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Summary:
In more ways than one, global actors are involved and invested in the tourist industry in Honduras. The land issues surrounding the industry, particularly in Afro-indigenous Garifuna territory, overlap with state measures to control and manage land in the name of environmental protection and conservation.
We hear from Dr. Chris Loperena, an assistant professor of anthropology who acted as an expert witness in the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights in the case brought forward by the Garifuna community Triunfo de la Cruz against the Honduran state.
Transcript:
Karen Spring:
So hello all and saludos from Honduras. Yep, that’s right. I made it back. All of your finger crossing and good wishes definitely helped.
I flew in to Honduras two days ago on Wednesday. There was a lot of protocol once landing and getting through customs, I had to show that I got a COVID-19 test and the results back within 72 hours of landing in the country. That was kind of stressful to coordinate. But it ended up working out in the end. So I’m back home in Tegucigalpa. And now I have to move I have to get out of my house before the end of the month. So yeah, that’s not going to be very much fun.
To jump into today’s episode, in Episode 5, I mentioned I was going to talk about the one year anniversary of the release and the freedom of my partner Edwin Espinal and another political prisoner who was also jailed with him, Raul Alvarez, but I’m going to save that episode for the next one only because I found some great material that I want to incorporate into it. And with all the traveling and the five months of being away from Honduras, and now finding out I have to move, I need a little bit more time to prepare for it.
Where is the Money?
There’s been a lot that has been going on in Honduras as usual. Hundreds are painting the words “Where is the money” all over the place, in rural areas and urban cities. They’re referring to the billions of dollars allegedly allocated to the COVID-19 response that are certainly not reflected in the state of the healthcare system or the ability of the government to date to actually deal with the crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
And so where is the money and painting it everywhere on roads and huge letters on walls all around the country is sort of a way that hundreds are protesting and demanding to know what’s been going on with public funds.
Garifuna Disappearances: Still No News
It’s also been a month since 4 Garifuna leaders that were disappeared from the campo de la Cruz community, and there’s still no word on their whereabouts and next to nothing has been said about the alleged investigation that the Hundred government is doing. Well, except that the government keeps saying that they are investigating but no details are ever given.
Connecting Tourism in Honduras to Global Issues and Policies
For today’s episode, I’m really excited to share an interview with Dr. Chris Loperena. It’s super informative and jam packed with details connecting the politics of local tourism in Honduras to global issues and policies.
Chris also shares his personal experiences of first traveling to Honduras, and also connects with current issues in Honduras today to global anti-Blackness. So let me introduce Dr. Chris Loperena.
Now, Chris just has a way of explaining the global tourist industry in Honduras, land struggles, particularly Garifuna land issues, and also conservation and environmental protection policies in Honduras.
Introducing Dr. Chris Loperena
Chris is an assistant professor of anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, which for Canadians that aren’t as familiar that is the City University of New York. His research examines indigenous and black indigenous struggles and the socio-spatial politics of economic development in Honduras. Chris spent a significant amount of time in Honduras to do this research.
He has also published in many academic journals. He’s working on a book project called: A Fragmented Paradise: Blackness and the Limits of Progress in Honduras. He served as an expert witness in the Inter American Court of Human Rights specifically on the case presented by the Triunfo de la Cruz community against the state of Honduras.
Interview With Chris Loperena
Karen Spring:
So Chris, thank you so much for joining me.
Dr. Chris Loperena:
Thank you very much for the invitation.
Karen Spring:
So would you start by talking a little bit about how you started working and doing research in Honduras?
Traveling to Honduras
Dr. Chris Loperena:
Sure. The first time I went down to Honduras was just after I was wrapping up my undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago. I went down with a group of friends, fellow college students to do a technology training project or a computer training project with COPINH, the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras. COPINH was then under the leadership of Berta Cáceres.
And so, in 2003, I packed up went down to Honduras thought I would be there for about three months working with COPINH activists in computer technology, internet usage and communication tools that they could use to advance their struggle. And then I ended up staying for six months.
