by LAUREN Elliot
Garífuna men fishing. PHOTO/Jennifer Jewell
“At this very moment we have advanced our struggle. We succeeded in breaking the gate of shame in Vallecito!” wrote Miriam Miranda yesterday, September 13, in the latest communiqué from the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), a human rights organization of the Afro-indigenous Garífuna people. Writing from Honduras, Miriam, the coordinator of OFRANEH, told about the first victory in the Garífuna’s most recent campaign to win back their legal and ancestral lands lost to mega-development projects.
Two weeks ago, OFRANEH and its allies set out to reclaim a significant portion of Vallecito, the site of the largest single landholding of the Garífuna people. This most recent action was part of a decades-old struggle to maintain their territory, agriculture, and livelihood on the northern coast of Honduras. They established a camp outside the locked gates that surround the disputed land and demanded the government resurvey the territory and put it back in Garífuna hands. They also demanded protection from wealthy developers’ intimidation tactics, including regular death threats and nightly visits from the developers’ hired guards.
Yesterday they succeeded in opening the gates and walking again on their land, the first victory of hopefully many more to come. “A judge [originally]… decided against our ancestral and legal rights. But after great pressure, patience and accompaniment by our ancestors, we were able to open the gate,” wrote Miriam.
According to a September 4 statement by OFRANEH, Vallecito “is in the heart of the coastal strip that the Honduran state plans to hand over to foreign companies under a new Law or Special Regions for Development (RED).” Wealthy tourism and agricultural developers, some with known ties to organized drug crime, have taken the land, developed it, and kept the Garífuna out. Often this means preventing the coastal Garífuna from reaching the ocean which they depend on for sustenance fishing.
The businessmen won’t give up the land lightly. Yesterday Miriam went on to write of the struggle ahead. “The process of land surveying has not even been concluded, yet the Garifuna people are already receiving death threats! The security guards of the [developer] have said that after tomorrow they will assassinate any Garifuna person who enters the town of Icotea [a non-Garífuna town near Vallecito].”
In an era when corporations and governments don’t blink one eye before taking ancestral and farming land from indigenous and small-farming communities, OFRANEH’s action is of global significance. The Garífuna’s relationship to the land is as old as their ancestors, and their philosophy in defending it demonstrates a clear alternative to modern-day commodification of land and the earth’s resources. As Carla García of OFRANEH said, “Our ancestors fought so we could inherit this land and the Garífuna culture. We are obligated to protect this legacy for our children to inherit. In this way our culture will live forever.”[i]
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