Racist, violent dispossession of Garifuna lands spiking in Honduras
“The Garifuna people don’t want to work or study or contribute to the development of [Honduras]. They are not using these lands productively, and they are hindering progress by opposing tourism projects and the like.”
Below: A long-form compilation and reflection by Steven Johnson
In response to a very public, racist attack in the media against the Garifuna people in Honduras who are suffering a spike in corrupt and violent dispossessions of their ancestral lands to make way for tourism, for-export African palm plantations, privatized “model cities”, and organized crime rings, Steven Johnson provides a deep dive into the history and culture of the Garifuna people, going back before the formation of Honduras as a country in the early 1800s.
Including extensive statements from Garifuna land and rights defenders, Steven analyses the racism against and dispossession of Garifuna lands happening today in the context of 500 years of imperialism and colonialism, and in the context of the always relentless growth of global capitalism.
Chipping away in support of OFRANEH
Rights Action has supported OFRANEH, the leading Garifuna rights organization, since 1998. We regularly send your donations and grant money to OFRANEH; we have shared countless articles, reports and urgent actions; we have led human rights/educational trips to Honduras to meet with organizations like OFRANEH and visit Garifuna communities in the eye of this local-to-global land grab storm.
The fox’s message to the henhouse
Delivered by a paid-off hen the fox PROMISES not to eat!
By Steven Johnson, Thinking Aloud substack, Aug. 26, 2026
https://sjthinkingaloud.substack.com/p/the-foxs-message-to-the-henhouse
Honduran media personality Ulises Aguirre has become the subject of widespread outrage, and a criminal complaint, on account of what critics consider to be an egregiously racist, colonialist-trope-laden, and potentially violence-inciting video rant, published on August 19, 2026, against the Afro-Indigenous Garifuna people who have inhabited Honduras’s north coast since before Honduras came into existence as an independent nation.
Aguirre alleged that the Garifuna people “are not really among the original peoples of Honduras”, that many don’t want to work or study or contribute to the development of the nation, that they are not using these lands productively, and that they are hindering progress by opposing tourism projects and the like.
He also casually referred to “invasions” of lands on the north coast by Garifuna people, as if that patently false interpretation were an indisputable truth, while ignoring the fact that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which Honduras is bound by treaty obligations to respect, ruled that the lands in question indeed belong to the Garifuna people and ordered the Honduran government to honor their title to it.
While I am not an expert on the Garifuna people and culture in general, what I have learned about their land struggles, as well as this recent media controversy, leads me to believe that these conflicts are paradigmatic for understanding:
the dynamics of global capitalism;
the true causes of forced migration;
how elite-serving media help facilitate the territorial, spiritual, and cultural dispossession of sustainably-living peoples by capitalists;
and why people everywhere, especially those in the U.S. and Canada (whose governments support the forces of dispossession in Honduras), should support the Garifuna people’s and many other similar struggles in our own countries and abroad.
To help people outside Honduras better understand and apply lessons from this case, I will provide some background; a Spanish transcription and English translation of what Ulises Aguirre said; videos, transcriptions, and translations of some responses; some observations of my own; and links for further information and action.
Recent Background
For over two weeks, people of the Afro-Indigenous Garifuna people from the northern coast of Honduras, have been camped outside the Supreme Court of Honduras in Tegucigalpa, demanding the dropping of all charges against five members of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) who have been criminalized for defending lands that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ruled belong to their people.
The government is carrying out illegal evictions, and charging people with “usurpation” of their own lands, on behalf of powerful oligarchs and investors who have long sought to grab the lands of this beautiful coastal paradise to enrich themselves.
Aguirre’s video intervention, released days after the encampment began, serves to justify the evictions and turn public opinion against the Garifuna people, recycling arguments and tropes that have been used for centuries to justify colonialist dispossession.
Continuation of 500 years of history
The Garifuna struggles and hateful media campaigns against them are best understood as a continuation of the same corrupt and violent process of colonization that began in the hemisphere 500 years ago.
Some recent events in continuity with that long, blood-stained history include the Trump administration’s renewed assertion of naked imperialist power throughout Latin America. Under the banner of the “Donroe Doctrine”, the U.S. government enabled: the return to Honduras of the Trump-pardoned drug smuggler and former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández (”JOH”); the fraudulent election (November 2025) of Trump’s pick Nasry Asfura as president of Honduras (who is from the same narco-drenched Nationalist Party of JOH); and, the renewed politics of dispossession that have been launched since Asfura took office.