During that period, COPINH was organizing a very large forum on indigenous rights against hydroelectric dams, in defense of biodiversity and all these very important issues that were impacting not only Lenca indigenous communities in western Honduras Indigenous, but also the Afro-descendant communities throughout the Americas.
Part of the objective of our computer training seminar was actually to help them prepare for that very large forum. People were coming from all over the Americas to Honduras to learn about these issues and to dialogue about them. And it was during that forum that I first met, OFRANEH, the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras and Miriam Miranda.
I was really struck by the strength of their [COPINH and OFRANEH’s] relationship and bond. I was also really curious to learn more about what was happening on the Caribbean coast of Honduras in Garifuna communities. So then I ended up going down to the Caribbean coast.
The first Garifuna community I ever visited was Triunfo de la Cruz and that’s sort of how the work for my graduate studies began. I was there first as an activist. Then when I started graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. I was selected for this fellowship to go back down to Honduras to work directly with OFRANEH and the Caribbean and Central America Research Council in support of Garifuna territorial claims on the north coast of Honduras.
Honduras’s Lure: Reasons To Stay Longer
Karen Spring:
So you could say that hundreds kind of stuck to you and then kind of like it did with me.
Dr. Chris Loperena:
Absolutely.
Karen Spring: What is it about Honduras? Because there are other activists and researchers that visit that tell me, you know, I was only supposed to be here for a month or two or a couple weeks or two. But I changed my flight and I’m going to stay longer.
Dr. Chris Loperena:
I mean, it’s an there are many things about Honduras that, for me really penetrated.
One is just the kind of natural beauty of the country. It’s an extraordinary landscape, incredibly diverse, but there’s also the kind of cultural geographic diversity. Seeing the Garifuna communities for the first time and understanding that these were Afro-Caribbean communities and my family is is from the Caribbean, originally from Puerto Rico. So seeing that and understanding that that’s also very, very kind of formative component of Honduras and Honduran culture, even though it’s often marginalized in relation to the kind of the mestizo majority. It is a very important part of Honduran history.
And so I was inspired by the commitment of the activists that I was interacting with, inspired by their really, really expansive knowledge of the issues and their ability to communicate and teach me about what struggles they were involved in and how they were going about trying to attain their different political objectives. And I just learned so much and I got sucked right in.
Karen Spring:
So you mentioned that you went to Triunfo de la Cruz and in the last episode of this podcast, I discussed the disappearances of the four Garifuna men from that community on July 18. The community where the men are from, is demanding that these men be returned alive and unharmed.
I want to talk a little bit about like the context in which this happened. Many believe that the disappearances of these men are connected to the vocal activism of some of the disappeared men, including the President of the elected community council or the patronato, as it’s called in Spanish, Snider Centeno.
OFRANEH has been referring a lot to international court, the Inter American Court of Human Rights, which issued a sentence related to the different land struggles in Tela Bay, which is right where these leaders were disappeared. I wanted to ask you about this because you are very knowledgeable about this. You did your research on it and you have a special connection to it.
Inter-American Court Ruling & the Disappearances of the Garifuna Men
So could you tell us what the Inter-American court is? What is this 2015 Court ruling? And what might it have to do with these recent disappearances of the Garifuna in Triunfo de la Cruz?
Dr. Chris Loperena:
Yeah, that’s an excellent question. So the Inter-American Court of Human Rights is part of the Inter-American Human Rights system, which includes the court and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. It’s basically an international human rights body that falls under the umbrella of the Organization of American States.
So all kind of member states of the OAS can access this International legal body to adjudicate cases of international importance involving human rights violations. And so when you go to the Inter-American court, you actually first go to the Inter-American commission of human rights.
So the case that went to hearing in 2014, I believe the judgment was issued in 2015 with regard to the Garifuna community Triunfo de la Cruz versus the state of Honduras. But the commission was reviewing and researching the claims of the community for probably around a decade.
