Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Honduras’ Garífuna people, with their rich culture and homeland spread across the Caribbean Coast of Central America recently asked an international court in Costa Rica to help them recover ancestral land, which they say has been lost to development. We present the dark and the light of this vibrant way, threatened by neoliberal development schemes, palm oil plantations, mega-tourism, and drug trafficking.
In the isolated region of La Mosquitia, Honduras, narco-traffickers act as shock troops in the assault on native Miskitu, Tawahka, and Pech homelands, ruthlessly dispossessing residents and rapaciously converting forest commons to private pasture primed for sale to multinational corporations.
Canadian “Porn King” Randy Jorgensen’s mega-tourism “development” projects are stirring conflict and destroying Afro-Caribbean Garífuna communities in Trujillo on the north coast of Honduras.
Historically a roadless fishing port with little development nor electricity, Puerto Lempira has transformed into a boom-town, host to drug traffickers, nearby military bases, and oil and gas development. In an effort to overcome this adversity, we participated in a blessing for the people and their land and culture in transition, directed by a local Miskitu sukya, or healer, and members of the community.
Puerto Lempira lies on the shore of the sweetwater Laguna Caratasca, just west of the Caribbean in La Moskitia, Honduras. The largest Miskitu town in the region, with an ailing lobster industry in an atmosphere of post-coup insecurity and governmental corruption, many turn to drug trafficking for income.
Military and judicial violence against the public and in post-coup Honduras leading up to the coming November elections are central components of the neoliberal economic takeover. In order to legitimate and secure the economic violence effected against Honduran citizens by multinational corporations, the judiciary criminalizes opposition to them while the military (along with other state security forces) goes after citizen-“criminals” with an iron fist.
On a recent trip to the Kruta River near Cape Gracias a Dios on the Honduran Caribbean and the Nicaraguan Border, life without roads and little electricity proceeds slowly, detached from the world at large. Yet, drug trafficking is changing the economy and the culture of the Miskitu People, and due to overfishing, local people can only turn to harvesting jellyfish for China as an honest source of revenue.