Bad to Worse for Garifuna Communities along Honduras’ Caribbean Coast Solidarity & funding call
By Rights Action
On July 6, 2026, a violent land grab eviction was carried out by armed police in the Garifuna community of San Juan; followed by the illegal detention of five Garifuna land defenders; followed by a ruling by a local court that the five are part of an “organized crime ring”, moving the corrupted legal proceeding to national criminal courts.
On July 16, Karen Spring sent this update: “In response, OFRANEH, Garifuna communities, and several social movement organizations are blocking the main highway in northern Honduras to demand that the case be returned to courts in Tela (and not in the city of San Pedro Sula or in the national organized crime court). The ruling is racist and corrupt as the community of San Juan has land titles to the land in dispute, as recognized by the Honduran state and the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights.”
This situation will not get better soon for the five criminalized Garifuna folks; and not for close to 50 Garifuna villages stretching hundreds of kilometers from near the Guatemalan border to the eastern Gracias a Dios region.
For decades, wealthy Honduran elites and the global tourism industry (including countless Canadian and U.S. operators and investors) have coveted the Caribbean shoreline and Bay Islands (including Roatan), and have been chipping away (often violently) to carve out chunks of the shoreline, all of which is ancestral Garifuna lands and territories as recognized by Honduran and international law.
This most recent spike in violent dispossession of Garifuna communities is the foreseeable aftermath of the U.S. intervention into Honduras’ November 2025 electoral process, resulting in the U.S. supporting Nasry Asfura of the organized crime-linked National Party as President. This trashing of Honduras’ democracy was accompanied by President Trump giving a ‘get-out-of-jail’ card to Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH), the former National Party President of Honduras who had run a drug-smuggling crime ring from the President’s office from 2014-2022.
Democratic allie of the U.S. and Canada
During his entire drug-trafficking presidency, JOH was recognized as a “democratic allie” of the U.S., Canada, Israel and Western European allies, all of whom have now recognized President Nasry Asfura as the legitimate President.
Find here - 17 Years After the Coup: The Narco-Dictatorship Returns - an articulate indictment of the current situation by Karen Spring: “Seventeen years since the 2009 U.S. and Canadian-back coup in Honduras, it is hard to understate the catastrophic impact of U.S. President Trump and the Make American Great Again (MAGA) movement in Honduras.”
Renewed call for funding for, and solidarity with OFRANEH
Since 1998, Rights Action has been sending grassroots funding to OFRANEH for their visionary, courageous work in defense and promotion of Garifuna territorial and indigenous rights, and the environment. We have just sent more of your funds. To donate, see below.
Below, we share a solidarity call from the Honduras Solidarity Network. Please send your own messages of solidarity to OFRANEH and share this information with your local media and elected officials in the U.S. and Canada. This on-going nightmare in Honduras since 2009, and now renewed, is also a “made in the U.S.A. and Canada” nightmare.
New ‘open for global business law’ of the Asfura government
Below, we also share a criterio.hn article (translated by Rights Action) summarizing the recent wave of attacks against the Garifuna people, summarizing how national and international law recognize the ancestral rights of the Garifuna people along the coast who are now confronted with a new ‘open for global business’ law passed by the government of Nasry Asfura that will try to justify criminalizing the Garifuna peoples on their own lands.
Eastern Canada speaking tour, Sept.29-Oct.9, 2026
OFRANEH & Karen Spring (HSN)
“Impacts of North American Tourist Investments on Afro-Indigenous Garifuna Lands, Rights & Communities in Honduras”
To host an event: Karen Spring, karen@hondurassol.org, +504-8785-5757 (Whatsapp), +1-705-816-1849 (Canadian number)
Rights Action
info@rightsaction.org
HSN solidarity call (July 15, 2026):
Miriam Miranda of OFRANEH has made an urgent call for statements of solidarity in support of the Garifuna communities under attack. Below is a statement from the Honduras Solidarity Network. Use as a template and share it out widely, or create your own.
Tag your message, @PJdeHonduras and @OFRANEH
As 5 community members from San Juan Tela are in court today facing trumped up charges of “land theft” for being on their communal ancestral land, we declare the following:
1. We stand in solidarity with OFRANEH and with the Garifuna communities defending their territories in Honduras,
2. We condemn the ongoing and violent violations of their territorial, civil and human rights.
3. We call on the Honduran state to stop violating and to immediately implement the rulings of the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights court that recognize and protect the rights of the Garifuna communities of San Juan, Triunfo de la Cruz, Punto Piedra, and Cayos Cochinos.
4. We demand that all charges be dropped against San Juan community members: Deinor Osmany Mejia Arzube, Irbin Rene Lopez Cortes, Carlos Enrique Fernández Guzmán, Onil Rigoberto Hernandez Zelaya, Sara Abigail Acosta Acosta.
Garífunas from San Juan Expose True Scope of the Agro-Industrial Law
Marcia Perdomo, July 14, 2026
https://criterio.hn/garifunas-de-san-juan-desnudan-el-verdadero-alcance-de-la-ley-agroindustrial/
(translated by Rights Action)
Tegucigalpa, Honduras. – The Garifuna community of San Juan in the Honduran Caribbean has become the epicenter of a conflict pitting the rights of indigenous peoples against privileged sectors seeking to assert control over these territories through the implementation of the “Law for the Strengthening and Protection of the Agroindustrial Sector, Energy Projects, Tourism, Livestock, and Small-Scale Agricultural Producers of Honduras.”
