Summaries of Wendy Griffin's Manuscripts Related to Honduran Banana Companies in US Libraries

Descriptions of Wendy Griffin’s Unpublished Manuscripts in US Libraries Related to Honduran Banana Companies

(Summaries were  put in the Google Books Pages)

1.  Griffin, Wendy (1992) La Historia de los Indigenas de la Zona Nororiental de Honduras tomo I Prehistoria a 1820

Books.google.com/…/Historia_de_los_indigenas_de_Honduras_nororiental: La Prehistoria

This books begins the history of the Honduran Indians with the arrival of Olmec influence in 1,000 BC, by which time the Rainforest Indians of Honduras like the Pech are believed to have already arrived in Honduras. The book looks at populations of Honduran and other Central Americans Indians in the Classic Period (300-900 AD) and how they had to move in the Postclassic Period due to arrival of slave and land taking Indians from Mexico, most notably the Chorotega and Nahua speakers, known in colonial documents as mexicanos, Pipiles, Nicaraos, Cholulatecas,Tultecas and Acaltecas (now spelt Agalteca in Honduras due to influence of the Nicarao dialect of Nahua). The book also covers the effects of the partial Spanish Conquest of Honduras and how resistance of the Pech, Miskito, Tawahka, Jicaque/Tolupan, Lenca and Nahua Indians in the unconquered parts of Honduras differed from those Indians under Spanish control who were influenced by Spanish Indian slavery, encomiendas, pueblos de indios, repartimiento, Spanish government land titles, missions and missionaries, etc. The book also documents the arrival of different Afro Descent groups such as Spanish speaking slaves,mulattos and pardos, the Black English speakers, Blacks who intermarried with Miskito Indians and at the end Garífunas. Many maps and explains different linguistic, archaeological, ethnographical, colonial terms used for different Honduran Indian and Afrodescent groups. Essential for understanding why the Honduran government did not control the territory where they gave banana company concessions to the Tela Railroad and Truxillo Railroad of United Fruit and to Standard Fruit/Vacarro Brothers (now Dole owned) at the beginning of the 20th century and which groups did live there before the Banana companies. This books is also important to put into context the current problems in the Honduran rainforest in Olancho, Colon and Mosquitia caused by the colonization by Honduras Ladinos as modern descendants of the Mesoamerican Indians as part of an interethnic conflict over land use techniques and definition of culturally important plants and trees that is already 3,000 years old. Also includes information on the independent Miskito kingdom, its kings, its internal administration, and the functions of the Miskito kings. The issue of why the Pech and the Tawahkas who were neighbors of Mesoamerican Indians for 3,000 years yet deliberately chose not to adopt their heirarchical society, their agricultural techniques, or their architecture may be essential for knowing why they were able to live in the Honduran and Nicaraguan rainforest for 3,000 years and not destroy it and in 50 years Mesoamerican based Ladinos have done away with it, as well as for knowing who built the Ciudad blanca or White City in the Honduran rainforest in Pre-Columbian times. This book uses archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, and historic evidence and starts with an essay on the limitations and benefits of each type of evidence. A good basic overview of this Little known área developed for the Pech Bilingual Intercultural Education program and as a way to make available to Hondurans many bibliographic resources about their country which were either not in their country or not in Spanish or not understandable because Hondurans did not know the meaning of the classifications like Tropical Forest Tribes/Mesoamericans, uto-Aztecans vs Macro-Chibcha, or the connection of historic names like Mexicanos, Mexicano corupto, and Payas with modern names for Honduran Indians like Nahuas and Pech. The errors in the Smithsonian Institute's maps for the Central American Ceramics exhibition which closed 15 February 2015, shows this confusión is not only in Central America. Resources used for the colonial period include not only secondary and primary sources that have been published, but also documents from the General Archives of Central America in Guatemala City and oral history. Trujillo in NE Honduras is the only place in the New World both Christopher Columbus and Hernan Cortes visited.  To here my review on Google books.

This book on the ethnohistory of the Pech (Paya), Tawahka (Sumu), Tolupan/Jicaque, Miskito, and Nahua (Pipil, Nicarao, Mexicano, Cholulateca) Indians of Honduras beginning in1,000 BC to the end of the colonial period  also includes the Colonial era Spanish speaking Blacks and the English speaking Blacks .  The book was written in 1992 in support of the Pech bilingual-intercultural education project.  It combines the major archaeological, lingüístic, históric and ethnographic sources of information, and so is a place to begin to connect the modern Honduran Indians and Blacks  to anthropological, ethnographic, linguistic,  historic, and geographic classifications and contexts.  Many maps showing different periods are included. In addition to published sources of information, both primary sources from the colonial era, secondary sources, and Honduran sources of Indian oral history and ethnography,  documents from the General Archives of Central America in Guatemala City were also consulted.

A lot of information on Western and Central Honduras  from 1,000 BC to the Spanish conquest which was occupied by Mesoamerican groups including Lencas, Nahuas, and  Mayas is included. Vol. I emphasizes the conflict between the Pech and other Central American Indians when the Nahuas and Chorotegas arrived in Central America from Mexico and more conflicts with the coming of the Spanish.  Almost all Indians of Northeastern Honduras  remained free during the entire colonial period so strategies of resistance are noted, and where the frontier was between the Spanish and the Free Indians is documented at different periods in the colonial period. Information on the Miskito Kings and their Kingdom is included as is ethnographic data noted in colonial era documents.

 The situation of the free Indians like the Miskitos, the Tawahkas, the Tol and Jicaques, some of the Nahuas, the Rah, and the Pech is contrasted with Indians under Spanish control such as through encomiendas, pueblos de indios, or missionary controlled towns and the different resistance strategies of both are noted.  Why the Honduran North Coast and the Bay Islands were mostly deserted by the time the Honduran Garifunas arrived in1797 and later the English speaking Blacks who are the ancestors of today’s Bay Islanders  is included.

This book is important to understand why the Honduran government did not control the áreas where the US owned Banana Companies like United Fruit’s Tela Railroad and Truxillo Railroad and the Standard Fruit Company/Vacarro Brothers wanted to establish themselves, and why the Honduran government was anxious to gain control of the areas by adding communication infrastructure such as Railroads, Telegraph, Radio, Ports, and Customs Houses, in areas of the Honduran North Coast that they did not control and had no presence after becoming independent in 1821 and which was still the case at the beginning of the 20th century when Banana Company presence increased. None of the current books on Honduran Banana Companies takes into account that almost all the land given to US owned Railroad Companies for Bananas was NOT controlled by the Honduran government at the time it was given and that the Railroads were a strategy to gain political control and economic resources in an área where 400 years of Spanish Conquest had not yet managed to penétrate.

This book also puts into historic perspective the colonization front of Honduran Ladinos in entering the Honduran rainforest which has accelerated since the 1960’s, but is part of an interethnic conflict between Mesoamerican and Tropical Rainforest type Indians over land use and resources that is at least 3,000 years old in North Eastern Honduras with evidence of Olmec influence and trade in both Olancho and Colon Departments. While US archaeologists ooh and aah over Mesoamericans, the Pech and Tawahka Indians were their neighbors for 3,000 years and chose not to copy their style of hierarchical societies and practices of land use and understanding why and how the Pech and other Tropical Forest groups maintained the rainforest and did not copy these other Indians whose practices have destroyed the Olancho rainforest in 50 years is probably a critical point to understanding tropical ecological systems, a how they were maintained for many millenium by their inhabitants and current conflicts in Honduras today.

This unpublished manuscript is the basis of historical information in published books like the 1991 “Dioses, héroes, Hombres en El Universo Mitico Pech” by Honduran anthropologist of the UPN Dr. Lazaro Flores and Wendy Griffin, the 2009 book “Los Pech de Honduras: Una Etnia que Aun Vive” by Wendy Griffin and Pech informants Hernan Martinez Escobar and Juana Carolina Hernandez Torres and also figure in her published books on Afro-Hondurans like “Los Garifunas de Honduras” (2005) and Griffin,Wendy (2004) The History and Culture of the Bay Islanders and North Coast English speakers”  available on the Internet at .s114101627.onlinehome.us/files/Isleno.pdf  Many Honduras This Week articles included information from this unpublished manuscript. There are copies of this manuscript in the library of the Universidad Pedagogica Nacional (UPN), the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH), in Pech schools in Moradel and El Carbon, and Miskito and Garifuna high schools in Brus Laguna and Santa Fe in Honduras and in the University of Pittsburgh library and the Vine Deloria Jr. Library of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian, Washington, DC.  

2. Griffin, Wendy (1994) The History of the Indians of Northeastern Honduras: Prehistory to 1820: Contact, change, and resistance Across the Mesoamerican-Tropical Forest Tribe Cultural Fronteir www.books.google.com/.../The_History_of _Indians_of_Northeaste.html?id.

Similar to above, but it is better documented and also includes at the end looking at how to see the presence of the Honduran government in the áreas where the Indians of NorthEast Honduras and the presence of these agencies at different points in the 19th and 20th centuries, in a shift from what had been closed corporate communities to societies inmeshed in the national structures and surrounded by the national and increasingly globalized culture. Also includes the shift in local control from the Indians to municipalities run by Ladinos, a process now also affecting strongly the Garifunas of Honduras.  It looks at religión maintenance and language maintenance as the Honduran government and the Ladinos of the center move into the Indian and Free Blacks controlled áreas.  Documents better Indian forms of resistance in both Mesoamerican Indian towns under Spanish control and that of the free Indians.