U.S. and Canadian-backed drug-trafficking party back in power
Examples of this new wave of assaults include the illegal evictions of Garifuna people from their lands, a recently passed Honduran law enabling dispossession on behalf of oligarchs and agribusiness interests, and a return to policies favoring the deeply unpopular “ZEDEs”, which are the kind of CEO-led, privatized city-states with their own laws which the billionaire Peter Thiel seeks to build in Honduras and elsewhere.
Policies like this carried out in Honduras (and many other countries) will surely intensify what was already a pressure cooker of factors creating the miserable and dangerous conditions which drive millions of people to leave the homelands they love.
Imperatives of global capitalism and resulting dispossession and migration
Trump, Stephen Miller, etc. seek to reverse and contain this phenomenon, which they slanderously label a migrant “invasion” of the U.S., through brute force using what is increasingly becoming a lawless secret police force of terror to enforce unjust immigration laws that were historically inspired by the Ku Klux Klan.
“MAGA” supporters who support these cruel policies, and even liberals who speak of reforming our “broken” immigration system, are largely unaware of three crucial and ominous realities:
1) The roots of mass migration lie in unjust U.S. foreign policy.
2) The reasons why capitalists, at the present stage of capitalism’s development, need migration and other issues to be addressed through violence rather than justice.
3) How the way is being paved for the same violence to be used against many of the very same people who currently support its use against immigrants, Gazans, and others.
As future posts may treat at greater length, the conditions which gave rise to the so-called migrant “invasion” were created largely by the U.S. through decades of military invasions, coups, unfair trade policies and other harmful policies carried out in the interests of corporations and wealthy investors.
Capitalist-controlled countries (which is to say, virtually all countries at present) often resort to brute force. And while they have always done this, they may do so with even greater regularity and intensity in the future.
William I. Robinson (here, here, and here) and others argue there are simply no ways to address social problems like forced migration that do not involve creating more just conditions in the intensely exploited, migrant-sending countries — something that capitalist elite-serving leaders are loathe to do, because greater justice would diminish capitalists’ opportunities to reinvest over-accumulated capital profitably at a time when many other such opportunities have already been largely tapped out and are no longer as profitable.
Global capitalism’s capacity to solve this kind of recurring crisis by restructuring itself and opening up new avenues for expanded capital accumulation may be reaching hard social, economic, and physical/ecological limits, given that capitalism has conquered virtually the entire world and exhausted and destroyed much of its productive capacities.
To put it simply, this thesis argues that capitalists cannot keep making money in the current exhausted state of capitalism’s evolution without bringing increasingly authoritarian governments into power, taking over more lands and mineral deposits, suppressing labor rights and wages, and expenditures on safe working conditions, dismantling environmental regulations, incarcerating or exterminating “surplus” members of the population who are not needed as employees, violently repressing dissent, and dispossessing peoples of lands that are not already being used to generate the maximum profits possible to capitalists.
This is a completely unsustainable situation that can only give way to continued progress towards cataclysmic environmental destruction and the virtual enslavement of the majority of the world’s population, including most who previously enjoyed relative privilege in the richest countries at the core of the global capitalist empire, or to an overthrow of this destructive and oppressive system carried out by concerted bottom-up action by allied oppressed classes and peoples.
Arguably, many who enjoy moderately privileged niches within the capitalist system - such as small businesspeople, managers, professionals, the higher-paid tiers of the working class, and the elites’ media hirelings (like Ulises Aguirre), who often tend to be MAGAs in the U.S., ‘uribistas’ in Colombia, ‘cachurecos’ (supporters of JOH’s and Asfury’s National Party) in Honduras, ‘bolsonaristas’ in Brazil, etc. - would serve their long-term material interests much better if they stopped blaming immigrants, trans-people, Muslims, Garifuna and other Black and Indigenous people, communists, or other scapegoats that capitalists want them to blame, and joined the struggles from below for liberation.
Because they too are now being squeezed out and rendered dispensable, and may be enslaved or exterminated if the current trajectories continue, while leaving a devastated world and terrifying existence to their children.