So when a community or an individual brings a case to the Commission, the commission reviews it and reviews what they consider to be the merits of the case and decides whether or not it should actually advance to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. And then once it advances to the court, a hearing is scheduled and then the judges decide on the case. And so that’s what took place in Triunfo de la Cruz.
Tourism as a State Development Priority in the late 1990s
Dr. Chris Loperena (Continuing from above):
What’s important to understand here is that the conflicts over land in Triunfo de la Cruz stem back several decades but really sort of intensified in around the 1990s with the advent of tourism as a really focused state development priority.
That actually coincided as well with the passage of Hurricane Mitch, which devastated Honduras in 1998. The hurricane really decimated the largely agriculture based economic activity that the country was dependent on for growth. And so in that vacuum that was left as a result of the hurricane, state authorities and international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, sort of came together and said: Hey, you have this beautiful country, you have hundreds of miles of pristine white sand coastline on the Caribbean coast. This could be a really phenomenal place to develop tourism.
And so it’s around that time that those plans to develop a robust kind of tourism industry in Honduras took off and that led to all sorts of complex over the lands within the Garifuna communities because again, the Garifuna communities lay claim to some of the most gorgeous and some of the most coveted stretches of coastal property in Honduras. And so their lands were all all of a sudden very much in kind of the purview of state developers of investors of international financial institutions.
The Court, Garifuna Land Rights and Conflict
That generated a number of conflicts between the communities and incoming investors, state authorities, international financial institutions, but also within the communities themselves. There were conflicts around land that were starting to emerge. And it’s important to understand that the land historically within the Garifuna communities has been held in common.
So the land is collectively owned essentially by the community. Individuals within that larger collective can lay stake to a particular parcel of land but according to their customary land practices, they can’t sell that land to non-Garifuna. And presumably because the Honduran state ratified International Convention 169 on indigenous and tribal rights, presumably the state is supposed to safeguard those rights, in particular the collective rights of the community. But instead, what we’ve seen happen, and this is one of the things that became really central in the court case is that local authorities in the municipality of Tela were actually sanctioning land sales within the collective title that belongs to the community.
And that, again, is because there was money to be made off of the development of these lands, and so the case really, it took many years to get to the court, but once it got to the court, there was quite a bit of evidence that demonstrated state complicity in the violation of Garifuna territorial rights. And eventually the decision, which came out in 2015, the ruling of the court was that indeed, the state had been complicit in the violation of these rights of Garifuna rights to property and that, therefore, the community was entitled to a number of reparations.
Violence Generated by Land Conflicts
Karen Spring:
This is really important because in Honduras, the impunity rate is so high. A lot of people think that the judicial system in Honduras is very weak. But it’s not, it’s just strong when it wants to be and very weak when it when it wants to be. And in cases of land rights, especially for indigenous and Afro indigenous communities, a lot of the times they depend on this court to sort of help them deal with some of these issues.
I mean, they can’t really bring their their cases to Honduran courts because they’re always ruled against or it’s simply not fair. There’s a high impunity rate. Nothing happens. There’s no investigations. The judges rule against the interests of the communities, even though it’s very clear, at least when you examine the evidence that could be it should be maybe different the ruling, and so they go to these courts, and you know, this Inter-American court and Commission first and then the court, like you mentioned.
And so they issued a ruling in 2015. And so one of the things that OFRANEH is saying is that the state has not basically listened to the ruling. They don’t want to comply with it.
Did you see any sort of repression or sort of any or maybe read about it or studied any sort of fall out for the Garifuna communities and different leaders that are very vocal about this issue? Is there a consequence for them when they speak out?
Dr. Chris Loperena:
Oh, absolutely. 100%. There are several things that I think would be important for your listeners to understand. One is, that conflicts over land within communities have been very violent. And in fact, there were several prominent land activists in Triunfo de la Cruz, that were killed over the course of this period of time from like the late 1990s until the moment at which the court decided on the case in 2015.