3.  Griffin, Wendy (1992) La Historia de los Indigenas de la Zona Nororiental de Honduras: 1800 a 1992 Tomo II

books.google.com/books/…/La_historia_de_los_indigenas_de_la_zona.htm

This book begins with a summary of why the Honduran government did not control NE Honduras in 1800 with a map showing where the free Indians and the Honduran government each controled.There is also a section on efforts of the colonial Spanish government 1795-1820 to try to gain control including the reconquest of Trujillo abadoned in1645 and missionaries trying to christianize Indians in NE Honduras. The rest of the book is divided into the 19th and 20th centuries and follows five main themes. What did the Honduran government do to try to gain political control and uncontested title to NE Honduras which meant extinguishing in turn the rights of the Miskito King, the rights of the British,overcome interrnal civil wars, and the rights of the Nicaraguan goverment, a process only completed in 1960. There are a whole series of international treaties and treaties with the Miskito King or his representative which brought this about which make the Honduran Indians, Garífunas and Bay Islanders have Treaty rights which is uncommon in Central America. The second theme is economic activities in the área,usually driven by foreign concessions or buyers, and how did the Pech, the Tawahkas, the Miskitos, the Jicaques, the Nahuas, the mulattos, the Garífunas and Black English speakers fit into this and how did it affect their cultures. Also noted is the expansión of Catholic and Protestan tchurches into the área. The ethnic composition of NE Honduras changed drastically especially after the Wars of Olancho ending in 1865 with Ladinos exiled to the North Coast and the coming of the Truxillo Railroad,beginning in 1914 which displaced at least 6 Pech villages, and the railroad of Standard Fruit. Extensive information on the Truxillo Railroad and how their bananas, free rights to all hardwoods and all hydrocarbons along their route caused issues of land loss, destruction of the NE Honduras rainforest which did not return, and changed the ethnic composition of the área where interethnic relations remain conflictive. Besides Honduran ethnic groups, the arrival of new European and Black immigrants are noted, and laws and policies to encourage or discourage their migration and investing in Honduras are noted. 

The process of how new industries moving into the Indian and Garifuna áreas at the beginning offered Jobs, but later these Jobs disappeared either because the Company left, the ethnic composition of workers was changed in favor of Ladinos, or the Jobs were mechanized and so local people were not needed or internationally some chemical product was found to replace a locally produced natural product like dyes, chicle, rubber, etc. and so how it came to be that the ethnic groups of Honduras have few job opportunities in their áreas is revealed.  Hondurans tend to think that these ethnic groups never contributed anything to local economy, but in fact they were the motor of these export industries until the 1950’s, since cacao was the first export product of Honduras in 1,000 BC to the Olmec región of Mexico. The types of things these ethnic groups  produced for the international market tended to take advantage of rainforest resources without wiping them out, which led to an internal ethnic group ethics to maintain the rainforest rather than to cut it down for the selling of the hardwoods.

While this book has a map of where the Truxillo Railroad had reached by 1933 when Jesus Aquilar Paz completed his first map, it does not include the spur of the Truxillo Railroad going along the Western bank (margen izquierda) of the Aguan River that went from Corocito to Sonaguera which was built and the story of Sonaguera when the Truxillo Railroad and the Standard Fruit’s railroad wanted to go through is beautifully documented in John Solouri’s 2009 book “Banana Cultures”.  The mulattos of Sonaguera warned don’t give away the land and displace the cattle industry that has been our “patrimonio” the way we made money from time inmemorial. These companies could come in and then be gone.

The municipal government of Sonaguera did not listen to them and zoned all of Sonaguera agricultural so that the cattle would not bother the banana trees, thereby destroying the livelihood that had been Sonaguera’s reason for existence since at least 1550 by which time the native Indians had already been sold overseas as slaves. The mulatto cattle ranchers of Sonaguera who probably had no legal land title to their grazing lands were right. Within a decade the Truxillo Railroad had both come and gone, but the resources were not returned to their original owners who anyway no longer had cattle to put on the land.  Sonaguera is now full of Agrarian Reform cooperatives which do monoculture with oranges and when it is a bad year and people do not want to buy the oranges they rot and the people have nothing to eat, because they did not plant part of their beautiful flat lands in beans and rice for having listened to the siren’s song of advisors who recommend using land to produce things of higher value for people who have money to pay more, instead of what will feed your family and your neighbors.

4.  Griffin, Wendy y Tomasa Clara Garcia Chimilio (2012) Yaya: La Vida de una Curandera Garifuna. (Yaya: The Life of a Garifuna Healer) There is an English versión and a Spanish versión,but only the Spanish versión is in the University of Pittsburgh library. 

Tomasa Clara García Chimilio was 91 years old at the time I interviewed her for this book, and so she grew up at the time of the Truxillo Railroad in Trujillo itself.  Her father at first worked bringing contraband goods and some people from Belize by three sail canoe for the foreign merchants who sold in Trujillo for the local population and to the workers of the Truxillo Railroad. Then he switched to working on call for the Truxillo Railroad as one of the dock workers for Puerto Castilla, a common job for Garifuna men in Trujillo at the time. Clara’s mother had a farm and sold produce from her farm and breads in Puerto Castilla to the Truxillo Railroad’s workers there, and sometimes Clara went with her to sell.  She herself was a midwife and healer and her stories and those of other older Trujillo Garifunas are full of interethnic stories of healing, birth attending, and of witchcraft.  Her life which included working as domestic help for other people in banana towns like La Ceiba and Olanchito for a number of years is fairly typical of other people’s remembrances of Garifuna life at the time of Truxillo Railroad in Trujillo itself. I am working on improving this manuscript for publication.

In the versión at the University of Pittsburgh there are modern photos of Doña Clara a buyei, including in her guli or sanctuary where she communicates with the ancestor spirits who help her by David Flores Valladares and there are 4 photos of the series of photos by Cajun engineer Antime Landry from 1928-1930 of the Truxillo Railroad era in the área of Trujillo and Puerto Castilla, used with permission.  Hopefully I will get the stories related to Growing Up in the Shadows of Honduran Banana Companies: An Oral History Project in Honor of the 100th Anneversary of the Truxillo Railroad written and published, a Project for which I have permission to use the photos of Antime Landry from his inheritors, his children and grandchildren.

Honduran Banana Companies as Reflected in the Published Works of Wendy Griffin

Honduran Banana Companies as Reflected in the Published Works of Wendy Griffin

By Wendy Griffin February 2015

1. Griffin, Wendy, Juana Carolina Hernández Torres y Hernán Martínez Escobar (2009) Los Pech de Honduras: Una etnia que aun Vive  Tegucigalpa:  Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.

This book includes the stories of the Pech of Olancho walking to Trujillo to sell pigs in Trujillo for the Truxillo Railroad workers, the Pech as workers for the Truxillo Railroad, the effects of the Truxillo Railroad as it entered the Pech áreas of Rio Sico and Paulaya including displacing Pech villages without payment, cutting mahoghany and even abandoning it, and the rainforest not growing back after the Truxillo Railroad left. It also mentions the logging by Samuel Zemurray’s other Company the Nicaragua Louisana Lumber Company in the Honduran Mosquitia, and the fact that the Truxillo Railroad’s concession included the rights to cut Wood,  and also rights to hydrocarbons like coal, gas, naptha, petroleum that might be under their lands or within 50 miles of their right away for free. This is mentioned in the context of other hydrocarbon concessions given in the 1920’s and 1930’s  in the área.

The book includes the Honduran rubber industry and how rubber was extracted and processed in order to be sold. It mentions that some of the buyers included people associated with the United Fruit Company such as Mr. Darling, the builder of United Fruit’s Great White Fleet who had a rubber concession on the Caratasca Lagoon. Each ship required 22 tons of rubber. During the Second World War the United States was concerned that the Japanese controlled most of the sources for domesticated rubber which were in Southeast Asia, and United Fruit’s President Samuel Zemurray personally assumed responsibility to ensure that from Central American sources the US would have enough rubber to build the ships and make tires and hoses for truck and airplanes for the war effort. The Honduran rubber industry mostly died after the Second World War. Also included is the Honduran chicle industry, which provided chicle to Wrigley’s to make chewing gum which had a Factory at Waspan on the Rio Coco on what is now the border between Honduras and Nicaragua. Wrigley’s provided chewing gum to the US troops during the Second World War. Both natural rubber and chicle have been largely replaced by products derived from petroleum.

The book also mentions the founding of the Pech village of Silin outside of Trujillo as a Ladino cattle rancher from Olancho brought Pech workers to work on his ranch in the 1930’s when the Truxillo Railroad was still active and had two fincas in the Silin área of Trujillo. The  Truxillo Railroad had a person who slaughtered beef in the Trujillo neighborhood of Jerico and then it was sold to the Truxillo Railroad workers, so cattle ranching expanded around Trujillo as a result of the Truxillo Railroad and the German owned Mas Nada which raised cattle for the shoe Factory that opened in Trujillo to make shoes from the slaughtered cattle to sell to the workers of the Truxillo Railroad. Mas Nada, located where the Garifuna neighborhood of San Martin is now, and the Shoe Factory both left in the 1930’s as the Truxillo Railroad began to shut down.

One third of the Pech population was lost in the 1918-1920 Spanish flu epidemic during the time of the Truxillo Railroad, including the parents of the woman considered the founder of Silin. It is called Spanish flu as it followed the trade routes of ships, so the frequent ship transportation to the North Coast as a result of the Truxillo Railroad was a contributing factor to the high losses of population reported among the Pech and the Tawahka Rainforest Indians for the 1918-1920 period.   This book is in US universities and is note don WorldCat.  Some copies are still for sale through the major distributors of Central American books in the US such as www.libreroonline.com and Literatura de Vientos Tropicales.