But, for any of them to do so, they must come to grasp the true nature of our predicaments. They must come to understand that the (in many cases diminishing and precarious) short-term rewards that they enjoy within the current system will not afford any meaningful protection to their children from the tsunamis that the continued existence of that system will generate.
And they must come to see through and reject the divisive and hateful ideologies that the capitalist rulers spare no efforts to get them to embrace.
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What Ulises Aguirre Said
I therefore think it is essential to expose and refute media that promote what capitalist interests want us to believe, as exemplified by Ulises Aguirre and countless others; to connect people, beyond the corporate algorithms, to media sources serving movements of struggle that better reflect most people’s truest long-term interests; and to invite people to support those struggles against the capitalist predator that is stalking us all.
Here is a transcription of Aguirre’s odious message in Spanish (please send corrections, anybody, if necessary):
In Spanish
Saludos a todos. En Cuantos Cuentos. A inicios de esta semana y para ser más específicos este martes amaneció de nuevo tomado uno de los accesos a la Corte Suprema de Justicia por la comunidad afrodescendiente en reclamo y protesta por una ley de reciente aprobación en el Congreso Nacional en materia agrícola e Industrial, que sale al paso de esas invasiones allá en el litoral Atlántico. Pero es de aplicación nacional y va para todo el país.
Ellos dicen que muchas de las tierras de las comunidades, o toda la ribera del litoral Atlántico, les pertenecen, porque ellos son pueblos originarios y que llegaron ahí cuando no había nada, ni existía nadie.
Pero pueblos originarios son los Lencas, los Pech, los Tawahkas, ustedes no. Ustedes llegaron de otras latitudes. Muchos llegaron huyendo, que han contribuido algunos con el desarrollo del país, sí, pero otros han vivido de dar lástima. Muchos de ellos no les gusta ni estudiar ni trabajar. Vea usted las comunidades de las comunidades garífunas, o de los negros como ellos dicen, porque no somos ni trigueños ni morenos, Somos negros.
¿Qué ha pasado con eso? ¿Qué han hecho? Y ahora Es que si alguien construye, si alguien invierte, si alguien quiere hacer un complejo turístico. Nuestras tierras son nuestras.
Ustedes ven a los Lencas, a los Tawahkas, a los Pech reclamando tierras. No, esos labran la tierra. Esos trabajan. Y ellos. Es que esto es nuestro. ¿Para qué?
Pero eso de que son pueblos originarios me van disculpando. Y si me apuran, les diría que ustedes son advenedizos. Llegaron de otro lado y hay que tolerarles todas estas cuestiones y no les diga nada, porque van al Ministerio Público y lo demandan.
¿Cómo podrían proceder? Porque se les dicen estas que son verdades y que no se pueden callar.
A todos, gracias. Cuantos Cuentos. Nos encontramos luego.
In English
Here I offer a translation into English (again, corrections are always welcome):
Hi everyone, and welcome to ¡Cuantos Cuentos! Earlier this week—and to be more specific, this Tuesday—one of the entrances to the Supreme Court of Justice was once again blocked by the Afro-descendant community in protest against a law recently passed by the National Congress regarding agriculture and industry, which is intended to address those land invasions up there along the Atlantic coast. But it applies nationwide and affects the entire country.
They claim that much of the land belonging to the communities—or the entire Atlantic coastline—belongs to them, because they are Indigenous peoples who arrived there when there was nothing and no one else existed.
But the Indigenous peoples are the Lencas, the Pech, the Tawahkas—not you. You came from other parts of the world. Many arrived as refugees. Some have contributed to the country’s development, yes, but others have lived off eliciting pity. Many of them don’t like to study or work. Look at the Garifuna communities—or the Black communities, as they say—because we’re neither brown-skinned nor dark-skinned; we’re Black.
What’s happened with that? What have they done? And now, if someone builds something, if someone invests, if someone wants to build a tourist resort. “Our lands are ours.” You see the Lencas, the Tawahkas, and the Pech claiming land. No, those people till the soil. Those people work. But them [the Garifunas]? — it’s “this is ours.” For what?
But this business of your being Indigenous peoples—excuse me. And if you push me, I’d tell you that you’re interlopers. You came from somewhere else, and we have to put up with all this from you, and not say a word to you, because you’ll go to the Public Prosecutor’s Office and press charges. On what grounds could you bring proceedings? Because the things being said to you are truths that cannot be silenced.