So many people have been targeted, many people have been assassinated. And in most cases, these people have been killed without proper judicial and juridical processes playing out around the investigation and holding of people accountable for those murders. So essentially, they’ve been carried out with impunity. And so it creates a real situation of land tenure insecurity for people within the community, right.
OFRANEH has said that there’s a campaign of terror against the Garifuna communities. And you can see that when you talk about the number of Garifuna that have been killed for trying to defend their rights to their lands and to their territory. And so, you know, it’s very important that we bring attention to the violent nature of these conflicts and the ways in which Garifuna activists have been targeted and affected by these, these attempts to kind of expropriate their lands for the purposes of development whether it be in tourism in the agribusiness industry.
Racism & Denying Garifuna Are Indigenous
Another thing that’s very important to understand during the the hearing, state lawyers for Honduras or even though the Garifuna are one of nine officially recognized – they use the language ethnic groups – the state authorities in the hearing argued that the Garifuna not actually indigenous. That they weren’t a pueblo originario, that they weren’t indigenous to Honduras and therefore tried to negate the legitimacy of their claims to national territory.
And this so even though Garifuna were in Honduras before Honduras gained full independence from its colonial, from Spain. That was before it became a modern nation – Garifuna were on those lands on the Caribbean coast of Honduras. And so you know the argument that Garifuna are not indigenous or that they are not native to Honduras is that they are this foreign group of greedy land usurpers is historically erroneous and there’s no basis, really, for that type of argument to be formulated. But that is indeed, the argument that the Honduran state lawyer attempted to make, which again speaks to the ways in which the kind of presence of black peoples in Honduras is repeatedly negated and relegated to space outside the sovereign boundaries of the Honduran state.
Karen Spring:
Yeah, that’s very important because it continues today. I mean, the state continues that claim. And I’m sure it’s one of the reasons why they won’t comply with the 2015 ruling of the court.
International Actors Team Up with the Honduran Tourist Industry
Chris, you mentioned that the Inter-American Development Bank, which I don’t think you mentioned, but it’s kind of the same as the IMF and the World Bank. A lot of people want the names of the companies, the tourist companies and names of those who are funding these tourist projects that are stealing Garifuna land. It’s often hard to know the names of these companies and it takes some time to investigate, if it’s not really made clear.
People want to know how that funding works. These are really complex issues to explain in such short periods of time, but can you talk about how these foreign economic interests teamed up with specific groups in Honduras to push these types of tourist projects?
I see it with Canadian companies in Trujillo Bay, which is another Bay along the northern coast, beautiful Bay as well, just like Tela Bay, but and I’m not as familiar with the Tela Bay tourist developments. I know there are processes in which these things unfold on the ground in which a process of land transfer from land that’s inside the community titles is passed into the name of a private tourist developer. Can you talk a little bit about this? How do these processes work both with foreign interest and national interest? And then just how [these land transfers] happen?
Dr. Chris Loperena:
Yeah, I think I think I really appreciate this question, Karen, because what you’re speaking to is is actually something that I think is somewhat intentional on the part of investors in the state. And that is an attempt to make these sorts of deals actually very, very murky and difficult to comprehend.
Public Private Partnerships
There’s a law for public private partnership, PPP as it’s known. And what that allows for is for public entities within the state, for instance, like the Honduran Institute for Tourism to come together in partnership with private entities. And here I’m referring to developers, many times they’re national developers, you know, very prominent Honduran businessmen. But a lot of those individuals are getting support and investment from international actors and in some cases, for instance, in the case of the now deceased Miguel Facusse when he was alive. He was the largest land holder or land owner in all of Honduras. And he was a very, very prominent individual in the establishment of African palm plantations along the north coast. And he’s he received funding and support, for instance, from international financial institutions like the World Bank for some of his investments in those projects.
So it’s a very complicated constellation of actors that sort of merges the public and the private in these ways that make it very difficult to understand who’s who and what’s what. And so, in the case of Tela Bay, you can see that really clearly.
