Tolupanes Put Their Lives on the Line Defending All Hondurans
Tolupanes Put Their Lives on the Line Defending All Hondurans
Written by James Phillips
Friday, 17 July 2015 11:59
Anniversary commemoration of the killing of the three activist, San Francisco de Locomapa, August 25, 2014. Photo by Lucy Edwards
Source: Cultural Survival
The Tolupanes of Yoro in central Honduras have become major actors in the massive protests and demonstrations that have been filling the streets of Honduran cities for weeks. Revelations that Honduran government functionaries and members of the ruling National Party had drained an estimated 300 million dollars from the national social security and health budget to help finance election campaigns may have seemed like the "last straw." Hundreds of the poor have died without access to adequate medical care. Honduras already has the highest murder rate in the world, massive official corruption and impunity, a non-functional judicial system, rising narcotics and gang violence and political repression, and a national development plan that forcibly and often violently evicts peasant and Indigenous communities for the sake of mining, logging, tourism, and the expansion of corporate export agriculture. Especially targeted have been many of the country's Indigenous Peoples.
For the Tolupanes, the struggle is at three levels--two triggered by recent events within a larger history of ongoing resistance. There is a significant scholarly literature about the history and culture of the Tolupanes. In colonial times, the Spaniards called them Xicaque or Jicaque, by which they meant "savage," "barbarous," or "infidel," and treated them as enemies to be subdued. But an alternative interpretation—that Xicaque is derived from a Nahuatl word meaning “strong or ancient person”—provides an apt description of the Tolupán people. In an effort to bring Tolupán communities under the sovereignty of the state in the 1860s, the government concluded treaty agreements that confirmed some traditional Tolupán land rights. By the 1920s, Tolupanes were working on foreign-owned banana plantations, and were losing their language and some of their cultural customs. Many Tolupanes were also recruited or forced to work on the coffee plantations of large landowners in Yoro. Today there are twenty-five Tolupán communities (tribus) in Yoro.
Tolupán lands contain sizable stands of precious mahogany. In the 1970s, agents of the National Agrarian Institute (INA) and the national forestry agency (COHDEFOR) began awarding portions of Tolupán land to non-Indigenous peasants, loggers, and others, and trying to replace the role of traditional Tolupán community leaders with government forestry agents. To protect their interests, Tolupán communities formed the Federation of Xicaque Tribes of Yoro (FETRIXY). What followed was a period in which dozens of Tolupán leaders and activists were assassinated, including the president of FETRIXY, Vicente Matute, killed in 1982 shortly after declaring, "Better to die before surrendering our rights to the land that is ours.” Since then, as many as one hundred Tolupán leaders and community members have been killed.
Periodically, Tolupán communities have experienced forcible evictions from their land. Armed men in the employ of large landowners arrive in a Tolupán community and threaten to kill the inhabitants if they do not leave by a certain time. The number of these evictions has increased in the years following the 2009 coup. One of several examples recounted by Catholic church workers in Yoro: on August 19, 2013, about 25 heavily armed men arrived at night in one Tolupán community of 112 adults and children--nineteen households. According to a community member who sought refuge with local church authorities, the community was ordered to leave immediately and not to return or they would all be killed. Demands for justice in these incidents are thwarted by the close relationship between large landowners and public officials.
The 2009 coup d’etat that deposed President Manuel Zelaya also ended a moratorium on granting new mining concessions in this mineral rich country. The post-coup government passed a mining law in January, 2013, that resulted in many new mining concessions to foreign companies and Honduran entrepreneurs. Tolupán communities around Locomapa in Yoro found themselves facing development and expansion of antimony mining nearby, and threats to their land and environment. They could not rely on FETRIXY, since many were convinced that its leadership had been compromised by the government and the private mine owner to lend at least passive support for the mining.
More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5398-tolupanes-put-their-lives-on-the-line-defending-all-hondurans