2. Griffin, Wendy & Comite de Emergencia Garifuna de Honduras (CEGAH), “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” in Spanish ) Central Impresora San Pedro Sula, 2005.

This book includes some of the land problems caused by the Truxillo Railroad, the Tela Railroad, and Standard Fruit/Vacarros Brothers in Garifuna communities. It includes the work of the Garifunas with the banana companies, and as the Truxillo Railroad closed, how the Garifuna men switched to working as merchant marines for the banana Company ships and how they served on the Great White Fleet as these ships provided logistics support for the US war effort in World War II. Also includes the affects of other businesses of the Honduran Banana companies like logging and making vegetable shortening from coconuts, cohune palm (corozo), and African Palm oil.  The Honduran government had  land to give to Ladino peasants in the Lower Aguan  (see Wikipedia article Bajo Aguan Conflict and Food First’s book Power Grab for overview of modern conflicts there) as part of the Agrarian Reform in the 1970’s as it was Truxillo Railroad land that was set aside for Colonization as the Truxillo Railroad began to withdraw. The book documents the relationship of bringing Ladinos to the North Coast first for the Truxillo Railroad and later for the Agrarian Reform and then displacing them as a result of the Counter Agrarian Reform in the 1990’s which Standard Fruit of Dole had a role in is related to current Garifuna land troubles. How mahoghany was actually cut with the bull gangs and principally Garifuna workers before the railroad was put in is also documented.

The book also includes a Garifuna eyewitness versión of the expulsión of the Black English speakers who had been employees of the Truxillo Railroad in the 1930’s and for which the Honduran government required in the 1934 law prohibitting the entrance of Blacks to Honduras even as tourists that the United Fruit Company to send three ships and forceably repatriate them, which they did.

Another version of this mass deportation of Honduran Black English speakers who were employees of the Truxillo Railroad is in Glenn Chamber’s book on Race, Nation and Anglo-Antillans in Honduras.  That book does not include that it was in the Truxillo Railroad’s original 1914 concession that the Truxillo Railroad was prohibitted from bringing in Black, Chinese, East Indian, Syrian, and Malayan workers. While they complied with the other races, by 1914 there were already complaints that United Fruit was bringing in Black workers and that they should repatriate them.

Reports of Honduran revolutions during the Truxillo Railroad period reaching Trujillo itself and the actual entrance to the American zone of Puerto Castilla is also included in Wendy Griffin’s book, with descriptions of different types of Garifuna houses used to take refuge in because they were bullet proof. Anti-black riots in Trujillo reported in other sources like Elizeth Payne’s article on Trujillo merchants and the Black English speaker book “Black Chest” were not mentioned by the Garifunas, but it may be that the two month strike,the race riots,and then the entrance of Gregorio Ferrera’s troops into Trujillo and Puerto Castilla coming from Western Honduras in the 1930’s by way of Tocoa and the Aguan Valley plantations all blended into the memories of “revolution”.  The idea that there were no strikes in US owned Honduran banana companies prior to 1954 just because unions were illegal, with at least 15 strikes noted in the documents sent back by British and American diplomats on the North Coast, does not hold water.

There are photos of an old Standard Fruit train engine, currently in a park in La Ceiba, and also parts of a railroad car of the Truxillo Railroad which were left abandoned on the beach in Trujillo in the neighborhood of Barrio Rio Negro. The latter and the old Truxillo Railroad engine that still stuck out of the wáter in the Trujillo Bay in the 1990’s are no longer there. There is also a photo of a banana tree growing in a Garifuna garden. There are also photos of Garifuna women farmers holding some of the products that they raise with the caption that Garifuna women sold food crops and breads to the workers of the Truxillo Railroad.

Another source of information about Garifunas as workers for the US banana companies and as merchant marines on the Banana companies’ ships is in Wendy Griffin’s  article “Garifuna Immigrants Invisible” available for free as a pdf file in the about and Garifunas section on the website of the Garifuna in Peril movie www.garifunainperil.com

3. Wendy Griffin’s articles published in Honduras This Week related to the Honduran Banana Companies

Wendy Griffin did a number of articles related to the land problems caused by the leaving of the Truxillo Railroad for Honduras This Week. She also did one article specifically about the Truxillo Railroad and the photo collection of Antime Landry from 1928-1930 that will be included with the book versión of the Oral history Project in commemoration of the 100th Anneversary of the Truxillo Railroad. She also did a two series article on Black Women’s work during the Banana Boom and a two series article on the long history of Black English speaking churches on the North Coast of Honduras and in the Bay Islands. Those on the North Coast were all started by the Banana Companies and most had bilingual schools associated with them, which in most cases precede the opening of Honduran government Spanish language schools in those towns. 

Although others have argued that these schools were opened for the children of the White workers of the Banana Companies, in most cases until at least the 1950’s, the White children were taught separately in the American zones like Mazapan in La Ceiba or where Villas Telamar is now in Tela, and the bilingual schools were attended primarily by the children of the Banana Companies’ Black workers, including both Black English speakers and some Garifunas. Many children of White workers also studied in the US in either boarding schools or with family members. The articles on the Black English speaking churches also note that in Banana towns like La Ceiba, the Episcopal Church did services in the American compounds like Mazapan separately for White workers and their families  until 1954, and then said, we only have one church where we do services. Come to the church services together with the Black workers or don’t attend church. In the US Martin Luther King described 11 am on Sunday morning the most segregated hour in America, because mostly Blacks and Whites did not go to the same Protestant churches in the US. This issue also affected Honduran churches, and when the Honduran Episcopal churches passed to being a Missionary church of Episcopal churches in Florida in1954, the pressure in the US to force churches to be more open also affected the Honduran Episcopal churches in Banana Company towns. The Episcopal Church and its bilingual school in Puerto Castilla closed after the Truxillo Railroad left.

4. 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 available for free on the Internet . Developed at request of IHAH librarian due to student requests.

.s114101627.onlinehome.us/files/Isleno.pdf

Everything about North Coast English speakers in this book is related to life and culture in Honduran banana towns. Much of the information about the Bay Islanders was also provided by people whose parents had worked for the Banana Companies on the North Coast, especially Prof. Arnold Auld whose father had been a Jamaican school teacher in the bilingual school at Puerto Castilla for the workers of the Truxillo Railroad Company employees. He married a Black English speaker from the Bay Islands and the family relocated to Roatan as feelings and laws grew against Black English  speakers in the Trujillo área. The Bay Islands is where the Honduran banana trade started, and at the beginning bananas were just a part of a general fruit trade from the Bay Islands in which coconuts actually dominated.  During the Banana boom period, the Bay Islands provided agricultural products for sale to Banana Company workers and to Standard Fruit’s La Blanquita Company with ships between La Ceiba and the Bay Islands being frequent.   Bay Islanders like the Pech and Miskito Indians often relocated for a time to work with the Banana companies on the North Coast. Black English speaking women provided both profesional labor like school teachers and nurses and domestic help like cooks and nannies in Banana Company towns.

The stories of Black English speakers going to Belize in skiffs and dories seemed to buy seem to indicate that the Black English speakers, like the Garifunas, Miskitos, and the mulattos of the Honduran North Coast were all involved with the Honduran government called contraband or smuggling which continued unabated at least through the massacre of most of the Garifuna men of San Juan near Tela in 1937 by the Ladino army detachment based in El Progreso, Yoro, for helping to smuggle arms brought from Guatemala to support General Umaña in his revolt against the Carias government. The Garifunas of San Juan were also accused of bringing General Umaña himself ashore almost in the direct shadow of the Tela Railroad’s cattle ranch at Puerto Arturo and their headquarters in Tela 4 km away.  Virgilio Castillo’s book about the Massacre at San Juan is in US libraries.   Examples of the arms that were left in the caves at Puerto Arturo are in the Rufino Galan Museum in Trujillo.

5. Griffin, Wendy (2012) "Garífuna Immigrants Invisible" Available as a pdf for free on the Garífuna in Peril website. www.garifunainperil.com

This article tells the role of Garífunas in the US banana companies in Honduras and as sailors on ships of the US banana companies and how this led to many Garífuna families being able to legal immigrate to the US.  This article also tells the leading role of the Garífunas in international, regional, and local struggles for Blacks and Indians.  The article documents that the experience of many Garífunas in unions within Fruit Companies, including the Pomona Citrus packing plant in Belize, and later in unions for Honduran government workers like teacher's unions and medical worker unions, led to the Garífunas being part of political parties and government structures that changed their countries. In Belize these changes extending  voting rights to reach universal suffrage and receiving Independence from Great Britain.

T. V. Ramos who is famous for his inspiration of the Garífunas in Belize was actually born in Honduras where his father worked for a banana company in NW Honduras at the time of Marcus Garvey's UNIA organization's misión to Honduras between Puerto Cortes and La Ceiba which tried to reach Garífunas as well as Black English speakers.  According to Honduran historian Jorge Amaya Banegas, T.V. Ramos mentions being motivated by Marcus Garvey's dreams which his father had heard and also many Garífuna sailors heard about. See for example Sabas Whittaker's book Africans in the Americas.

When Honduras made laws that foreign Blacks could not immigrate or even come to Honduras as tourists between 1934 and 1949, this affected not only Black English speakers, but also Garífunas living in other Central American countries.  The assumption that all the people who held British Passports in Honduran statistics were West Indian English speakers does not take into account the movements of Belizean Garífunas during the Banana Boom period. Not only did Belizean Garífunas go to Honduras, but Honduran Garífunas including Yaya's natural father from Roatan and Herman Alvarez's uncle in San Juan, went to Belize and stayed. 

