Land Grab: Green Neoliberalism, Gender, and Garifuna Resistance in Honduras

5. Representing the Garifuna: Development, Territory, Indigeneity, and Gendered Activism

90 five Representing the Garifuna Development, Territory, Indigeneity, and Gendered Activism Indigenous rights is arguably the most valuable rights-based discourse in the Garifuna struggle for territories. Yet, curiously, while an assertion of indigenous rights increases the ability of ethnic activists to influence state and international policies, only one of the two principal Garifuna organizations embraces these rights discourses. This chapter takes up the differences between the ethnopolitics of La Organización Fraternal Negro Hondureño (OFRANEH) and La Organización de Desarrollo Etnico Comunitario (ODECO), and their approaches to development, beginning with an overview of the relationship between indigeneity and territory. Indigenous Rights and Land-Rootedness Indigenous activism is based on the articulation of a specific meaningful relationship of indigenous peoples to their territories, behind which lies the ultimate political goal of the right to self-determination. The struggle for territory goes beyond land reform to include the right to communal land, environmental protection, and control over development. The link between indigenous identity and control of territory has been credited to the UN-commissioned study the “Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations.” The study began in 1972 and was completed in 1986, resulting in the multivolume work compiled by special rapporteur José Martínez Cobo that has become a standard reference for discussion Representing the Garifuna • 91 of indigenous peoples within the United Nations system (United Nations 2004). The Cobo report identified land-rootedness as the principal marker of indigenous identity (Lâm 2004). Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with preinvasion and precolonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sections of societies once prevailing in those territories or parts of them. They form at present nondominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems. [Cobo 1983] With this definition of indigenous communities, international bodies officially recognized that the ability of indigenous people to survive is inextricably tied to their right to occupy their traditional territories and control local resources. Around the same time, in 1982, the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations was convened to begin discussions of what later became the draft Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This declaration, which was first issued in 1989 and expanded in 1990, raised international consciousness of the issues indigenous communities faced, by advocating the right of indigenous groups to develop their own ethnic and cultural characteristics; to protect their cultural practices and ceremonial, historical, and archaeological sites; to practice their own spiritual traditions; to promote their own languages; to name themselves and their communities; to have a voice in legal and administrative proceedings . . . ; to control their own schools; to have access to the mass media; to gain recognition of their customary laws and land tenure systems; to receive restitution or compensation for lands that have been usurped; to enact a wide range of environmental protection; to actively participate in their own social and economic improvement with state support; to have autonomy in internal and local affairs . . . ; to gain direct representation in the political affairs of the state; and to exercise autonomy in international and local affairs. [Warren 1998:7] The rights outlined in this declaration have been confirmed through additional international declarations and conventions that have come out 92 • Land Grab in the last 20 years. These include: the United Nations Educational, Scientific , and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Declaration of San José, and the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Convention concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries (commonly referred to as ILO 169), and most recently the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. These passages made the link between previously ratified international conventions on genocide and racial discrimination (e.g., the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the 1966 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination) and the necessity of territorial and resource control, claiming that the infringement of this right is both a violation of human rights and ethnocide. Moreover, these declarations note that cultural ethnocide is effectively equivalent to genocide (Lâm 2004). Honduras ratified all of the conventions listed above, providing a legal structure through which indigenous groups can make their claims. ILO...