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Garifuna land rights abuses persist in Honduras, despite court ruling

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Since the early 17th century, the Garifuna Afro-Indigenous peoples of Honduras have lived on the country’s northern Caribbean coast, where they collectively own large tracts of rich coastal land and sustain their livelihoods on subsistence agriculture and small-scale fishing. But ever since palm oil plantations, tourist developments and other harmful practices have expanded across their ancestral lands and their way of life and territory have been under threat. Garifuna human rights activist Rony Leonidas Castillo Güity was 8 years old when he first noticed changes in his community. It was the early ‘90s and the government had just built a highway to improve access to his community in Iriona, a municipality in the Honduran department of Colón. “That’s when we started to see movements of strange people we didn’t know,” he told Mongabay over the phone. Today, the coast is covered in luxury developments, such as the five-star Indura Beach & Golf Resort and the Rosa Negra tourism complex in Tela, a municipality in the department of Atlántida. Hotels and apartments, created without the consent of the Garifuna peoples, sit directly on top of the community’s ancestral burial grounds and agricultural lands. On April 12, Garifuna communities and the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) carried out protests in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Image courtesy of Carlos Ortiz. “Our communities are facing a war,” Miriam Miranda, a Garifuna human rights defender and leader of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), told Mongabay over WhatsApp messages. “Today, we no…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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