 

 

 

 

 

War and Music and Dance in Honduras

War and Music and Dance in Honduras

By Wendy Griffin February 2015

Mythical Battles at the Beginning of the World

Baile de los Gigantes—Maya Chorti Indians

Although the oficial line for this dance is that it is the story of the Beheading of John the Baptist, according to Rafael Girard a Swiss anthropologist who studied the Maya Chorti for 40 years, it is actually the reenactment of the battle of the hero twins against the Giants which led them to have to go to Xibalba, the Mayan hell, part of the Popol Vuh. Although this dance is mainly done by the Guatemalan Maya Chortis who dance it for the Patron Saint’s Fair of St. John the Baptist (beginning on the summer solstice), the patrón saint of the old parish of Jocotan, Guatemala, it is known by the Honduran Maya Chorti.

Dances that Remember the Spanish Conquest and the Visit of Doña Marina or la Malinche with Hernan Cortes in 1524.

La Huasteca—Maya Chorti

The name in Nahua of this dance probably comes from the fact that the main personage of the dance la Malinche was an Aztec princess who was obtained as a slave girl by Hernan Cortes in La Huasteca área of the Gulf of Mexico in Mexico. Although there are Huasteca Mayas, at the time of conquest La Huasteca área which includes Veracruz was about 70% Nahuatl speaking.   Dr. Brent Metz describes this dance as a conquest-drama story. Although principally done by the Guatemalan Maya Chortis in the Department of Chiquimula, the Honduran Mayan Chortis also know the dance. Both of these dances are only fleetingly mentioned in David Flores’s La Evolución Historica de La Danza Folklorica Hondureña. Like El Baile de los Gigantes it was traditionally danced at the Patron Saint Fair.

El Guancasco of Mejicapa, Lempira and Gracias, Lempira, Honduras

During the Patron Saint Fairs in Western Honduras, now known as a Lenca área, most towns which were colonial pueblos de indios do a ceremony of two villages coming together and they do dances in honor of the peace between these two communities which had previously been at war. Although Western Honduras and other places where the dances are done including South of Tegucigalpa and in the El Paraiso Dept. bordering with Nicaragua, often one of the towns has a Nahua name (Mejicapa-the place of a lot of Mexica—the Aztecs’ name for themselves) and the other a Spanish or Lenca name. The current Guancascos are thought to be sincretic ceremonies including elements of pre-Columbian traditions and other elements required by the Catholic Church to be changed.  The importance of large town dances in Mexican Nahua culture is well documented with Hernan Cortes writing that the payment of musicians and dancers and those who organized games were part of the tax structure and government payments at the time of the Conquest. Nahua speaking Pipiles also had large dances. The importance of large dances in Guatemalan Mayan culture was highlighted in the colonial period, and continues to present. The cofradías in the Lenca communities were responsable for organizing the Patron Saint’s fair of which a large dance was generally part of it.

In the Guancasco of Mejicapa and Gracias, the figure of La Malinche, Don Hernan Cortes’s Nahuatl-Mayan-Spanish translator also is prominent. The dance has been described without pictures in Manuel Chavez’s book Como Subsisten Los Campesinos? (How do the Peasants Subsist?) and with pictures in David Flores’s La Evolución Histórica de la Danza Folklórica hondureña. One of the Characters in this dance is the Chichimeca (the people of the Dog Tribe); however instead of being pejorative the Chichimeca is an eloquent speaker who tells traditional poetry known as ”bombas” at different times of the dance.

Guancascos can also have the dance of Moors and Christians which is a day long dance showing the battle between the Moors who are fighting against the Christians, taken from a medieval play about Charlemagne’s defense of Europe against the Moors. Spanish monks introduced the dance and play to substitute pre-columbian dances which they found of an objectional nature, and also to teach the Christianity always wins over the pagans. Variations of the dance have been reported from Mexico to Chile. Although there is a play known with words in Honduras, most Honduran groups—Lencas, Maya-Chortis and Garifunas perform it principally as a dance accompanied by instrumental music, with the Garifunas adding a few Vivas.   The reason for the loss of the words includes that some groups do it with masks like the Maya Chorti of Ocotepeque so words can not be Heard behind the masks, and that when the dance was introduced not only did most of the groups were not able to read Spanish, but they probably did not even speak much Spanish.   This dance of Moors and Christians  during a Guancasco or meeting of two towns during the Patron Saint Fair is called the paisanazgo (the dance of my paisanos) among the Lencas of Lepaterique (Place of jaguar in Lenca,Jaguars being the tótem animal of the Lencas) and Ojojona (Oxoxona which is the twin city of Santa Ana de Cerro de Hula, whose name appears not to be Lenca.) The Patron Saint Fairs of the Lencas and the Maya Chortis sometimes today and definately in the mid-twentieth century included in addition to dancing and the offering of food and drink, the sacrifice of turkeys or ducks, either as part of a Compostura such as among the Lencas of Yamaranguila or as the Indian versión of Carrera de Cintas, replacing ribbons (cintas) with live ducks which were killed as they were taken off the rope where they were hung. In Eastern Honduras, the day of St. John the Baptist (summer solstice) was remembered by playing the game of burying a female chicken up to its neck in the ground and giving blindfolded boys machetes and one by one the boys would try to chop the head off the chicken.  In Pre-Columbian times these types of large dances such as among the Pipiles, were often accompanied by human sacrifice, but chickens, turkeys, or ducks now replace these for the sacrifices of the summer solstice, the Patron Saint’s Fair, and the beginning of the rainy season.  The sacrifices at the end of the 240 day sacred calendar November 2 are now usually squash dishes (ayote, which they say is shaped like ahead) offered by the Maya Chorti at a tzikin or by throwing ripe tomatoes which squish by Ladino children, also called tzikin. The figures of Pipil gods of yuca and bark cloth paper faces or of Straw with bark cloth paper faces in the AgaltaValley were also called tzikin, and from that came the Pech Word for church sikinko (the place of the saint figure or tzikin).

The Description of Lenca and Maya Chorti and Garifuna Moor and Christian (Tiras) dances are in Evolución Historica de la Danza folklorica Hondureña. The Garifuna Moors and Christians dance with other photos is also in Wendy Griffin and CEGAH’s Los Garifunas de Honduras.  A video of the Garifuna Moors and Christian dance from Trujillo, Honduras is available from Monico Productions, which has an Internet site. The instrumental music of Moors and Christians (Tiras) among the Garifunas was also on the Lanigi Garifuna (Heart of the Garifunas) cassette that accompanied the song book by the same name.  I was told by US piano player Mike Montano that the music the accompanies the Garifuna Moors and Christians is an 1890’s dance tune from the US.  It is played by a musical group (conjunto) that includes either a saxophone or trumpet, a bass drum (bombo), and a snare drum. A Garifuna drum is generally not used for this dance. There are numerous Honduras This Week articles about the different Honduran Guancascos and also the Garifuna Moors and Christians Dance. The dancing and playing the musical instruments is considered as one of the forms of sacrifice or service, as is the giving of food, drink, organizing the games like partesanas or carrera de patos, offering prayers and preparing oneself to offer prayers. Part of the video about Red Comal on the Internet shows part of a Lenca compostura, described by Anne Chapman in Los Hijos de Candela y Copal about the Lencas and in David Flores’s book.  The Word Compostura comes from the Spanish verb “componer” to fix that which was broken, or to make an agreement when there was a disagreement, so it is the Lenca ceremony to restore harmony, necessary when there has been War or when people have violated the laws of the spirits, which leads to illness.

Like the other Garifuna dances, the Garifuna women’s dance clubs organize the presentation of the Moors and Christian Dance, which in Trujillo includes shutting down a main road for four or five times over a month to dance (the initial parts of the dance are called Embajadas), and for the last day the road is closed all day long. Among the Garifunas, the dance can be during the Patron Saint’s Fair,but in many communities it has its own day like the Tuesday of Carnaval or Mardi Gras before Ash Wednesday in Trujillo or during Holy Week in some other communities like Santa Fe.   

Afro-Honduran Songs and Dances About the Experiences related to them being forcefully brought to the Americas or to Honduras

John Canoe (Yan Canu)

Both the Black Bay Islanders and the Garifunas did dances known as Yan Canu. They were both danced around Christmastime.  There are two versions of the Garifuna dance Yan Canu, one of which is done only by Belizean Garifunas and is danced with a red British army uniform with a feathered hat.  The Bay Islander dance was done in rags. The name is believed to come from the name of a British slave trader in Ghana John Canby.  The dancer accompanied by musicians goes from house to house dancing in the patio and scaring the children.  People pay him money and he goes away.

Gunchey
On the Smithsonian Folkways CD Traditional Music of the Garifuna (Black Carib) of Belize, this genre of song is spelt Gunchai

This Garifuna genre of songs is accompanied by a dance similar to a quadrille and is the only Garifuna dance danced in male-female couples. The songs are slow in the melody and fast in the drums. The songs like “Generali” tell the experiences of the Garifunas on the Island of St.Vincent in defeating the French forces which wanted to take over half the island in the mid-18th century. There is a season to dance this dance –after the Christmas season dances have ended on 15 January and finishing on the Saturday of Glory, the day before Easter Sunday. It was danced during the day on the weekends and after the older people danced they would eat cake. The cake had a bean in it and whoever got the bean had to make the cake the following week, probably based on a similar custom with the roscón del rey cake the Spanish ate for Three Kings Day.  This seems to be a case of taking the enemies’ dance and celebrating the victory over him by dancing triumphantly in celebration his own dance.