Emblematic Tourist Project in Honduras: Indura Beach and Golf Resort
I should say, the kind of emblematic tourism project in Honduras is the Indura Beach and Golf Resort.
Indura used to be known as the La Micos project. It’s first was conceived actually in the 1970s under the name Torna Sal, and it’s gone through all kinds of iterations.
The Indura project is located in between the Garifuna communities of Miami and Tornabé and in the buffer zone of the Jeanette Kawas National Park. It was finally inaugurated in 2014.
So you see it was initially conceptualized in 1970s and actually finally opens in 2014. It’s pitched as an eco-resort. It’s quite beautiful. It’s on a strip of land, kind of between the ocean and this extraordinary natural reserve. But it also ironically, as an eco resort, it has an 18 hole golf course has 16 junior suites, a convention center, a fitness center, a spa, multiple restaurants. It’s quite a robust development and there are plans to build it out further along the western edge of the resort which abuts of course with the Garifuna area of Barra Vieja.
So it’s a very controversial project and the funding for this project also came about through this public private partnership between the Honduran Institute of tourism and what is known as the Tela Bay Touristic Development Society.
Tourism and Wealthy Honduran Business Investors
Now, it’s important to recognize here that Camilo Atala, who is one of the most prominent businessmen in all of Honduras is actually very closely associated with the Honduran Tourism Investment Fund. I believe at one point he was the President. And he also sits on the board for the Indura Resort. He was also president or is President of the Grupo Financiero FICOHSA which is one of the largest financial institutions of all of Central America.
So you can see very clearly the the kind of, again, the constellation of actors and the network of capital between that kind of threads together those different actors at different levels. between state authorities, international investors are actors and these very elite hundred business families that are sometimes you know, they’re sometimes referred to as the Honduran oligarchy because of their power and influence within the country.
Tourism Inside Natural Reserves and Protected Areas
Karen Spring:
So and you mentioned something that is actually right leads into my next question because it’s coming up constantly now in Honduras and different conflicts around the country.
For example, there’s a conflict with mining inside a natural reserve in Colon, the department of Colon. There are eight people that are imprisoned because they’re trying to stop the mine – that’s the Guapinol mining conflict.
As well as in Tegucigalpa. They’re trying to build like a really wealthy gated community inside the La Tigra National Park, which is a protected area. Several residents and communities and Tegucigalpa in the capital city are also trying to stop the construction of that residential gated community in this park and so on.
You talk about this a lot in the academic articles that you’ve written. And it’s basically refers to the impact of the creation of these natural reserves are these parks or these state managed protected areas in Honduras.
And in my experience, and this is ongoing, like I said, these protected areas or these national parks are often not protected, when it’s not in the interest of the hundred government to do so. Or in the interests of or private investment.
So it’s interesting too, because when people hear protected area, or natural reserve or national park or eco tourism, they automatically think that these are wonderful and important, state-led initiatives, who would be against protecting the environment and that’s sort of what these terms project when you hear them. So I know you’ve done a lot of research and analysis on this.
Can you talk about the controversies behind the creation of these natural reserves are protected areas in Honduras and what they have meant – what the creation of these parks have meant for Afro indigenous or indigenous populations or non indigenous populations in Honduras.
Dr. Chris Loperena:
Thank you. Yes, I’m happy to talk to that. RCW speak to that. It’s actually I was, I was struck by precisely those same sort of contradictions, when I first learned about the controversies surrounding the establishment of protected areas in Honduras. And it’s important to note that like many of these protected areas are located in areas that are actually claimed by indigenous and black Hondurans as their ancestral territories.
Protection? Or Land Control?
So what happens often is that the the creation of a protected area kind of overlays a management regime for the natural resources in that area. This is on top of the territorial claims and the communities that pre-existed the creation of those protected areas. And so of course that creates a situation in which there’s conflict.
All of a sudden in the case of Tela Bay, which is very I know best, you have, for instance, the Punto Izopo National Park, which is on the eastern end of Triunfo de la Cruz.