Thank you, everyone. This is ¡Cuantos Cuentos! We’ll meet again soon.
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Responses by Garifuna land and rights defenders & COPINH
Below are a few of the expressions of vigorous protest that Garifuna leaders and their allies have made in response to Aguirre’s vicious smear. I’d encourage anyone reading this to give such voices priority attention.
Miriam Miranda, of OFRANEH
Below are two reels of Miriam Miranda of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), an organization of Garifuna land and rights resistance, with Spanish transcriptions and English translations, at the encampment outside of the Supreme Court of Honduras.
English speakers who understand little to no Spanish might nevertheless wish to click on the links and listen to her, to get a sense of her forceful energy, and then read the English translations.
First reel:
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1771780700500336
Transcription in Spanish
Aquí tienen unos cuantos que están tirando una campaña de odio racial permanentemente por los medios de comunicación. ¿Saben cuál es la diferencia? Es que nosotros sí sabemos de dónde venimos, qué queremos y qué queremos como país, como pueblo garífuna. Nosotros sí lo tenemos bien claro y lo que pasa es que aquí hay grupos de poder económico y que no son ni siquiera del Honduras.
Los apellidos están claritos, los Rosenthal, los Facussé, etcétera. Todos esos que vinieron después de nosotros y ellos hoy son los que toman decisiones en este país. Y lo quiero decir claramente porque esa es la verdad. Lo que pasa es que duele la verdad, porque a ellos si los respetan, a ellos le ponen la alfombra roja para que pasen.
Y nosotros, que somos nosotros? Tenemos más de 200 años en este país y los pueblos indígenas que tienen más de 500 años de todos los pueblos, a ellos realmente los tratan como con las patas.
Nosotros decimos claramente que tenemos derechos ganados en este país y ahorita ya no se trata de decir que mire que los garífunas no son indígenas, que los garífunas no son acá, que no sé cuánto y todo eso. Lo que nosotros tenemos como identidad cultural, eso nos hace ser un pueblo con orgullo, dignidad. Ese es el problema. Nosotros sí tenemos dignidad y sabemos que es lo que queremos y hacia dónde vamos y vamos a seguir aquí. No vamos a cerrar este campamento.
Translation in English
Here we see a few people who are constantly waging a campaign of racial hatred through the media. Do you know what the difference is? It’s that we know where we come from, what we want, and what we want as a country, as the Garifuna people. We’re very clear on that, but the thing is, there are groups here with economic power—and they aren’t even from Honduras. Their last names are crystal clear: the Rosenthals, the Facussés, and so on. All of them came after us, and today they’re the ones making decisions in this country.
And I want to say this clearly because it’s the truth. The thing is, the truth hurts. Because they are respected. They roll out the red carpet for them to walk on. While we, who have been here for over 200 years, and the Indigenous peoples who have been here for over 500 years, are really treated like dirt.
We say clearly that we have earned rights in this country, and right now it’s no longer about saying, “Look, the Garífunas aren’t Indigenous,” or “the Garífunas don’t belong here,” or whatever else. What we have as a cultural identity—that’s what makes us a people with pride and dignity. And that is the problem. We do have dignity, and we know what we want and where we’re headed, and we’re going to stay here. We’re not going to shut down this encampment!
Second reel:
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1084877370706098
Transcription in Spanish
La maldad que significa cuando hay personas que muestran un odio. Pero no solamente es el odio, sino llamar a que nos destruyan a un pueblo. Yo creo que eso es importante. Yo le hago un llamado al pueblo hondureño. ¿Esa es la sociedad que queremos? ¿Esta es la sociedad que queremos, una sociedad en la que nos odiemos, en la que se insiste al odio, en la que hay mucha gente que se compone el pecho, de que son cristianos y sin embargo generan odio racial y llaman a la incitación a que nos destruyan?
Nosotros creemos que, miren, yo les doy una cosa por mi salud mental, esas cosas ni siquiera quiero escucharlas, porque tenemos que tener capacidad de razonamiento. También el pueblo hondureño tiene que razonar, tiene que también analizar qué queremos nosotros.
Yo quiero decir claramente es que el pueblo garífuna tiene dignidad, no solamente es identidad.