The Gunchey Dance is the central dance of the yellow-white-black (the colors of the Garifuna flag) gala of the New York City Garifunas for Garifuna-American month (11 March-12 April). It is quite raw to see the dance now in Honduras although the teachers of the Socorro Sorrel School in Trujillo have organized a Gunchey group for the teachers, the older people of Sangrelaya have their own Gunchey group, and I have seen one elementary school group I think from Limon present it at InterDepartmental Garifuna dance festival in Trujillo.  I think one of the Gunchey songs “Saucei” is on the Lanigi Garifuna cassette recorded by the Sangrelaya women’s dance group.There is a mention of the dance in Wendy Griffin’s Los Garifuna de Honduras and in David Flores’s La Evolución Historica de la Danza Folklorica Hondureña.

Wanaragua (Dance of the Warriors) or Mascaro
There is an example of this dance on the Smithsonian Folkways CD Traditional Music of the Garifuna (Black Carib) of Belize. The photo on the cover of the CD is also of men dressed for this dance. 

This Garifuna dance is also called Yan Canu, but it has a different historical story behind it. The Garifunas were being attacked by the British in the Second Carib War on the island of St. Vincent and the wife of Chief Satuye, Barauda, asked her husband what are you men going to do about the English? Maybe you should give me your pants and you wear skirts? That scene is shown in the Garifuna in Peril movie. Chief Satuye decides to dress up his warriors as women, which is why they wear flowered shirts with ribbons and feathered hats,skirts and slips, and white gloves and they put scarfs on their hair and a mask (always with European type faces with pink cheeks and mustaches), and they went and danced close to the English so that they could spy on them and know what they were doing and their position, but the British would not be concerned, because it was only women dancing. The dance is done beautifully in the Garifuna in  Peril movie but is also shown in La Historia de Corozal, andSambo Creek,but one version is without costumes. In Trujillo this dance is specifically done on Christmas Day and New Years Day.

On these same  days the Indio Barbara (Barbarian Indian) game (no music) is also played in Garifuna communities, and it remembers the conflicts of the red skinned Barbarian Indians in breechcloths and painted red with anetto seed and red clay dissolved in oil, an insect repellant, armed with a bow and arrow and speaking no mutual language having just a whistle (the use of whistles in war in Honduras by the Indians has been confirmed in archaeological and ethnohistorical documents).    

Yarumein (Island of St.Vincent in Garifuna)

This is a women’s song in the genre of hunguhungu. It tells the story of the Garifunas being rounded up the British at the end of the Second Carib War in 1796, and then in 1797 put on boats, and then being sent into exile and looking for the other Garifunas. As they approached Honduras in April 1797 the Spanish did capture one ship of the British bringing the Garifunas to Roatan and took it to Trujillo, so in fact it was necessary to go and look for the other Garifunas who then rescued and joined their fellow Garifunas on the island of Roatan, North of Honduras.This song is considered the National Anthem of the Garifunas. It opens most Garifuna women’s dance group sessions to dance, and most other Garifuna events like the Bicentenial celebrations of arriving to Honduras. Two of the women dancer wear ropes tied in lassos attached to their waists and they are the police or soldiers responsible for rounding up the Garifunas. I have seen this performed even with a British pith helmet for one of the police rounding up the Garifunas. The dancers also make the movements of paddling away by canoe.  The dance is described in Evolución Historica de la Danza Folklorica Hondureña by David Flores and in Los Garifunas de Honduras by Wendy Griffin and CEGAH. Recorded versions I know of include that by Honduran Garifuna male singer Aurelio Martinez and his traditional band Lita Ariran (Black Rooster), available on the Garifuna Coalition of New York City website and on Lanigi Garifuna cassette by the Sangrelaya women’s group with the words only in Garifuna in the accompanying songbook. There are probably many other versions. This song sung by the women and Garifuna drums to accompany it played by the men are never lacking in any Garifuna protest.

There are probably other Garifuna songs related to these themes like La Balsa maybe about escaping from slavery on a raft between Barbados and St. Vincent. Garifuna anthropologist Joseph Palacios of the University of West Indies, Belize says that if you collected all the Garifuna songs you could probably know their history much more completely.

There are also versions of the Spanish name of the dance Punta that originally there were two generals, and the other general was killed and defeated and the people said we would dance from punta to punta, referring to the places in the Honduran coastal geography where the land sticks out like punta Caxinas (Puerto Castilla), Punta Betulia, Punta Cameron, etc. Punta is a song danced at wakes, so if there was a wake for the death of an enemy, what you would dance is punta.  Four examples of the Punta songs are on the Smithsonian Folkways CD Traditional Music of the Garífuna (Black Carib) of Belize, which is still available for sale. The women on the cover of the CD are dressed to dance Punta. See also the GariTV.com movie "La Historia de Punta". 

Modern Resistence Songs

Maya Movement Songs by the Guatemalan Maya Chorti about the Guatemalan Civil War. Collected by University of Kansas Anthropologist Dr. Brent Metz.

Miskito Indian songs of Resistance. Most of the popular ones seem to be from the Contra War period, but some of them seem to be from the original Sandino War of the US against Sandino in the Nicaraguan Mosquitia. Anthropologist David Price recently wrote that the US is returning to counterinsurgence updating the manual based on the original Sandino War in the 1920’s, so it is just the Miskitos are maintaining their resistance with the same songs that that war inspired. These songs were collected by MISKIWAT, whose president Jairo Wood is now the high school principal in Brus Laguna. There are examples of Miskito music available from the Smithsonian’s Folkway Records and there is a video of an older Miskito man playing Miskito music on the MASTA Miskito Federation website, but in general the meaning of the songs are not made available. 

An interesting story of using music and dance to remember someone who died in battle among the Miskitos is the Parayapti organized in Lakatabila, Honduran Moskitia by Miskito teacher Cecilio Tatallon in honor of the death of the last Miskito king Henry Clarence at the end of the 19^th century. At least 12 different genres of very traditional Miskito music and their accompanying dances were done in the 1990’s for these 3 days of celebrations and possibly the last Miskito drummer was 92 years old. The Last Miskito King died because of the invasion of Nicaraguan President Zelaya’s forces entering the Mosquitia to annex it finally to Nicaragua and renamed the Department Zelaya. Photos of some of these dances and not very detailed descriptions of the dances and music and a better description of what Parayapti usually was are in David Flores’s La Evolución Historica de la Danza Folklorica Hondureña. In Ronny Velasquez’s book about Miskito song and dance, done with Miskito Indian Nathan Pravia, the Parayapti ceremony is called Sihkru. In Charles Napier Bell’s 19^th book Tangweera or life among Gentle Savages he also describes this ceremony done at one year after the death of a person among the Miskitos as Singkru. The modern Sinhkru Tara, noted on the MASTA website, held binationally alternating its location between Nicaraguan and Honduran Mosquitia is now a conference held on International Day of the Indigenous People 9 August to reflect on the situations facing the Miskitos, although probably a cultural afternoon is included in the program.   

Ladino Songs of Resistance related to the 2009 coup against Honduran President Mel Zelaya are available on the Vos el Soberano website.  That coup inspired art, poetry, and apparently song.

Corridos by the Honduran Indians about the Death of their 20^th century leaders

One of the most well known of these corridos which are accompanied by guitar is Corrido a Vicente Matute who was a Tolupan or Xicaque Indian slain in the late 20^th century.  The founding of the all Indigenous CONPAH (Confederación Nacional del Pueblos Autoctonos de Honduras) was done in 1992 Yoro, Yoro, the site of the Xicaque Federation FETRIXY on the anniversary of his murder, shortly after Columbus Day.    Since his death 50 Tolupan leaders have been murdered, mostly over land disputes or disputes relating to mining in their area. Just in one year, maybe two years ago, the community of Subirana, Yoro buried three different presidents of village council.

A really nice use of a protest song as a music video is the song to the Rio Gualcarque, which is the River the Honduran government wants to Aguazarka Dam on and the Lencas of COPINH are protesting at Rio Blanco, Intibuca for the last two years trying to prevent the entrance of the heavy equipment to build the dam. The music video is on Vimeo. At the end there is just a small note listing the names of the two Lencas, one a woman with 5 young children, who died in 2014 in confrontations of the Lencas at Rio Blanco and the Honduran government forces, with the added note, they would have liked to have heard this song if they were still alive.

The Pech Indians native of the Honduran rainforest in NE Honduras feel that the violence is not only against them but also against the animals that they depended on. The modern song by Pech teacher Angel Martinez in Pech tells of this-- “Who were our relatives? The Animals, the white collared peccary, the deer, the peccary, were our relatives and neighbors and now they are all gone and we are worried”.   The song is popular at Pech events where it is accompanied by guitar and traditional Pech instruments and was popular at the Central American Linguistics conference in Tegucigalpa.

 If the Pech have forgotten most of the old Pech songs,they are now writing new ones in Pech,and if the Xicaques and Lencas have mostly forgotten their traditional language, they are writing new songs in Spanish. Garifunas living in the US have been known to record punta songs written in English, and many Honduran Garifunas compose songs in Spanish.

A really nice use of a Garifuna composed song in Spanish is the “Tristeza es natural” (Sadness is natural) theme song of the Garifuna movie El Espiritu de Mi Mama (The Spirit of My Mother—It has English subtitles). The Garifuna girl in the movie becomes pregnant by a white American soldier who is stationed in the Honduran Mosquitia during the Contra War, and she goes to look for him in the US, but he does not even recognize her in the US and has a new girlfriend. Her deceased mother bothers her in dreams in the US until she goes home to Honduras to do a dugu ancestor ceremony, and becomes reconciled to her traditional culture, and her new life as a single mother. This movie is available for sale on the Garifuna in Peril website www.garifunainperil.com.