Passed on June 10, this law was first enforced during the eviction of a property in San Juan, Tela, Atlántida, when police forces surrounded community members who were reclaiming a plot of land within the community. During the operation, five people were arrested and later charged with the crime of trespassing.
During the eviction on Monday, July 6, Anibal Serrano Nieto, a National Police commissioner, explained that they were acting in compliance with Legislative Decree 107-2026, after receiving a complaint filed by investors from the company Promociones y Turismo, in which the Rosenthal family reportedly holds a majority stake.
The regulation aims to protect land designated for these sectors—agroindustry, energy, tourism, livestock, and agricultural production—even in the face of public utility projects, agrarian reform, or other legal proceedings.
Although the regulation included a supposed safeguard to exclude indigenous and Afro-descendant territories from its application, the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (OFRANEH) warned from the outset that this protection would remain merely on paper.
Rony Castillo, a member of the organization, pointed out that even a memo distributed by the police before the law took effect expressly stated that it should not be applied in indigenous and Garifuna communities in compliance with ILO Convention No. 169. However, he asserted that during the operation in San Juan, that provision was ignored. “It was just rhetoric to send messages to international organizations, but in practice, the police and the Public Prosecutor’s Office show up and they don’t care if there’s an ancestral title,” he said.
Judgment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
The eviction was carried out even though the community is the beneficiary of a judgment by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) that held the State of Honduras responsible for failing to guarantee the protection of its ancestral territory, allowing the transfer of lands to third parties, and authorizing projects without prior, free, and informed consultation.
Agro-Industrial Law vs. Ancestral Rights
Attorney Caleb Navarro argued that the Law for the Strengthening and Protection of the Agro-Industrial Sector creates privileged classes at the expense of the rights of indigenous and peasant populations. He noted that its implementation in San Juan affects a community that has already obtained a favorable ruling from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights regarding the protection of its ancestral territory.
For Caleb Navarro, a lawyer with Ofraneh, San Juan is representative of other cases that demonstrate how the interests of the political class and economic power take precedence not only over the rights of indigenous peoples but also over human rights in general.
“There is talk that the Law for the Strengthening and Protection of the Agroindustrial Sector is intended to guarantee legal certainty, when it seems they are unaware of the true concept of legal certainty, which must first be developed from a human rights perspective,” Navarro noted. He also noted that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights does not grant rights, but rather condemns the State for violating them, as occurred in the cases of the Garifuna communities of San Juan, Triunfo de la Cruz, Punta Piedra, and Cayos Cochinos.
Rony Castillo noted that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ ruling delineated the ancestral territory of San Juan after nearly two decades of litigation and that the State itself recognized the presence of third parties within that perimeter. For this reason, he found it particularly troubling that the first application of Decree 107-2026 occurred precisely in a community protected by that international ruling.
Castillo also expressed concern about the situation not only in San Juan but in Tela Bay in general, where on Sunday in Tornabé, heavily armed men—including a foreigner—appeared in the community.
Regarding the disputed land in San Juan, he explained that Jaime Rosenthal obtained, in the late 1970s, two manzanas of land under the concept of “usufruct,” a mechanism that—according to Castillo—may have stemmed from a loan granted by the community for farming purposes and not from a transfer of ownership. Subsequently, he stated, that land was registered, and the property expanded to 216 hectares, which are now being claimed by the Rosenthal Hidalgo heirs.
Castillo explained that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ ruling defined the boundaries of the ancestral territory of San Juan and recognized the presence of third parties within that perimeter. However, he clarified that the community is not claiming the neighborhoods inhabited by low-income families, but rather the areas occupied by companies that, according to Ofraneh, have appropriated ancestral lands. He added that the Court instructed the State to regularize the territory to resolve this situation.
Legal Proceedings and Mobilization
Far from ending with the eviction, the case escalated to the judicial arena. One day before the initial hearing, scheduled for Wednesday, July 15, Judge Norma Fuentes, who was presiding over the case, declared herself incompetent ex-officio and referred the case to a court with national jurisdiction in San Pedro Sula, on the grounds that the five defendants were part of an organized crime structure.
Edy Tábora, an attorney with the Justicia para los Pueblos law firm and one of OFRANEH’s legal representatives, called the ruling illegal and reported that the case file was transferred without prior notification to one of the defense attorneys, which prevented them from filing an appeal before it was sent.
In the context of the eviction in San Juan and other actions against the Garifuna communities of Tela Bay, the Tuba Mena Camp—named in honor of a Garifuna woman who, according to OFRANEH, died while defending access to ancestral lands—has been in place since July 8. From this camp, the organization called on Garifuna communities from across the country to attend the hearing for the five individuals accused of trespassing.
Miriam Miranda, general coordinator of OFRANEH, stated that the initial hearing on Wednesday, July 15, “is not just about San Juan. It is a hearing that will determine the future of the Garifuna people.” She therefore called on the Garifuna population, indigenous peoples, and the general public to gather at the Tuba Mena Camp to monitor the legal proceedings and support the defense of the ancestral territory.
EcoJustice Radio interview with Grahame Russell
Garifuna people & Hondurans in resistance to U.S. & Canadian exploitation, violence & corruption
******
Change media sources
Rights Action urges folks to diversify news sources as an antidote to the oftentimes propagandistic reporting coming from government and corporate media in the U.S. and Canada. Gray Zone, Democracy Now, DropSite News, Real News Network, CounterPunch, Intercept, Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, Breach, rabble.ca, Orinoco Tribune, Al Jazeera News (for Palestine related reporting)