Yo le hago un llamado a este pueblo hondureño, a todos los que nos miran a través de los medios de comunicación - Levántense, levántense contra está este grupo, que sí ellos sí son criminales porque están llevando a la destrucción al pueblo hondureño. Ellos utilizan esas voces, voces cobardes para nosotros destruir de según ellos, la dignidad del pueblo garífuna, no la destruyen esas palabras jamás.
Queremos decirlo claro. Nosotros luchamos por un pueblo que ha sido guerrero, que lucharon contra el colonialismo europeo. Compañeros y compañeras, para los que no saben la historia, luchamos contra los ingleses y los franceses en la isla de San Vicente. Porque nosotras sí sabemos lo que es luchar contra el colonialismo.
Y ese tipo de discurso es puro colonialismo. Es desconocer que este es un país de multicolores, es un país que tiene una diversidad y también es negar la indianidad de este pueblo. Muchos de los que hablan mierda están hablando contra sus abuelos, contra sus antepasados, porque eso que creen que son blanquitos menea la cabeza. Le van a caer cabezas de negros e indígenas porque se les olvida que son nosotros y reivindicamos lo que somos.
Somos garífunas, somos indígenas, somos negros. Esa es una mezcla que tiene este país. El que se la quiera tirar de blanquito que se vaya para Europa y anda perdido. Y eso es lo que queremos decirle al mundo hoy. Este es un país que es multilingüe, pluricultural, diversas culturas y lo que pasa es que quieren vestirse de blanquitos. Imagínese. Y cuando uno los mira son más negros que nosotros. No le ven la cara de indio indígena negro. Eso es este país.
Usted que está viendo ahorita, revísese. Vea a sus vecinos, véase a usted mismo de dónde viene y se va a dar cuenta que esta campaña es un odio contra ustedes mismos. No es un odio contra el pueblo garífuna, es un odio contra ustedes mismos.
Pongámonos las pilas. Porque si no, nos van a desaparecer de este país, compañeros y compañeras.
Translation in English
The evil is shown when there are people who show hatred. But it’s not just hatred—it’s calling for the destruction of our people. I think that’s important. I’m appealing to the Honduran people. Is that the kind of society we want? Is this the kind of society we want—one in which we hate each other, in which hatred is perpetuated, in which many people boast that they’re Christians and yet spread racial hatred and incite others to destroy us?
We believe—look, I’ll be honest with you for the sake of my mental health—I don’t even want to hear such things, because we must be capable of reasoning. We, the Honduran people, too, must reason; we must also analyze what we want. I want to make it clear that the Garifuna people have dignity, and not just identity.
I call upon the Honduran people, upon all who are watching us through the media: Rise up, rise up against this group—for they are indeed criminals because they are leading the Honduran people to destruction. And so they use those voices, cowardly voices, to, as they claim, destroy the dignity of the Garifuna people. Let it be clear: those words will never destroy it!
We fight for a people who have always been warriors, who fought against European colonialism. Comrades, for those who do not know the history, we fought against the English and the French on the island of San Vicente. Because we do know what it means to fight against colonialism.
And that kind of racist rhetoric is pure colonialism. It ignores the fact that this is a multiethnic country, a country rich in diversity, and it also denies the Indigenous identity of this people. Many of those spouting nonsense are speaking out against their grandparents, against their ancestors, because those who think they’re white can shake their heads and they’ll see Black and Indigenous heads, because they forget that they are us.
And we’re reclaiming who we are. We are Garifuna, we are Indigenous, we are Black! That is the mix that makes up this country. Anyone who wants to act like they’re white should go to Europe. They’re lost.
And that’s what we want to tell the world today. This is a multilingual, multicultural country with diverse cultures, and the thing is, they want to pretend they’re white. Imagine that. And when you look at them, they’re blacker than we are. They don’t see their own Black Indigenous face. That’s what this country is.
You who are watching right now: Take a good look at yourselves. Look at your neighbors. Look at yourselves—where you come from—and you’ll realize that this campaign is an act of hatred against yourselves. It’s not hatred against the Garifuna people; it’s hatred against yourselves.
Let’s get our act together, because if we don’t, they’re going to wipe us out of this country, comrades.