 

Foreign Direct Investment in Honduras From a Local View—Part I

Foreign Direct Investment in Honduras From a Local View—Part I
(published by HondurasWeekly.com)

By Wendy Griffin February 2015

Since before the original Liberal Reform in the late 19^th Century in Honduras, the Honduran elite has tried to woo foreign investors to come to Honduras and invest there.  Even before bananas they tried changing Honduran laws to make investments in rubber and coffee attractive to foreigners who were encouraged to relocate to Honduras through favorable policies like free land and rapid Honduran citizenship.

An early attempt  boost to the original growth of San Pedro Sula was the relocating of about 200 white Confederate families from the US South after the US Civil War  with favorable concession terms (half the people on the San Pedro City Council who signed them also had beside their name does not know how to read); however, that was disasterous for the investors as they used all their capital to plant acres and acres of the US species of cotton bushes and local army worms ate the bushes leaving only sticks as far as the eye could see. The cotton native to Honduras, which the Mayas, Lencas, and the Pech Indians used, grew on a tree.

In Trujillo I saw four main types of foreign investment. In addition to the 4 types of foreign investment noted below, Honduras also has a stock market called the Bolsa de Valores Centroamericana, and investing through the Honduran stock market will be covered in a separate article. Large scale land speculation, such as in happening in the Trujillo-Santa Fe area by such companies as Enjoi, Banana Coast, Life Style Developments and others, mostly owned by Canadians, are very new in Honduras and were not legally possible until the passing of law 90-90 under Honduran Nationalist President Callejas, and then the law had to clear the hurdles of legal cases calling the law unconstitutional.  OFRANEH’s claims published in a Honduras This Week article that declaring the 90-90 law constitutional would be like a tsunami for the Honduran Garifunas who are threatened with Model cities or ZEDE in the Puerto Cortes, La Ceiba, Trujillo-Santa Fe, Irionia-Gracias a Dios, and Bay Islands area and the Bay of Tela project near Tela has proved to be true in the intervening decade.

Small Foreign Owned Businesses

The easiest kind of direct foreign investment of foreign individuals to see in Trujillo was the starting small businesses by individual foreigners and they usually started small hotels like Casa Alemania, Casa Kiwi, Tranquility Bay, and Villa Brinkley (recently confiscated by the Honduran government for belonging to the Los Cachiros drug family who had bought it from the Brinkley family), or small restaurant/bars like Rogue’s Gallery, Gringo Bar, and Camille’s Place.

Although the land bought in the Betulia area west of Trujillo where the Crespo family had owned the land, was all torn up and a Four Seasons hotel was supposed to go in there according to the Honduran who was helping them with their permits, that was not built, and the land was reportedly bought by a Mexican drug cartel. With the land on the beach, and the road extended from Trujillo extended to Betulia, it would seem they found other uses for the land more lucrative than actually building and maintaining a hotel there.

Local Hondurans had mixed views about these foreign owned businesses, as they directly competed with bars, restaurants, and hotels owned by Hondurans. The number of local Honduran employees they added were very negligible. In Trujillo there is a high school major known as Hotelería y Turismo (Hotel Management and Tourism), but almost all graduates do not find jobs in these businesses in the Trujillo area. Most hotel owners can manage their hotels themselves with only a cleaning lady and a watchman.  The salaries paid for cooks and waitresses in Trujillo are generally below the official higher minimum wage established under President Manuel Zelaya and barely allow a person to rent a room for themselves and their two or three children and they have difficulty meeting other expenses like food, clothes, school fees and supplies.

Two: Transnational Corporations who Invest in Honduras

Another type of foreign investment are transnational corporations.  United Fruit’s worse nightmare came true. The United Fruit Company literally tore up the railroad tracks of the Truxillo Railroad and took out the bridges in the 1930’ and 1940’s so that their competitor Standard Fruit could not take advantage of the infrastructure. Instead the Honduran government with foreign assistance in the 1970’s built the highway connecting Standard Fruit’s holdings in the Aguan Valley to the port near Trujillo, Puerto Castilla, and with US assistance during the Contra War in the 1980’s made the deep water port at Puerto Castilla a world class container port. Standard Fruit, now owned by Dole, has been the principal user of that port for decades, although Honduran businessman Miguel Facusse also uses it to export palm oil, and recently a Chinese company began exporting iron ore out it.

In Trujillo, there is a whole gated neighborhood within the Garifuna neighborhood of Manuel Bonilla, known as “La Standard” which is where higher up people in Standard Fruit live and then commute to Puerto Castilla. The Puerto Castilla area is infamous for its sandfly problem, not a significant problem in Trujillo itself. La Ceiba which developed almost exclusively as a Standard Fruit town, no longer has an international seaport. The land for the “La Standard” neighborhood was not acquired from the Garifunas, but rather from the late America Hode, a woman of Palestinian descent whose husband became mayor of Trujillo with whom the Garifunas of Trujillo have had a long standing land issues with. Her family still controls many acres of fenced of lands in the increasingly crowded Garifuna neighbors west of the Cristales River.

Standard Fruit also used to control some of the coconut producing beach area west of Trujillo, for coconuts to produce oil for their La Blanquita plant in La Ceiba. Thus they appear as sellers on the deeds of land transfers of the foreigners who now own some of the land between Trujillo and Santa Fe. Standard Fruit’s “La Blanquita” factory and associated margarine, soap, oil, and vegetable shortening products,  have switched to using exclusively or almost exclusively bleached African palm oil, now grown on over 100,000 acres in Honduras.

Besides African palm, and bananas, Standard Fruit also exports pineapples out of Honduras, mostly being produced on lands near the La Ceiba airport. They also hold the license for bottling Coca Cola products in Honduras, have two beer brands sold in Honduras, were the founders of the Honduran bank,  Banco Atlantida, and the milk, milk products and orange juice products in La Ceiba --Leyde .

Standard Fruit is no slouch besides United Fruit’s vertical monopoly model, as Standard Fruit also owns a box making company in La Ceiba to pack the bananas in, they owned a plastic company to make the pesticide laden plastic sheeting which is put around the bananas (same company that makes the plastic bags Honduran milk is sold in), and they have their own shipping line, now marked Dole, which brought in many of the imports to the Trujillo area as well as provided transportation to export their products.   Most of the issues related to the problematic Honduran banana companies are well known. Some good recent books are Peter Chapman's 2007 book "Bananas: How United Fruit Changed the World" and a 2009 book by CMU professor John Solouri "Banana Cultures".

Dr. Solouri's book is especially interesting to people who study the Truxillo Railroad and the mulattos of Honduras because he tells the story of what happened to the mulatto cattle ranchers of Sonaguera when both Standard Fruit and the Truxillo Railroad wanted to open up the Sonaguerea área to intensive banana cultivation. It is an important precautionary tale to those who screw local people to open áreas up to foreign companies, who sometimes a short time later just depart again. Upon Reading the concessions recently given to foreign investors for the new Nicaraguan canal which will go through important lowland forests, disturb north south migrations of rainforest animals, and displace the Rama Indians of Nicaragua, a Costa Rica historian commented, "Didn't they learn anything from the banana company era concessions?" 

Foreign Direct Investment by Development Banks in Honduras Part II

 

Foreign Direct Investment by Development Banks in Honduras -- A Local View—Part II

By Wendy Griffin February 2015

Another type of foreign investment in the Trujillo area where I lived is from international development banks. World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB in English, BID in Spanish) funds can either go to private companies, usually with government guarantees in the case of the World Bank, or to the Honduran government itself. The Honduran government in theory is using the World Bank and IDB funds to build infrastructure. An example of a small IDB project is the $35,000 to partition and furnish a room at the Fort in Trujillo to make a souvenir shop for the Pech and Garifuna artisans and buy crafts and display cases for an exhibit on Pech and Garifuna crafts there through the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History.

An example of a World Bank funded project was the Sustainable Tourist Development in Coastal Areas Project through the Honduran Institute of Tourism which “restored” historic buildings in Trujillo like the Santa Barbara Fort in downtown Trujillo, the small building in front of it where tickets for the fort are sold known as “La Comandancia” Building , and the building in front of the Trujillo Post Office, now used as technical training school for the Honduran government’s program INFOP.  That building had been the house of a prominent Trujillo merchant family, the Melhados, originally Sephardic Jews from Jamaica, who were usually the British Consuls in Trujillo.

That World Bank Tourism project, mentioned in Keri Brondo’s book “Land Grab”, did help some local businesses like Garifuna Kike Gutierrez’s Silk screening company (now closed, the variable currents in Trujillo fried all the electrical equipment), and a bread making company in Honduras Aguan which still supplied bread products to Trujillo, but many of the proposed parts of that project, like building a really nice museum for the collection at the Rufino Galan Museum or building a Garifuna Museum and a Garifuna Cultural Center and Museum in Cristales did not happen as the money was withdrawn from Trujillo and invested in Copan Ruinas—not a Coastal Area.   

Honduran businesses that have received World Bank funding over the years are quite varied. The large Bay Islander commercial fishing and exporting of frozen seafood, with its logical overfishing results, was originally funded by a $10 million grant from the World Bank. The growth of meat packing plants to export frozen deboned beef such as is used in hamburgers was mostly started by World Bank funding, with similar problems in the Honduran rainforest as Brazil faces in theirs, only more people lived in the Honduran rainforest and it is much smaller, so the problems are more acute.

The recent World Bank funding of Palestian Arab businessman Miguel Facusse in Honduras, both directly and through Banco FICOHSA, also owned by a Honduran family of Palestian Arab descent with a one third equity position of the World Bank, which generated serious criticism from the World Bank’s own Omnibudsman and New York Times articles, is only one in a series of access to multimillion dollar World Bank financing and other internationally funded sources funds for Miguel Facusse’s companies, some of which is documented in Tanya Keissen’s 2013 book “Power Grab”. 

