On July 18, four Afro-Caribbean Garifuna community leaders were abducted from the coastal fishing village of El Triunfo de la Cruz on the northern coast of Honduras. More than three weeks later, there is still no sign of them.
“We have had no concrete response from authorities,” Cesar Benedit, a community leader and member of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) in Triunfo de la Cruz, tells The Progressive. “We do not know if they are alive or dead.”
The ongoing attacks against the Garifuna communities have spurred an exodus of people toward the United States, especially as part of the caravans of asylum seekers and migrants in the past few years.
According to Benedit, the list of those abducted includes four OFRANEH members: Alberth Snider Centeno Tomás, Suami Aparicio Mejía García, Gerardo Mizael Rochez Cálix, and Joel Martínez Álvarez, along with another man, Junior Rafael Juárez Mejía. He says they were put into trucks by armed men in police uniforms alongside investigators from the Police Investigations Directorate.
Centeno Tomás was the community’s youngest-ever president.
The men were taken early in the morning during a curfew meant to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. At the time, only the police and military were allowed on the streets. Their disappearance has led to protests in the community demanding their safe return.
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández has attempted to smear the OFRANEH leaders by claiming that they were involved in drug trafficking.
The Garifuna are the descendants of former African slaves and the indigenous Arawak populations who were exiled from British St. Vincent Island in 1797. Today, Garifuna communities span the Atlantic coast from Belize to Nicaragua. In Honduras, the communities have maintained collective titles for the communal lands where they reside.
But, amid pressure from national elites and foreign investors to build resorts and other projects along the pristine beaches, the Garifuna’s land has been usurped. The disappearance of the community leaders in Triunfo de la Cruz comes as the Garifuna communities have mobilized to defend their land and culture.
Juan Orlando Hernández’s government has responded to this mobilization with a brutal campaign of violence, disappearances, and the criminalization of community leaders. This is nothing new: Since 2015, at least twenty-five Garifunas were killed, nineteen of those in 2019 alone.
“We see that it is a systemic dispossession,” Benedit says.
“When they begin to murder the leaders, who else will there be to defend, who will fill their space in the community? It is terror. They are trying to leave the Garifuna community without someone to represent the community against the State.”
The Garifuna communities have been at the forefront of the defense of territory and land in Honduras. The communities along the pristine beaches of the Atlantic coast have increasingly faced the dispossession of their communal lands by industry and private businesses.
“It has been a constant struggle for the Garifuna communities for their territory,” Doctor Luther Castillo, a Cuban-trained Garifuna doctor who runs a Garifuna solidarity hospital in Ciriboya, tells The Progressive. “The site [of our territory] is attractive for large scale tourism and plantations for African oil palm, even though our communities have ancestral documentation for the land. They have clearly been invaded.”
The Garifuna communities hold the communal titles for their lands. But the expansion of tourism projects and monoculture has left them without places to sow seeds and to fish.
“African Palm oil is ruining our land,” Benedit says. “They are working right where we sow rice, yucca, the food that we use in the community. All that land is now full of oil palm.”
He adds, “A Garifuna without land cannot live.”
The dispossession of land has accelerated since the 2009 coup-d’etat against the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, which ushered in a series of far-right administrations that have promoted investment across the country. This has brought about the theft of Indigenous lands.
“For them they see the beaches as riches, and us as poor people, we can’t be living in these beautiful places,” Benedit says. “They want these beautiful places to have development for themselves, not for Honduras, for us. They want to remove us, the Garifuna, for their development, he continues. “It is racist.”
Faced with the expropriation of their land for tourism projects and the dispossession of land, the community of Triunfo de la Cruz challenged the theft in the Inter-American Court on Human Rights.
In October 2015, the court ruled that Honduras had violated the collective right to property of the community and the State failed to consult the Garifuna people prior to the construction of the projects in accordance with Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization, which requires States to consult Indigenous peoples prior to projects that affect their territories. The court ruled that the land must be returned to the Garifuna community and to investigate the deaths of Garifuna leaders in the region.
Yet according to Benedit and Castillo the administration of Juan Orlando Hernández has refused to comply with the ruling. Centeno Tomás as president of the community was among those demanding that the national government comply with the court’s ruling.
Both Castillo and Benedit attribute the disappearances and the increase in violence against the Garifuna communities to an earlier 2015 Inter-American Court of Human Rights decision that recognized the Garifuna’s right to their lands. Since that decision, a campaign of violence and intimidation against the Garifuna Communities has ensued. This violence has increased in recent years.
“The State in place of complying with the ruling have tried to subordinate community leaders, but the leaders refused to be subordinated. So the State began a campaign to discredit the leaders, and later of persecution and criminalization,” Castillo says.
At least five other leaders from Garifuna communities have been murdered since 2019. All the cases have remained unprosecuted. The disappearance comes weeks after another Garifuna leader, Antonio Bernárdez, was killed in the community of Punta Piedra, which has also faced a struggle for their lands.
“The state is responsible for everything that has happened there,” Castillo says. “If the state had complied with the court’s decision we wouldn’t have to have a committee for the defense of territory. By not complying with the decision, the state is sending a message to those who have invaded Garifuna lands that they can continue with the blessing of the state.”
On July 30, fourteen members of the U.S. Congress wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo regarding the disappearances of Garifuna leaders, which they said “reflects the continued determination of the country’s politically powerful to prevent progress in the fight for equal justice in Honduras.”
The House members urged Pompeo to “speak up on human rights and anti-corruption efforts in Honduras.” But the Trump Administration has remained silent on the human rights violations and corruption in Honduras, despite Hernández’s fraudulent and illegal re-election in November 2017 and his brother Tony Hernández’s conviction in New York of conspiracy to traffic cocaine to the United States.
The ongoing attacks against the Garifuna communities have spurred an exodus of people toward the United States, especially as part of the caravans of asylum seekers and migrants in the past few years.
“We hope the United States sees the situation in [Honduras], but not just the disappearance of our leaders,” Benedit says. “Everyone wants to migrate to the United States, fleeing the unemployment, insecurity, the lack of health, and the dictatorship that Juan Orlando Hernández is forming. How can Trump close his eyes to a government that is so corrupt?”