Okay, so let me just break this down a little bit. One of the reasons why Triunfo de la Cruz is such a desirable place for tourism investors and for the kind of tourism development agenda of state officials is because of its proximity to these natural areas.
Tela Bay’s Natural Beauty
It’s on a strip of uninterrupted white sand coastline and it’s meshed between Cerro Triunfo de la Cruz – which is a large rocky dramatic hill on the western side and the Punto Izopo National Park on the eastern side. And it’s in very close proximity to the Lancetilla Botanical Garden in Tela, which is one of the largest in Latin America, the Cuero y Salado Wildlife Reserve, and the Jeanette Kawas National Park, which I already mentioned.
So you have all of these very prominent and important areas of potential nature tourism. All are located within a very short distance of a really beautiful Garifuna community, which also has this unique culture – the Garifuna language, Garifuna music, dance and the food.
So there was a very concerted effort on the part of developers, private and public, that said, hey, there’s a real opportunity here to develop this for the purposes of tourism. And so the parks play a really fundamental role in that larger tourism development agenda for the region of Tela.
Parks As An Attempt to Protect Resources and Promote Tourism
But the parks themselves are presented as again, as as an attempt to kind of preserve the natural environment to protect the resources within that area. But they work together, they kind of interlock or articulate with very closely, development objectives that are at their roots, extractivism nature.
Protective Areas and Extractivism
And so I want to get into that a little bit more because the protected area does not mean that you can engage in extractive economic activities within the area that is designated as protected.
There’s the nucleolus zone of the park of a protected area. And in that area, no sort of economic activities related to the extraction of the resources within the park are permitted.
Zones that move out from the nucleus. area of the park in which different levels and intensities of extractive economic activities are permitted. So you can have something like the Indura Beach and Golf Resort constructed on lands that are protected, but that are considered to be the buffer zone of a protected area. Which allows again for certain forms of economic development and extractive economic activity to take place.
Creation of Protected Areas And Restricting Rights of Local Populations
And so you have that kind of complexity in how the resources are protected and managed in different kind of scales of intensity within the area that’s designated as protected. And then you also have the ways in which the rights of the people that have lived in those areas for hundreds of years are being restricted suddenly, because the area has been declared protected.
So, how do you explain for instance, that you can build an 18-hole golf course on top of lands that are presumably protected. But you’re telling Garifuna fishermen who have fished in those lands.
And I should be more clear – who have fished, for instance, in the waters off the coast of the Jeanette Kawas National Park, or in the Los Micos Bay for hundreds of years, all of a sudden, you’re telling them “No, you can’t engage in those activities, because it’s a damage to the natural environment or because it’s a threat to the protection of the resources within that protected area”.
So you have all these really significant contradictions in kind of policy around protected areas that are precisely designed to buttress the kind of economic development objectives of state development authorities and to diminish the rights and sovereignty of black and indigenous people over the resources within their territories.
Restricting Historical Indigenous Practices Inside Protected Areas
We saw that really, really clearly in one of my articles. I wrote about the case of a fisherman in Triunfo de La Cruz, who was killed while fishing in the Cuero and Salado Wildlife Reserve. So again, this is to the west of Triunfo de la Cruz. It’s an area where the Garifuna have historically been present, and have always used for their own kind of nature reserve, and for fishing and other types of resource extraction, but small scale resource extraction for subsistence purposes mostly.
And so this fisherman was on a fishing expedition with several other Garifuna men. They were intercepted by a naval boat that was commissioned as to protect the resources within the Cuero y Salado Reserve. When they came upon the guy when the naval boat came upon the fisherman, they said: “Hey, what are you doing down here, you can’t be fishing with the trammel net, because they were using a trammel net that’s prohibited within the nuclear zone of the park.
And then they shot at the boat. This was in the middle of the night, they shot at the boat, they shot at the engine of the boat, one of the passengers was hit, and he eventually died.
