarantees of ILO Convention 169 (something I warned about in my 2013 SALALM
talk which is summarized on the SALALM website) and the UN Declaration on
the Rights of Indigenous Peoples known as DRIP. Sincé non-indigenous Blacks
have no rights under these UN sponsored documents and often did not have
rights under Honduran law, the decisión of this InterAmerican Human rights case
could have devastating effects in Honduras. I talk about the demonization
of Garífunas as the scapegoats for the cause of the lack of development in
Trujillo on the Honduran radio in the case of the Trujillo cruise boat dock
which caused the whole Garífuna neighborhood of Rio negro (founded 1797) to be
leveled. High level Honduran politicians like Rafael Pineda Ponce, a
presidential candidate and former Minister of Education twice and former
President of the Honduran Congress said We can no tolerate that the
Garífunas are just using the Coast to watch monkeys in the coconut trees. The
Idea was that we need Jobs, and Coastal tourism will provide Jobs and so if the
Garífunas are blocking our ability to get Jobs and "development", by
taking up the beach watching monkeys in the coconuts we need to move them. We
can not let them stand in the way of national progress. My book Los
Garífunas de Honduras shows Garífunas protesting peacefully in
Tegucigalpa the attempt to change the Honduran Constitution by removing
Art. 107 to open up Garífuna villages for development. They were met with
bullets and 11 Indians who were protesting with them ended up in the hospital.
The ZEDE or Model Cities are another way of doing this, and if you
read the comments by an educated Honduran journalist who lives in a mixed
Garífuna Ladino community, that we need ZEDE because it will provide Jobs for
the 2 million Honduras without work, you will see that this process of saying
we don't care about the needs of the Garífunas, we need their resources to
provide Jobs for us, is really happening. Sharlene Mollett a Canadian
geographer now at the University of Toronto and previously at Dartmouth
College, is someone who has spent a lot of time analyzing what ethnic groups on
the North Coast say about each other.
The Book Dog Whistle Politics by a UC Berkley
Hispanic law professor shows the same kind of process of dividing
Americans by race and getting White Americans to vote for candidates who
promise to protect them from the other races in the US and their demands.
Below is a shorter article on the issue of the race
riots in Honduras in the 1930's and the exclusión of black English speakers
from Honduras. It was published in spanish, but in the end the English versión
was not published.
Jorge Amaya's article which was published in the
online magazine for the Association of the Development of Central American
Historical Studies on Black English speakers of Honduras and the
development of an imaginary nation that excluded a lot of races particularly Blacks
is also below. Another very revealing of how the Blacks came to be thrown out
and excluded from immigrating to all Central American countries and the role of
US racism in the form of a Eugenics conference is in Lowell Gudmundson and
Justin Wolfe's book Blackness in Central America. I am sure the Eckhart Tolle
book and this book is available in local libraries. The Eckhart Tolle book was
recommended by the Oprah Book Club.
The book A New Earth Awakening to Your Life's
Purpose by Eckhart Tolle (2005) describes pages 72-77 the process by which
others are identified as different from one's one group, and that this process
to say the other group is not part of us, is part of a dehumanizing process
that is often used to justify violence against and even killing members of
another group. He says that this is particularly common in countries that
have long histories of not recognizing people of the other race as part of the nation
or dominant group. This topic have been well researched in the case of the
Blacks,the Honduran Indians, and the Miskitos and other groups in the Honduran
Mosquitia that this "otherness" of the other group was a reason to
try to forcé them to assimilate or in the case of Black English Speakers and
Salvadorans to leave Honduras.
This issue of making Garífunas (and Bay islanders
and maybe Miskitos) Afro-Hondurans or Afrodescent instead of being
Garífunas,Bay islanders and Miskitos was fought against by Garífuna
intellectuals in Honduras on the grounds that it made them seem less
Honduran. They were right that was only the prelude of the Honduran
government declaring the Garífunas as not Indians in the InterAmerican Human
Rights Court Case in Costa Rica in June 2014, and thus not eligible for the
Human Rights Guarantees of ILO Convention 169 (something I warned about in my
2013 SALALM talk which is summarized on the SALALM website) and the UN
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples known as DRIP. Sincé
non-indigenous Blacks have no rights under these UN sponsored documents
and often did not have rights under Honduran law, the decisión of this
InterAmerican Human rights case could have devastating effects in Honduras. I
talk about the demonization of Garífunas as the scapegoats for the cause
of the lack of development in Trujillo on the Honduran radio in the case of the
Trujillo cruise boat dock which caused the whole Garífuna neighborhood of Rio
negro (founded 1797) to be leveled. High level Honduran politicians like Rafael
Pineda Ponce, a presidential candidate and former Minister of Education
twice and former President of the Honduran Congress said We can no
tolerate that the Garífunas are just using the Coast to watch monkeys in the
coconut trees. The Idea was that we need Jobs, and Coastal tourism will provide
Jobs and so if the Garífunas are blocking our ability to get Jobs and
"development", by taking up the beach watching monkeys in the
coconuts we need to move them. We can not let them stand in the way of
national progress. My book Los Garífunas de Honduras shows Garífunas
protesting peacefully in Tegucigalpa the attempt to change the Honduran
Constitution by removing Art. 107 to open up Garífuna villages for development.
They were met with bullets and 11 Indians who were protesting with them ended
up in the hospital. The ZEDE or Model Cities are another way of
doing this, and if you read the comments by an educated Honduran journalist who
lives in a mixed Garífuna Ladino community, that we need ZEDE because it will
provide Jobs for the 2 million Honduras without work, you will see that this
process of saying we don't care about the needs of the Garífunas, we need their
resources to provide Jobs for us, is really happening. Sharlene Mollett a Canadian
geographer now at the University of Toronto and previously at Dartmouth
College, is someone who has spent a lot of time analyzing what ethnic groups on
the North Coast say about each other.
The Book Dog Whistle Politics by a UC Berkley
Hispanic law professor shows the same kind of process of dividing
Americans by race and getting White Americans to vote for candidates who
promise to protect them from the other races in the US and their demands.
Below is a shorter article on the issue of the race
riots in Honduras in the 1930's and the exclusión of black English speakers
from Honduras. It was published in spanish, but in the end the English versión
was not published.
Jorge Amaya's article which was published in the
online magazine for the Association of the Development of Central American
Historical Studies on Black English speakers of Honduras and the
development of an imaginary nation that excluded a lot of races particularly
Blacks is also below. Another very revealing of how the Blacks came to be
thrown out and excluded from immigrating to all Central American countries and
the role of US racism in the form of a Eugenics conference is in Lowell
Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe's book Blackness in Central America. I am sure the
Eckhart Tolle book and this book is available in local libraries. The Eckhart
Tolle book was recommended by the Oprah Book Club.
No hay comentarios.:
Publicar un comentario