Unlike United Fruit which used to hoard land just to keep it out of other people’s use, Miguel Facusse  has used his World Bank funding very vigorously to buy more land for African palms, for factories that make a variety of products like oil, vegetable shortening, soap, especially for washing clothes, biodiesel from African palm oil, Issima brand instant noodles, sauces, fried snacks known as “churros” in Honduras, and for making personal hygiene products. Many of the acres and acres of African palm plantations on the way to Trujillo were acquired by him after the 1992 Law for the Modernization of Agriculture permited the sale and breaking up of the Agrarian Reform cooperations in the Lower Aguan Valley.

In the past he also owned companies that made tomato sauce and owned extensive acreage in the Comayagua Valley for tomatoes, and a fruit juice company. He sold his Cressida Corporation which made these products under the “Natura” brand to British company Unilever in a multimillion deal and said then, he would invest in more African palms. He actually gets preferential loans because of “carbon credits”, because,  cutting down the rainforest to plant African palms, a tree that requires lots of agrochemical inputs in Honduras which then get in the water often killing the fish, is internationally classified as an environmentally friendly business, in theory, because biodiesel from palm oil reduces dependence on petroleum products.

Not only does Miguel Facusse get carbon credits for his loans, he has also won environmental prizes for example for having Honduras’s first “private protected area” inside the Jeanette Kawas (previously Punta Sal) National Park in the conflictive Tela Bay area, according to an article on the Honduran website angelfire.com . Based on what I know of Honduran protected area laws, the principal ones being Ley de Modernización de Agricultura (The Law for the Modernization of Agriculture) and the Law governing the Sistema Nacional de Areas Protegidas de Honduras (SINAPH--National System of Protected Areas of Honduras), both available for sale on the Internet, I know of no legal way you can have a walled private protected area inside of a national park under Honduran law. Jeanette Kawas the founder and president of the environmental organization PROLANSATE which oversees the park that now bears her name was murdered when she was fighting against people who wanted to plant African palms in the Punta Sal National Park. Her murderers and those who are thought to have ordered the murder were never prosecuted.

Having 800 Honduran peasants thrown off the island of Zacate Grande in the Gulf of Fonseca in Southern Honduras has also been hailed as a positive environmental move by Miguel Facusse, worthy of an environmental prize as there is also the possibility that that too will become a private protected area. Keri Brondo’s book “Land Grab” on Green Neo-Liberalism on the Honduran North Coast talks a lot about the concept of businessmen masquerading as environmentalists.

One would think that having income from biodiesel, from snack food, from personal hygiene products, soaps, oil and shortening, and having access to multimillion dollar World Bank loans would provide an adequate income for Miguel Facusse, now 80 years old. But there are Wikileaks reports available on the Internet at www.wikileaks.org of the private airport on Miguel Facusse’s land at Punta Farallones near the Garifuna town of Limon being used for drug airplanes like a downed Cessna full of drugs which the US Embassy knew about.

On the Wikileaks website 26,000 of the documents mention Honduras, and include official US reaction to the 2009 coup against Zelaya and a Memorandum of Understanding about a public-private partnership to develop the Honduran Mosquitia, where the US military’s Joint Task Force Bravo is active at the Caratesca Naval Base and the Department of Defense funded mapping exercise Centroamerica Indigena is taking place.  

Denouncements of the Garifunas of Limon that Facusse’s land at Punta Farrollones (he originally said it was going to be a resort) is being used by drug traffickers is part of the Ethnics Review at the University of Kansas for the CentroAmerica Indigena Project. In Tanya Keissen of Food First, in her  book “Power Grab” about the land conflict between Honduran peasants and Miguel Facusse and two other prominent Honduran businessmen  in the Lower Aguan Valley,  she also says the peasants speak in whispers about drug airplane landing strips among the extensive African palm plantations.

The issue of cattle ranchers and African palm growers cutting down rainforest in the Honduran Mosquitia, and thus having an excuse to be there, and putting clandestine drug airports on their lands has also been reported by US geographer Kendra McSweeney in articles in Science and NACLA on “narcoganadería” (drug related cattle ranching) and “narcodeforestation” (deforestation related to drugtraffickers) including in the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, where the Department of Defense funded mapping project under the direction of University of Kansas geographers “Centroamerica Indigena” (Indigenous Central America) is taking place.  

If you look at the maps of the Honduran government’s official website for Model Cities or officially now called ZEDE’s—Zonas Economicas de Desarrollo y Empleo (Economic Zones of Development and Employment) which is www.zede.gob.hn there are some interesting patterns about where there are Model Cities and where there are not Model Cities. For example the areas where powerful people in Honduran politics and the economy like Miguel Facusse, Jaime Rosenthal, Pepe Lobo’s brother Ramon (Moncho) Lobo, the drug kingpins of Los Cachiros whose leaders’ last names are Maradiaga,  are no longer included in the proposed ZEDE areas. This represents a change from the proposed Model City locations maps in La Tribuna in 2012.  There are proposed Model Cities ZEDE in Lenca, Garifuna, Bay Islander, Miskito (ZEDE Sico Paulaya which overlaps with the UNESCO World Heritage site Rio Platano Biosphere), and Ladino areas, including the referendum for a ZEDE in Suyapa in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa passed in the troubled 2013 election.

Particularly interesting is that the maps on the Honduran government’s ZEDE website for Sico-Paulaya show airports associated with drug trafficking like Miguel Facusse’s Punta Farallones airport, the airport at Sangrelaya, thought to belong to the Los Cachiros family who also invested in African palms and had a palm oil processing plant confiscated by the Honduran government in Bonito Oriental, and at least 3 clandestine airports in the Sico-Paulaya valley which were connected to the Trujillo to San Pedro highway by the “illegal highway” between the Garifuna town of Ciriboya, Iriona and Sico denounced in the 2004 video Lucha Garifuna made by Witness.org and CEGAH (Committee de Emergencia Garifuna de Honduras).  

An illegal airport at Las Marias on the Rio Platano in the nuclear zone of the Rio Platano Biosphere is also shown on the ZEDE Sico-Paulaya map. The Pech are sure that the employees who put it in said they worked for an African palm company, and they thought it was Miguel Facusse’s company, but were not sure.   The SINAPH law states it is illegal to put in works for infrastructure like airports and highways in protected areas.    The new digital maps being produced by the Centroamerica Indigena mapping project, acessable on the Internet through the link about the project on the American Geography Society’s  website also show in detail the area of the Mosquitia such as the location of clandestine airport at Rayaka reported Canadian Geographer Derek Parent.

To think of this another way, how will the drug planes that go through Honduras get maps to find the clandestine airports they are trying to use? Now they can look it up on the Internet, and the detailed digital maps that they can use are being done with US government DoD funding, which says it is combating the War on Drugs in Central America. The idea of having these detailed maps are almost surely not coming from the Hondurans. During Contra War the Honduran government prohibited the distribution of maps of Honduras as “state secrets” and good maps of Honduras were not made available to Honduran schools until a USAID program after the Contra War.

Honduras made the laws for the Model Cities or ZEDE during Pepe Lobo’s administration. His motto was that he would like Honduras to be the best place in the world for foreign investment.  A movie was made showing that  a lot of people are interested in investing in a country with a lot of airports. What kind of industries they are really interested in investing still remains a very interesting question. For example, the benefits of investing in the ZEDE was presented at an international conference on “Bitcoins”,  the Internet currency favored by drug dealers as it is not tied to a specific country.

Since I spent time in the public Honduran hospitals of San Isidro and Hospital Escuela in Tegucigalpa and Hospital Atlantida in La Ceiba last year, and I have heard of reports of everything from rats to operating when there is no water in the building and even when there was no roof of the Trujillo hospital, I find the proposals at conferences of Honduras as a destination for medical tourism (where people go and have surgery for cheaper than in the US) as bizarre. I personally would not wish on a dog having to go to a Honduran hospital for treatment. The medical personal of Tegucigalpa hospitals marched in the streets last year, not for higher or unpaid salaries, but because they said, “We can not be expected to treat people without the most basic equipment, like no sutures for stitches. Estamos trabajando con las meras uñas (We are working with nothing but our fingernails)”.

Honduran Stock Market as a Way to Attract Foreign Direct Investment in Honduras —Part III

Reflections on the Honduran Stock Market as a Way to Attract Foreign Direct Investment in Honduras —Part III

By Wendy Griffin February 2015

Two years ago I was visiting my sister and she had the books “Outliers”  and "Breakout Nations" by a Morgan Stanley Frontier Markets analyst Ruchir Sharma.  She said she got it because since I lived in Honduras, she wanted to know what a professional financial analyst thought of investing in Honduras.  The basic idea of the book is that developing countries from the point of view of potential financial investors are divided into three groups—Emerging Markets which includes large developed markets like Brazil, Frontier Markets which are for the investor who might want higher returns, but is also willing to take higher risks like Nigeria and Sri Lanka. Wikipedia has an interesting article on Frontier markets and which countries are considered Frontier Markets.

Third group of the other countries in the Third World is, alas, where Honduras falls. These countries are characterized by having a system of law that is not adequate for protecting the investment, or to be honest even the life of the investor.   While it should be discouraging to Honduran politicians trying to sell Honduras as the best place in the world to invest, what is really distressing is the comparison of Honduras as significantly below who he considers to be the best of the Frontier Market group, the Outliers, which are Sri Lanka and Nigeria.

