Tucked into the curve of a highway off-ramp in front of the Supreme Court in Tegucigalpa, the camp is a living thing. In the communal kitchen, food is prepared for hundreds of people, while children play in the central clearing surrounded by trees hung with signs urging people to “live in community.” It was hard for us to reconcile that scene with what had actually brought people here: the violent eviction of the Garifuna community of San Juan on July 6, and the subsequent arrest of five people charged with “aggravated usurpation”—a case that was initially sent to an organized crime tribunal before being referred back to a local court.
SEE ALSO: The Garífuna’s Fight for Land on Honduras’ Cocaine Coast
It was a bitter irony. For years, the Garífuna—an Afro-Indigenous people from Honduras’s Caribbean coast—have been targets of organized crime. And now they were being accused of forming a criminal network.
Between September 17 and 19, we spent three days at the “Viva Berta” camp, named in honor of environmental activist Berta Cáceres, who was murdered in 2016. We arrived at the encampment as part of an international delegation of 35 human rights defenders and journalists convened by the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña – OFRANEH) which represents Garífuna communities across Honduras, and the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders (IM-Defensoras).
Over three days living inside the camp, we watched up close how the Garífuna came together to look after one another and organize their struggle. Tents were clustered in small neighborhoods connected by paths that opened onto a central clearing—the beating heart of the camp. In that clearing, we witnessed strategy meetings, press conferences, shared meals, sacred ceremonies, and even birthday celebrations. Everyone had a role: some cooked, others guarded the supply tent, and the elders tended the altar and kept watch over the spirit of the place.
We also spoke with Garífuna leaders and community members about the pressures bearing down on them: drug traffickers who use their land as cocaine transit corridors or hide coca crops there, and businessmen looking to seize their territory for palm plantations and hotel complexes. The leaders who stand up to defend their land against these incursions are being threatened and criminalized.
“We live in permanent danger because of organized crime,” said OFRANEH coordinator Miriam Miranda, speaking from a plastic chair surrounded by journalists.
Organized crime has stolen their land, threatened them, disappeared their people, and driven them into a corner. But now, it is the Garífuna whom the state accuses of usurping their own ancestral land—and, as in the case of the five San Juan members, of belonging to organized crime groups.
While we were at the encampment, another Garífuna community was facing the same fate as San Juan. On September 17, word arrived that police were evicting the community of Cayos Cochinos, who had been protesting the filming of a reality show—Supervivientes, or Survivors—on the island. Within hours, lawyers and community members set off on a nearly ten-hour journey to the coast, while others drafted communiqués from the clearing.
The pressure paid off at Cayos Cochinos. The reality show announced it would move its filming to the Nombre de Dios national park, about 13 kilometers away, and the camp on the island was dismantled roughly two weeks later. But elsewhere, communities face much more entrenched—and violent—threats, among them drug traffickers wanted for extradition but seemingly living in impunity.
Since 2015, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has condemned Honduras four times for violating the territorial rights of the Garífuna communities of Triunfo de la Cruz, Punta Piedra, San Juan, and Cayos Cochinos, ordering it to title, demarcate, and protect their lands. To this day, it has not complied.
Viva Berta still stands today, and the Garífuna struggle continues. When we left for home near midnight on September 19, the night owls of the camp were finally drifting off to sleep after hours huddled in a tent to escape the rain, singing songs of love and joy, of sadness and pain.
Cover image: Pennants proclaiming “For the life of the Garífuna people” in the Viva Berta camp. Credit: Liza Schmidt