Humberto Castillo, of ASAFROVAH
In the video below, another Garifuna community leader, Humberto Castillo, of the Association of People of African Descent in Honduras (ASAFROVAH), stresses that, contrary to Ulises Aguirre’s false claims that Garifuna people are usurping lands, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ordered the Honduran government to honor their title to these lands.
Captions for this YouTube video are available in English or Spanish. (Click on the “cc” icon at the bottom, and change the language of the captions in the settings, if necessary. You might need to watch this on YouTube, rather than here, to access these settings options.)
Original Spanish here / Translation in English
Check out what a shock the great Ulises—that erudite genius of Honduran ethnological sciences—gave us. In one of those moments when humanity pauses to reflect on its great existential dilemmas, Ulises treated us to the fruits of his imaginary studies at Harvard—studies that, judging by the results, were conducted under the influence of prolonged glue sniffing.
There he was. In front of a camera, wearing a tie, sitting upright with his little legs pressed tightly together, like someone preparing to reveal a universal truth or hold back an intestinal urgency. Then he declared that “Black people have lived off pity” and that many of them don’t like to study or work.
In just a few minutes, he dismissed centuries of colonialism, persecution, racism, and dispossession against the Garifuna people. It must be nice to know so much without having had to learn a thing.
For a moment, I thought he was going to talk about those who did arrive later in these lands—that handful of families of Arab-Palestinian origin who today form part of the Honduran oligarchic bloc. They started in commerce and from there expanded their dominance into banking, industry, mining, tourism, and large-scale landownership.
They didn’t build the Garifuna communities or work those lands. They arrived when the wealth was already there. Then they fenced it off, registered the titles, and cashed in.
But no. The problem, according to the doctoral thesis of the great Ulises, is that Black people don’t like to work.
The Garifuna people built communities, organized their territories, and defended the coast for generations—a coast that others are now selling off piece by piece. There lie their dead, their language, their memory, and their right to the land. But none of that appears in the advanced curriculum of the bachelor’s degree program in [unsure of meaning here].
This is how a colonized mind works in our homeland. It takes the contempt it received from above and unleashes it against those below. It calls the people who produce wealth “backward” and the capital that appropriates it “development.” It turns the Garifuna into invaders of their own territory and those who arrive with money, papers, police, and hitmen into respectable businessmen.
The saddest part—though quite predictable—is that this great scholar of races is a mestizo Honduran, with features that, when subjected to his own dime store science, could easily link him to any of the ethnic groups he so despises. Ulises should be careful with that research. Any day now, he might look closely in the mirror and end up accusing himself of living off pity.
But the tragicomedy doesn’t end there.
Ulises doesn’t even belong to the families whose power he defends. He doesn’t own the bank, the mine, the hotel, or the canal. Nor is he the landowner who fences off the community and then sends in the police and hitmen. They merely lent him a camera, adjusted his tie, and granted him a few minutes to explain why the dispossessed are to blame for their own dispossession.
That is his role: to put his face and voice where the oligarchy prefers not to put its own. To say about the poor what the rich need repeated. To call the worker a slacker, the true owner an invader, and the one who takes it all a businessman.
Ulises thought he was presenting a thesis on the Garifuna people. In reality, he presented a thesis on himself: that of the colonized mestizo who despises his own image in the hope that the master will accept him.
After all that “science,” the only one who ended up looking pitiful was the great Ulises.
COPINH-Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras
This organization of the Lenca people published a strenuous and categorical repudiation of Ulises Aguirre’s attempt to divide allied movements of resistance by putting peoples like the Lenca into a superior, acceptable category (truly original peoples, hard workers, etc.) and smearing the Garifuna people as not an original people of Honduras, lazy, etc.
Original Spanish here / Translation in English
Railing against the “For the Life of the Garífuna People” encampment that OFRANEH has maintained since August 10 in front of the Supreme Court of Justice, demanding an end to the criminalization of defenders of the territory of San Juan, Tela, and compliance with the ruling of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), journalist Ulises Aguirre (affiliated with Televicentro) sought to delegitimize the struggle by asserting that the Garifuna people are not an Indigenous people, labeling them “outsiders”, while also questioning their ancestral right to the land.
As COPINH and as the Lenca people, we stand in solidarity with the Garifuna people and firmly reject this racist rhetoric. We will not allow our identity as an Indigenous people to be used as a weapon to deny that of the Garifuna people.