And so you can see, I mean, it’s really important to understand there’s a popular perception that the protected areas are good for the environment that you’re protecting the natural resources. And Honduras is a place with extraordinary natural resources. But the way that those protected areas are being managed or mismanaged, is very detrimental to many of the communities that have depended historically on those lands and those resources for their subsistence.
And I think that the case of the fisherman that was killed also kind of demystifies the role of state in these kind of configurations of public private partnership as it pertains to the development objectives that I’ve been mentioning. It’s public resources such as the security forces of the state public resources, such as the courts of the state that are used to protect the rights and assets of predominantly private investors.
Karen Spring:
So, Chris, as you’re talking, I’m like thinking a lot about how I hear about these exact same issues globally. You know, in Central America, you hear about this stuff happening in the United States and the controversies of rules that are laws that the state uses and then tries to police, indigenous communities in the United States or in Canada, globally, really.
And you mentioned before that in the 90s in Honduras, you know, a lot of the international financial institutions came along and said, Wow, you have this beautiful coast, why don’t you develop that for tourism. I don’t know if you’ve gone this far to research it a little bit more or no, just, you know, can you draw some of the links with these policies of preserving land, but very selectively in Honduras more with like global interests and global actors that are not just implementing and encouraging the Honduran state to implement these kinds of things, but you know, internationally or globally?
Global Context of Tourist Initiatives
Dr. Chris Loperena:
Yeah, I mean, again, so for instance, you can actually understand what’s happening in Honduras without taking into account the kind of global context in which these initiatives are unfolding. So for instance, the Honduran tourism agenda was really born from a collaboration between the hundred and state and the World Bank. So there was this very important project that was funded by the World Bank that was called the National Sustainable Tourism Program, I believe was the name of this initiative.
Global Actors Formulated Honduras’s Tourism Policy
And it was a very large study to determine whether sustainable tourism was viable in Honduras, right. But again, sustainable in the kind of unsustainable ways that we’ve been talking about in our conversation.
And so it was global actors from the outset that were involved in helping to formulate these plans and seeing the touristic potential and saying, okay, you need to have designated protected areas, you need to have areas that are protected for the kind of consumptive practices of incoming tourists, you know, so they can enjoy the nature, the beach, etc. But you also have to do so in a way that allows for other types of economic growth and activities to flourish. And so that’s something that we see happening in Honduras, but it’s a pattern that is happening throughout the Americas
In other parts of the world, in other parts of the developing world, these are practices that are being conceptualized by development authorities within large multilateral development institutions, and in dialogue with State Development officers and authorities. And so you have, again, that kind of nexus of actors coming together to put these plans into place and to implement them. And not just in Honduras, but in many other parts of the world.
And so these are things that scholars have been writing about for some time, actually. And it’s an old practice and scholars have written about the ways in which the establishment of these protected zones actually has been really detrimental to the rights of the people that live in those areas and that subsisted on those resources prior to the establishment that protected areas.
You can see that in many cases like Yellowstone National Park in the United States, for instance, you know, many, many national parks and tell some of those sort of same dynamics. So yeah, it’s not specific to Honduras. And we can make sense of what’s happening in the case of Honduras unless we understand the kind of networks of individuals and institutions operating at the global and national level that are coming together to conceive of these projects.
Karen Spring:
Now that you’re talking about, you know, these global connections, these global actors, I wanted to ask you a final question.
You’re based in New York and you’ve spent a lot of time in Honduras. But I wanted to ask you, if you see any parallels about what is happening in Honduras, with the Garifuna, and what’s going on with Black Lives Matter, protests and the state response or discussions in the United States?
Global Racism: Connecting Protests in the US and Garifuna Displacement
Dr. Chris Loperena:
Yeah, I really appreciate this question, Karen. Because I think it’s very important actually, to understand the kind of global dimensions of anti blackness that we see unfolding, both in the case of Honduras and in the case of the United States and in other parts of the world.
