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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
VILLAGEApril/May
T
HE people here speak of a tree, a
buhuco, that will make any man who
touches it lose his way. The day we
came to Punta Sal we took a ride on a boat
with the people of the village we were stay-
ing in, going out to look for a man lost in the
forest there. The whole community coming
out to find one of their own, because there is
no one else to find him. There are no roads
out to the point, only boats or a trail that
winds through the forest and along an end-
less, empty beach for four hours to take you
into the heart of the park.
The government does not want the park.
This land was for development. These end-
less unmarked beaches were for tourists.
Jeannette Kawas, who made this a national
park in , was shot dead through her
kitchen window, and the park is now named
after her. The man who guards the park
walked back with us later that day, bare-
foot through the surf at the water’s edge.
He had known her. She had taught classes
on environmental awareness in his colegio
when he was growing up.
She was born in in the Honduran
coast city of Tela. Alongside other locals
and US Peace Corps volunteer Carl Pierce,
she helped to found the first environ-
mental organisation in Honduras in the
early s – La Asociación Hondureña de
Ecología, eventually becoming Prolansate,
which runs and maintains this and several
other national parks and nature reserves
in the area, against the opposition of the
government and major business interests
(prolansate.org). Her vocal opposition to
illegal deforestation, the contamination of
the lagoons and the development of beach
resorts in the area earned her powerful ene-
mies, however. Her success in having the
square kilometers around
Punta Sal named and recognised
as a National Park in threat-
ened government-supported
plans for major development in
the area, development that would
have threatened both the biodi-
versity of flora and fauna in this
Ramsar Convention Wetland of
International Importance and
the traditional ways of life of
Garífuna fishing communities.
“Le mató un animal”, said one
half-mad man with a half-mad
beard, speaking of the man lost
in the forest. Maybe an animal
ate him, the lost man. There are
jaguars in the forest and they say that one of
them has been caught on the hidden camera
traps in the forest, huger than any big cat
anyone here has seen before.
So we came into the little cove with its
clear blue waters, empty of anyone – anyone
but us and the search party – above which
British pirates had long ago built
a tower to watch for Spanish gal-
leons bringing back to Europe
the gold and wealth of South
America. And the man there told
us of the tree. The buhuco. The
lost man had known the forest
well, was here cutting wood. But
the forest was full of these little
trees and if you touch them you
will lose the way, a way you might
have walked a thousand times
before, a way you walk every day.
You will walk around and around
and not find the way, though it be
beneath your feet. If you touch
the tree you must tell it that you
see it – ‘ya te ví’ – or you will be lost and
will stay lost until you are found. The man
who told us this had been in the mountains
once, far from here, with five others, and all
INTERNATIONAL HONDURAS
Pillaging
paradise
Indigenous Hondurans fight
for their lands and their lives.
By Tomás Ó Loinsigh
Jeannette
Kawas, who
made this a
national park in
1988, was shot
dead through
her kitchen
window
“
April/May VILLAGE
had brushed by such a tree. They had wan-
dered in the mountains for five days until
they found a river. They built a raft and fol-
lowed the river down out of the forest.
But they found the lost man. They found
him quickly and came back yelling, loud and
triumphant. He had been lost for two days
and was found in under an hour, wander-
ing lost near the place where he cut wood
every day.
“Can we walk to the point?” we asked.
“No”, he said, “You’ll get lost. You don’t
know the way. There are trees up there, a
buhuco, if you touch it you will lose your
way”.
That night we walked back to the little
Garífuna town of Miami. The Garífuna are a
black-skinned people, descendants of indig-
enous Carib islanders and black African
slaves, who live along Honduras’ Caribbean
coast. They speak their own tongue, slipping
in and out of it and Spanish. It is a hybrid
tongue, descended from an ancient South
American Arawak language, mixed up with
words from Carib, English, Spanish and
French. Their language, and their music,
the punta, are considered Masterpieces of
Humanity’s Oral and Intangible Heritage by
the UN. But their way of life is threatened.
Miami is one of the last traditional Garífuna
villages of palm-leaf thatched huts, but no
more than thirty people now live there, and
many of them are not Garífuna at all, but
Hispanic ladino immigrants newly come to
the town. The Garífuna fish but the fish are
dying. There is no school in Miami because
there aren’t enough children any more and
the children that there are go far away to
school. There are no children in the town.
They only come home at the weekends, and
when they come it is not their home.
This is no isolated fact. Struggles between
Garífuna communities and major busi-
ness interests, who plan to turn much
of Honduras’ Caribbean coastline into
expensive resorts, have led to protracted
conflicts that cut to the core of Honduran
society. These beaches, owned collectively
by Garífuna fishing communities, are seen
by Honduras’ right-wing, US-backed gov-
ernment as wasted, as the ideal site for
the development of a multi-billion dollar
tourist industry to which the people who
once owned these lands would have no
access. With their old lands lost, and with
them their traditional fishing way of life,
many Garífuna would be forced to move to
Honduras’ cities, to San Pedro Sula, the most
dangerous city in the world, or Tegucigalpa,
the capital, to look for work in
the sweatshop maquíla factories
that ring them. The government-
sponsored encroachment of
tourist resorts and development
onto traditional Garífuna land
has sparked land disputes rem-
iniscent of other long-running
struggles between neo-liberal
ideas of progress and traditional,
often impoverished, communi-
ties, such as the struggle for land
rights being waged against major
banana plantation owners by the
campesino peasants of the Río
Aguan valley.
In July of last year, Tomás
García, the indigenous Lencan
activist and community leader
at the forefront of the strug-
gle against the controversial
Agua Zarca dam by a Chinese
company, was murdered at the hands of
the Honduran military. Local indigenous
people claim the dam will cause major dam-
age to the environment of the Río Platano
biosphere, and through that to their own
traditional livelihoods. In the Garífuna city
of Trujillo, on the edge of the Moskitia jun-
gle, a retired Canadian porn king, Randy
Jorgensen, is building beachside retirement
homes for wealthy North Americans on land
that Garífuna villagers see as their commu-
nal and ancestral lands, land
that they claim was sold under
fraudulent titles.
The case of Jeannette Kawas’
murder was taken by Centre for
Justice and International Law
to the Inter-American Court
on Human Rights in ,
and in the Court con-
demned the Honduran State
for its role in the crime, con-
cluding that the murder was “facilitated by
the intervention of persons that acted under
the direction of state agents”. Yet nobody
has ever yet been brought to justice for their
part in the crime and Honduran military
and state forces are still suspects in her
murder. •
Information about
the Garífuna and their
struggle for cultural
and territorial rights
and autonomy can be
found on the website of
OFRANEH at http://www.
ofraneh.org/ofraneh/
index.html.
Jeanette Kawa
National Park
Beaches, owned
collectively
by Garífuna
fishing
communities,
are seen by
Honduras’
right-wing,
US-backed
government as
the ideal site
for the tourist
industry
“
