The Garífuna community of Triunfo de la Cruz versus the State of Honduras: territory and the possibilities and limits of the Inter-American Court of human rights verdict

ABSTRACT

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (I/A Court) condemned the state of Honduras in a ruling rendered on 8 October 2015. The Court found the Honduran state guilty of violating property rights of the territories belonging to the Garífuna Community of Triunfo de la Cruz. The Court points out the responsibility of the Honduran state to provide guarantees for the communities to be able to exercise freely their right to prior consultation, established by ILO Convention No. 169. A central problem faced by these communities in Honduras is precisely the various forms of vulnerability of their collective territories, a problem other Afro-descendant populations face in Latin America. Yet, it is precisely the issue of territorial rights for ethnic groups that is a nodal element of the multicultural legal framework implemented in Latin America since the 1990s. Examining this legal case and the use by the Garífuna community of Triunfo de la Cruz of the IACHR, and taking into consideration the implications of the sentence against the Honduran state, this article analyzes the utility, limits, and possibilities of this type of international legal instrument to defend the multicultural rights of Afro-descendant peoples.

KEYWORDS:

• Afrodescendant
• Garífuna
• multicultural
• territorial rights
• IACHR

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to my colleague, friend, and actual Director of the Observatory of Justice for Afrodescendants in Latin America (OJALA), Jean Muteba Rahier, for the English translation of this text initially written in Spanish.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Garífuna are the product of a race-mixing process between enslaved Africans and indigenous Caribs-Arawaks that occurred during the 17th and 18th centuries in the Lesser Antilles, mainly on the Island of Saint Vicent. Deported in masse by the British to Central America, the Garífuna began in 1797 the settlement of the Caribbean coasts in four countries (Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, and Nicaragua). Currently, through a constant migratory process initiated in the middle of the 20th century, a large part of its population lives in the United States.

2. The Garífuna arrived on the island of Roatan on 11 April 1797. According to historical sources cited by González (1988), they were a total of 2026 Garífuna men, women, and children. Soon thereafter, they passed to the continental port of Trujillo where Garífuna men were assigned to serve in militias under the command of the Spaniards to defend against English attacks.

3. Beside the banana industry, other dynamics of agricultural production developed to a lesser extent. Logging (sawmills) will be the most relevant in some of the Garífuna settlement areas. In addition to the continuity of self-consumption activities with the predominance of cassava cultivation, artisanal fishing, and small-scale maritime and fluvial transport, the Garífuna also worked in the production of citrus and sugar cane crops, rice, and beans. This process extended until the middle of the 20th century, differently in other countries of the sub-region.

4. The literature on the impact of the banana industry in Central America is extensive. On the Honduran case see Euraque (2003), Slutzky (1980), Valeriano (1979).

5. The most recent data we have on Garífuna demography comes from ECADERT, 2013. They would be 200,000 in Honduras; 22,000 in Belize; 5,000 in Guatemala; and 2,500 in Nicaragua for an approximate total of about 230,000 people in the four countries. There are no precise statistics on the figures of the Garífuna population in the United States, but different sources speak of an amount equal to or greater than that of the Garífuna who inhabit Central America (Agudelo, op. Cit.). This would give a total population of about 500,000 individuals.

6. The analysis of the agrarian problem, the impact of tourism promotion policies as a strategic development objective, and their impacts on the Garífuna goes beyond the purposes of this work. For in-depth discussions on these issues, see the diagnosis prepared by the Caribbean Central American Research Council CCARC (Caribbean Central American Research Council) (2007); see also Anderson (2007), Cuisset (2014), Loperena (2012), Mollett (2014).

7. Anderson (2007) and Loperena (2012) delve into the history of OFRANEH.

8. As I continue my work, one of my objectives will be to conduct a historical ethnography on the process that led to the community of Triunfo de la Cruz and OFRANEH to initiate their mobilizations in defense of the territory, to the litigation against the state of Honduras before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the process of interaction between the representatives of the community and the different actors of the Commission and the I/A Court.

9. The Saramaka and Moiwana peoples are part of the descendants of maroons from Suriname who have preserved their own cultural characteristics and maintain a vital relationship with their ancestral territories.

10. For other important references on this, see Santos and Rodriguez (2005), Chenaut et al. (2011), Epp (2013), Feoli Marco (2016), Herrera (2015).

11. Such instances are courts and state bodies in charge of the agrarian question and of the rights of indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples, among others.

12. Provisions taken from the sentence Corte IDH (2015). The full text of the Judgment can be found at the following link: http://www.corteidh.or.cr/CF/Jurisprudencia2/ver_expediente. cfm? nId_expediente=219&lang=es.

13. See resolution of the Court of September 2016: http://www.corteidh.or.cr/docs/asuntos/garifuna_fv_16.pdf.

14. For more details, see OFRANEH’s webpage: http://ofraneh.org/ofraneh/derecho-consulta.html.

15. Depending on the complexity of the cases, the Court gives a margin of four years for compliance with the judgments. In this case, the deadline would come in 2019.

16. Interview posted on http://defensorenlinea.com -Tegucigalpa/September 10 – 2017 (accessed on 29 January 2019).

17. Interview conducted in Tegucigalpa, Honduras on 17 April 2017 with a Garífuna activist from Triunfo de la Cruz who asked for his identity not to be revealed.

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Notes on contributors

Carlos E. Agudelo

Carlos E. Agudelo has a Phd and Master’s degree in Sociology from the University Sorbonne Nouvelle. He is an Associate Researcher at the URMIS-Migration and Society Research Unit and the University of Paris VII, University of Nice, IRD-Development Research Institute, and the CNRS–National Center for Scientific Research of France. He is also researcher for the International Mixed Laboratory-LMI MESO ‘Mobility, Governance and Resources in the Mesoamerican Basin’ and for the Researcher Center for Afro-descendant Studies-University Javeriana Colombia. He is Specialist in multiculturalism, politics, and the identities of Afrodescendant populations in Latin America.