Historical records, anthropological studies, and international human rights conventions—such as ILO Convention No. 169—recognize the Garifuna people as an Indigenous people of Honduras, with ancestral rights to their territory on the Atlantic coast.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) itself has also recognized the Garifuna people as part of the country’s Indigenous population, thereby confirming their status as an Indigenous people.
This type of rhetoric is neither new nor isolated: it follows the same media narrative that once criminalized Berta Cáceres, portraying her as an “opponent of development,” and that is now being repeated against Garifuna defenders, disregarding their legitimate struggle for land.
Anyone who denies a people’s origins in order to strip them of their land opens the door to the dispossession of all peoples. That is why there is no Indigenous struggle without a Garífuna struggle, nor a Garífuna struggle without an Indigenous struggle.
#GarífunaSolidarity #OFRANEH #COPINH #IndigenousPeoples #TerritoryIsLife
GARIFUNA AND ALLIED STRUGGLES, FAR FROM HINDERING PROGRESS TO GREATER WELLBEING, ARE THE WORLD’S BEST HOPE
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What follows are comments of my own, informed by much less thorough and direct knowledge of Garifuna struggles than the voices heard from above, and motivated, as I explore the controversy over Ulises Aguirre’s message and its role in facilitating further dispossession and oppressive domination, by a quest to understand where we might find genuine hope and guidance as the prospects for human and nonhuman survival are being threatened.
It seems Aguirre rehashed in his message all the slanderous and malicious colonialist tropes that he could think of, or that perhaps simply occurred to him spontaneously as a result of conditioning from the cradle, that have been used for centuries to justify land theft and genocide, and that exalt as “development” and “progress” the rapacious processes that have greatly accelerated the Sixth Great Extinction and brought humans and the web of life to the brink of utter destruction.
All delivered with the same demeaning, dehumanizing rhetorical tone that colonizers have always used in addressing those they wish to subjugate or get out of the way of their destructive avaricious pursuits.
The same tropes and dehumanizing rhetorical postures are also routinely deployed by the likes of Fox News, Bill Maher (most notably on the topic of Israel and Palestine), right-wing Colombian news media, and other genocide-facilitating media around the world.
Aguirre’s cheap-shot attempts to deny Indigenous status to the Garifuna people, and thereby drive a wedge between them and their Lenca and other allies. Aguirre ignores basic relevant facts, such as the overwhelmingly Arawakan structure of the Garifuna language and their Arawakan cosmovision.
Aguirre does not seem interested in accuracy, but in weakening opposition to destructive capitalist expansion by fomenting division among harmed communities in resistance — a tactic that, in their statement above, the Lenca organization COPINH has hotly condemned.
In his vicious slanders about the Garifuna, who supposedly don’t work or study or contribute to the development of the country, Aguirre assumes, as ruling elites want us all to assume, that what counts as “study” or “work” or “development” or “progress” are the imposed Western notions of these that have been defined by colonizers — notions that all happen to support a system that concentrates wealth into the hands of oligarchs and global capitalists. While anything that doesn’t enrich dominating oligarch and capitalist elites is “backwards”.
Take, for example, the work of harvesting yuca that you’ve planted for your own family’s or neighbors’ consumption. Our Garifuna hosts showed the group of visitors I was with how they do this on their lands in northern Honduras. It sure seemed like work to me. And it was clearly productive. It made good food available to eat.
But it wasn’t shipped on a truck to distant cities. It wasn’t bought and resold by wholesalers to grocery store chains owned by wealthy oligarchs. It didn’t help any businesses in a long supply chain to repay loans with interest to enrich bankers. And it didn’t help to keep miserable workers alive that sweat shops depend on to continue making profits. Nobody was enriched except those who planted and harvested and consumed it, along with their families or friends.
Therefore it wasn’t any kind of work that colonizers acknowledge. And the people doing this work that colonizers don’t count as work were “backwards”. And so their land needs to be taken away from them so that something more “productive” can be done with it.
But productive for whom? The only uses of lands and labor that colonizers count as productive are those which profit ruling elites who don’t actually do productive work, but who only work to make sure that the value produced by others’ labor goes to them.