He does admit that yes Sri Lanka had just been through a Civil War that lasted over 27 years, and that it was not possible to get at that time to the North as the road had been damaged by bombing. I had worked in Sri Lanka just two or three months before the civil war broke, so I know that previously the Sinhalese majority has voted to repatriate to India the Tamils who lived in Sri Lanka, most since the 1820’s when the English brought them to work in the tea plantations. Four fifths of the Tamils starved after being repatriated to India where they had no family, no one to give them a head start, according to  the Gandyam Society of Sri Lanka. Faced with the options of starving to death or fighting to stay on their lands in Sri Lanka, the Tamils organized the Tamil Tigers and fought for over 27 years until the Sinhalese decided to let them stay in the country. To anyone following the Garifunas’ troubles in Honduras, does this situation sound familiar?

This analyst also considered Nigeria an outlier, a stellar possibility among the Frontier Market countries. I happened to hear a lot about Nigeria after I read the book, as my ex-husband had a business deal there. Almost every week he would say things like We got the contract signed by the Minister of Oil, but the rebels killed him. They are trying to decide if the contract signed by a dead Minister of Oil is valid. The President of Nigeria was going to sign the contract, but Bokaharam rebels have him pinned in an airport in the North and he can not get out. The lawyer in New York wants 15% of the contract. This was all before the Bokaharam rebels took the 200 Nigerian (and one French missionary’s) daughter which finally made the news. This analyst admits if you want to visit your investments in Nigeria, you should hire an armed guard. A friend in Honduras was reading a novel, I think just called 417, the number of the Nigerian penal code for financial scams, they are so common they are the subject of trade novels.

These are the countries he considered to have much better climates for investment than Honduras. This does not bode well for Honduras’s dream of attracting foreign investment, but some people are going for the possibility of access to minerals or the sea and hoping they can make a killing, because they are going into a high risk area.  Personally I find Honduras much less difficult than apparantly Nigeria is.

For many investors, the days of actually moving to a foreign country like Samuel Zemurray of Cuyamel Fruit, the Vacarro Brother and D’Antonni cousins of Standard Fruit, or Minor Keith of United Fruit and building a company in that country are over. The type of investment the Morgan Stanley analyst was referring to however, was instead the international investor could invest in the local stock market.

This idea raised some interesting questions for me like, does Honduras even have a stock market? If they do, what companies are traded on the Honduran stock market? And if Honduras has a stock market, why do they have a stock market? The World Bank was able to convince Cameroon that to be modern, they should have a stock market, so they opened one, but then did not list any companies on it.

Most Americans, even those who invest in the US stock market, usually do not know what their money is going for. For example, why is the US Treasury dumping money in the US stock market if it is against the law to use the money invested in stocks on the stock market to build factories and other activities which would actually create jobs? Also, according to The Economist magazine in London, there was concern among Third World money managers that the money US Treasury was dumping in the US stock market was actually partly going into Frontier Market funds, and so it seems that this money is not even going to help create jobs in the US, but rather drive economies overseas, including some not very market oriented.

I happened to see The Economist article because the same Korean companies who were interested in the Model City in Southern Honduras based in the Amapala/San Lorenzo area  have also adquired land in Madagascar and investors were investing tens of millions of dollars in an offering of the Madagascar tuna industry which was odd as the fishing was still being done by African men in canoes.   

In the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s webinar on Land Grabs, the reason given for so much money being poured into Land Grabs in Latin America and in Africa was the same reason the Economist and the Morgan Stanley Frontier Market analyst gave that US investor money is being put in Frontier Markets was the interest rates were so low in the US, a decision by the US Federal Reserve Bank, that investors with money could not make a good return in the safe US, so they were trying riskier investments in Frontier Markets and beyond in hopes of better returns.

Honduras does have a stock market which is called La Bolsa de Valores Centroamericana (Literally the Central American Bag of Values). They have a helpful website with a history of the Honduran stockmarket, which they said was almost totally wiped out when Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras in 1998, but it reorganized and in one year of Pepe Lobo’s administration did a billion dollars of business in a year. There are only 10 companies listed on the Honduran stock exchange, all Honduran banks. Actually it does not give me a warm feeling knowing my bank, Banco Atlantida is listed on the Honduran stock exchange as I believe it leaves them open to people who are speculating, and to people suddenly taking most of their money out.  Some Honduran banks like Jaime Rosenthal’s Banco Continental also act as Caja de Bolsa de Valores, which are places Honduran stocks can be bought and sold.

Another interesting thing about the website of the Honduran stock exchange is that there is a note that section for foreign companies listed on the Honduran stock exchange is “under construction”.   Even though Honduras has more millionaires than any other Central American country, it is a safe thing to say that most Hondurans are not in the market for stocks, foreign companies or local. You do not become a millionaire in Honduras selling beans and corn.

When I was a university professor in Tegucigalpa, I thought it would be a good thing to teach my students in Business English about how stock markets work. They might work for an international company like the Tela Railroad (Chiquita in Honduras) or Standard Fruit (Dole in Honduras), or since foreign companies play such an important part in the Honduran economy and Honduran policies and politics, I thought it would be useful for them to understand. When I was a little girl, my family bought stocks for my brother and I and we would watch them to see how they went up or down in the newspaper.  I thought we could pretend that we had bought the stocks and try to understand why companies sold stocks and why people invested in stocks.

I will have to admit that class went worse than almost anything I ever tried in my teaching career, and it did not work. My university level students could not understand the basic concepts. I now realize part of the problem is that the words used in Spanish in Honduras to describe stocks and stock markets and stock brokers usually mean other things. For example, the word for stocks in Honduras is “acciones”, literally “actions”. The place where you buy stocks, the stock market is a “Bolsa de Valores”, literally a bag of values. In Honduras “valores” usually includes things like being honest or even a folk dance or eating machuca are considered cultural values.  To make it worse, a stock broker is called a “Corredor de la Balsa de Valores” (a runner of the Bag of Values). Quite frankly does it not sound like a stock broker is a man running down the street carrying your money in a bag?  

I have tried teaching small business skills to rural Hondurans. For example if you have a carpentry shop, and you sell a door for $60, that $60 is not the “ganancias” the profit. First you have to take out the $30 that you spent on the wood and the tools, and the $30 left over is the “ganancias”. Quite frankly, most people I told that to did not believe me, and most of the businesses they started failed because they spent all the money they brought in from a sale as “ganancia” and that meant when they had to buy more Coca Cola for their small store or more flour and eggs  to make bread to sell they did not have it.

The best people could do to understand the concept is that I have sell this much bread to buy more materials to make bread, and if I sell any of the breads over that, often only 10 of them, that is where I will have my profit to go and buy something for dinner. Almost no one who owns a small business in Trujillo knows how to take into account the electricity they use to keep ice cream or beers cold or gas to cook bread into their costs, and I would guess many of them are taking money from other sources of income like money from their relatives to pay for their business which they are actually working all day long, but at a loss, because the price they put on their goods do not cover their costs.

If most Hondurans can not figure out the profit and loss of something in front of them, like coconut bread or cheese and corn donuts (rosquillas), it is no wonder that they can not grasp really what is the stock market or why it has anything to do with for example, the price of fish, beef, milk or orange juice in Honduras or how much their children working in maquila industries are paid.    

However, a very wise reporter wrote that it was true that the US young people who were the main participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement did not know how the securities derivatives that were based on bundling US mortgages together and selling them to overseas government banks worked, apparently then again, neither did the salespeople who sold them, and that is how they had brought the world economic system to near collapse.

The Hondurans, like my Garifuna friends, know that now there is “crisis”, for some reason now work is harder to get both in Honduras and for their children in the US, that the jobs now available do not pay well, that the Honduran government has trouble getting the money to pay the teachers and other employees and so they have trouble paying the little stores, their land ladies, they don’t order new furniture from the carpenters. But where this crisis is coming from and what caused it, most Hondurans have no clue.  

The interconnectedness of what is happening on Wall Street in the US and what is happening  in US stores or US government policies both in the US and in Honduras, however, plays out in many ways that investors and consumers and US government officials are also not paying much attention to. Different US based movements, like thinking of where your food like bananas, coffee, shrimp and cantaloupe comes from and how is it produced, or where do your clothes come from and how they produced (Honduras is the 5^th largest clothing manufacturing country in the World), or who are the sailors who bring us all these things (Honduras has the second largest number of merchant marines in the World after Philippines) are trying to raise the consciousness of consumers.

Many consumers are also investors, such as through their pension funds or IRA’s, that they often do not even know what their savings are invested in or even in what country, much less what stock. US College students in particular have raised in recent years questions like, “Where are their university endowments invested?” and “Where are the T-shirts and sports clothes their universities sell coming from?”. US taxpayers also seem to be investors and it would seem that more of them should be asking, “What are our tax dollars being invested in?” and “What are the effects on the local people of investing there?”

An interesting book about one woman’s search to find out the story behind the internationally made clothes in her wardrobe is the 2013 book “Overdressed: The Shocking High cost of Cheap Fashion” by Elizabeth Cline. Food First offers a blog and a number of books about the issues related to food including Tanya Kerssen’s 2013 book “Power Grab” which includes not only information about the Honduran African palm industry in the Lower Aguan Valley, but also reflections on the growth of the maquila industry based in the San Pedro Sula area as a part of the agrarian crisis in the Honduran countryside.

The Food Information Action Network (FAIN) also has a website with good information, including about the situations of the Garifunas, the Lower Aguan, the Lencas, and responses of different social groups to the World Bank’s response to its own Omnibudsman report about its Honduran loans to Miguel Facusse’s DINANT Corporation, which is not on the Honduran stock exchange and  FICOHSA, which is on the Honduran stock exchange, and its involvement with loans to Miguel Facusse and other hot spots like the dam to be built in the Lenca area at Rio Blanco, Intibuca which COPINH  has been resisting for almost two years..