I’ve been really troubled by what’s been happening here in the United States, the violence against black communities in this country has a very long and painful history. And it keeps coming to light and these really extraordinary acts of, of state violence against individuals such as George Floyd. And it’s opening up conversations around systemic racism, which for me, haven’t really been that prevalently discussed in the media before, but now we’re having more conversations about systemic racism and sort of the historical origins of anti blackness in this country.
Where does it come from? Why is it that you know, disproportionately black communities are faced with this type of targeted state violence? Why is it that disproportionately black communities have higher levels of poverty? Why is it disproportionately that black communities have higher levels of diabetes and other systemic health problems?
And so those conversations are starting to come to light now and we’re really having to grapple with our history, which is a very kind of grotty history.
And I think it’s important to understand that the types of anti black racism that exists in in the United States are again, they’re not confined to this country. We have this type of anti black racism, affecting very, very significantly black communities in Latin America as well, including in Honduras.
Anti blackness is alive and well in Honduras, and it is having very significant impacts on the Garifuna communities and manifests in a variety of ways. Again it manifests in this kind of insistence on the part of the mestizo state – mestizos being the dominant racial group in Honduras – that black people are not native to Honduras.
That blackness is this thing that belongs somewhere else but not in Honduras, despite the fact that Garifuna have been in Honduras for over 200 years. It manifests in legal politics that seek the expulsion of Garifuna from the nation. It manifests in development policies that seek to expropriate the resources, the lands, the natural kind of beauty that Garifuna lay claim to within their territory for the purposes of development, and that leads to the displacement of Garifuna from their communities.
So for instance, that’s been one of the big things for get even on that have been seeking asylum here in the United States and they’ve been fleeing their communities. Not only are they confronting this campaign of terror, but they’re being pushed off of their lands, their access to lands that are fundamental for their ability to continue subsisting and living on the coasts are being restricted greatly by these conflicts and by these developments. And so in many cases, there’s a push for them to leave those communities. They’re being displaced from their communities. And in some cases, they’re coming to the United States seeking asylum. And so we have to understand, I think, the global nature of anti blackness and how it’s playing out in these different contexts, but also the connections between them.
Karen Spring:
Thanks so much, Chris. That’s it’s really interesting because where you’re located is actually in New York and that’s where one of the largest Garifuna communities outside of Central America is located. A lot of Garifuna, when they go to the US, they experience the racism and the anti blackness like you mentioned, in a different way, but it’s not not in a different way than other like black folks in the US but in a different way because they identify as Garifuna as well. And then they come back to Honduras when they’re deported or they want to go back to their families and they are experiencing this expulsion from their territory, so they don’t even have lands to go back to. And a way to sort of feed their families and stay in the country when they’re being, you know, expelled from the United States and then expelled from their own lands in Honduras.
So I think I’ll wrap up the interview with you. This has been so much great information, and it really explains like so many of the root causes and very specific contextual issues in order for people to understand these recent disappearances of these four Garifuna guys from Triunfo de la Cruz. Is there anything that I missed asking you or something that you wanted to add, in case you missed anything?
Terror and Violence in Garifuna Communities
Dr. Chris Loperena:
I think, you know, again, I just want to reiterate what Miriam Miranda stated recently that the communities are facing a campaign of terror and of extermination. And it is true that several prominent community leaders affiliated with OFRANEH have been killed in recent months.
And it builds on this very worrisome legacy of violence against land and environmental activists in Honduras. I think these are serious, serious patterns that merit attention and action on the part of the authorities there, but also the international community. It’s a type of violence and harm that affects not only the individuals that have been targeted, but the entire community and it jeopardizes their presence, their continued presence in Honduras. So I’ll end with my comments there.
Karen Spring:
Thank you so much for joining me today. Your knowledge about Honduras and the Garifuna struggles across the coast but in Tela Bay specifically, is so important and so relevant right now. I’m really looking forward to reading your book once it’s out and published, but I just want to thank you so much for joining me.