With regard to education, Garifuna people with degrees from Western institutions routinely respond to the slanders of colonizer mouthpieces like Aguirre. Western education itself is both a danger, and a potential help, in various ways. It is in large part designed and deployed to discredit, undermine, and destroy cultures that promote communal ways of life that do not favor private capital accumulation by ruling elites. And it is structurally withheld from people that the colonizers intend to simply dispossess and hope they just die off.
With increasing automation and decreasing production capacity and consumer purchasing power resulting from capitalist exploitation and overproduction and the erosion of the social/physical/ecological basis of production, more and more people may be excluded from education, globally, even if it remains convenient for colonizers to slander the excluded as lazy and unwilling to study.
But for those who can somehow overcome barriers to accessing it, Western education can help some (though fewer and fewer) people to make better than the most miserable livings, by becoming able to perform the scarce and specialized roles needed by capitalists to keep the machinery for their own private accumulation running.
And it has also served as a tool, insofar as some have been able to resist its dangers and distortions and employ it for pro-community purposes, for subjugated peoples to defend themselves against the very forces of destruction that have designed it.
One Garifuna man I met lacked any advanced studies that the likes of Aguirre would reckon as such. But, having spent some time abroad and now back in Honduras, he spoke with great joy about all that he was learning from the Garifuna elders and how that was bringing all kinds of healing and positive things to his life.
And so this man whom the colonizers might deride as “not wanting to study” was doing real learning in arguably the best and most helpful school possible — the community, with its traditional ceremonies, accumulated wisdom, productive practices, etc. The fact that colonizers don’t recognize this as valuable education just reflects their own ignorance and elite-serving values.
Because it is precisely this kind of “school” in which many Indigenous peoples learn values and practices which, if they had the kind of sovereign control over their territories that they are fighting for, would enable the construction of prosperous societies without destroying the earth in the process.
Key to this is the ability of a sovereign people to freely produce on a sufficient and stable land base, and allocate their surplus production beyond what is needed for survival to purposes which promote genuine and truly sustainable development for the benefit of all, instead of having their lands and the fruit of their labor ripped away by capitalist exploiters.
This kind of sustainable shared prosperity is something that capitalist Western societies, ruled by the kinds of parasitic elites Aguirre serves, have not and never will be able to accomplish.
I think supporting, as well as emulating and multiplying, such struggles is our only hope. As I see it, the very survival of the web of life, or at least humans’ continued existence in it, depends on the success of struggles like those of the Garifuna people to recover and defend their territories, to refute and discredit the rhetoric of those who are laying waste to everything in the name of progress for a few quick bucks, and, using their wisdom in their recovered territories, and in cooperation with other oppressed peoples and classes seeking liberation and shared wellbeing, to produce sustainably and live in harmony with what remains of this earth that colonizers and capitalists are so busy destroying.
But the colonizers’ self-serving versions of “progress” and “development” really take us backward, or rather, down into an abyss. And their smear campaigns against the dignity of Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous peoples, like deadly poisons, are nothing to take lightly. They are the perennially recurring rhetorical prelude and accompaniment to lethal violence, dispossession, and genocide. These slanders must therefore be urgently opposed, with utmost vigor.
The Garifuna communities in Honduras deserve solidarity and tangible support, from people of goodwill everywhere, in this time of great danger.
Action To Take
I’d encourage anybody who can take a minute to sign, as individuals and/or organizations, these letters to the presiding judge of the Honduran Supreme Court, in support of the Garifuna land defenders who have been unjustly criminalized for “usurping” their own land.
Links For Further Information and Action
Below are links to learn more about Garifuna and allied struggles in Honduras and how to support them, from sources who are more knowledgeable and/or more directly affected than myself:
In Honduras:
OFRANEH
Red Nacional de Defensoras de Derechos Humanos en Honduras
Radio Progreso
U.S. and Canada:
The famous poster above illustrates the role that I think right-wing media personalities like Aguirre, religious leaders, (mis)educators, and other influencers play in the capitalist system: Rewarded with a moderate level of privilege by the parasitic capitalist interests they serve, they perform the “We fool you” role pictured in the poster, proclaiming as normal and inevitable an oppressive and wasteful system that is wholly sustained by the labor of exploited workers and farmers at the bottom. Only concerted organization and resistance by the latter can topple the pyramid and create genuine shared wellbeing for all.