In 1520 the university educated Rodrigo de Figueroa was charged by the Court of Spain, to decide which of the "hordes" of the Americas could be considered of the "Carib" race, or cannibals, and which others were the Guatiaos, which is to say the "peaceful" indigenous who were friends of Spain. This ethnographic work called the Auto of Figueroa, we can say is a monument to the barbarity of the conquerors that chose to enslave and assassinate those opposed to their designs.

Our ancestors were the Kalinagos, those who immigrated in the XXII century from the coast of Venezuela and Guayana to the Antilles, who due to their determined opposition to the actions of the conquerors, were catalogued as Caribs and for whom a war of extermination was decreed. Nevertheless on the island of St. Vincent the Kalinagus resisted the Spaniards and the other superpowers that sought to colonize their dominions, up until they fell under the yoke of the English in 1795, those who subsequently deported our ancestors to the Island of Roatan.

The Auto of Figueroa continues to be used today, by the international financial institutions and their underlings the nation states. Los Guatiaos, which is to say, the leaders of the peoples submissive to the mandates of the World Bank and the Inter American Development Bank (IDB) are charmed by local politicians and the mafias of "development" as they allow for the exploitation of their territories and the wholesale cultural homogenization linked to "progress." Last year in the month of April the writer Roberto Quesada - the big banana of national writers - published an essay that was published each week as part of an interesting column, relating often to national issues. In the article in question, he opined that the disputes among the Garinagus were similar to the ethnic war in Rwanda. In reality Quesada uses hyperbole as one of his favorite literary techniques, but in this case there was something true. The division that exists is a product of the interference of the whites and mestizos because there is no internal war among the Garifuna people but rather animosities among NGOs who, responding to the politicians and parasites of the moment, had managed to provoke confrontations concerning the management of the celebration of the 211 years.

Last year OFRANEH accompanied the Commemoration in the community of Tocamacho, following the tradition of the communities of Iriona and Gracias a Dios, that revolve around the fiestas of April 12 related to the arrival of our people in Honduras and includes the dramatization of the arrival itself.

This year once again we will accompany this celebration in the community of Batalla, because it is their turn and there we will also develop a Forum on the Adaptation and Mitigation of the consequences of Climactic Change. It is important to stress that the communities of Tocamacho, Batalla and Plaplaya are threatened by an enormous deforestation that has occurred in the River Sico watershed and the destruction of the mangroves of the Laguna de Bacalar.

As descendents of the Kalinagus (Caribs) and of the shipwrecked Africans who made landfall on St. Vincent in the middle of the XVII century, our people carry a rich culture of oral tradition, in which our language of origin, northern Arawak Maipure, we have preserved intact up to the present date, at the same time that the Dugu - the animist religion of our ancestors - continues being the core of the Garifuna cosmovision.

It is important to note that our hero Satuye - he who on March 14 will celebrate 213 years of having been assassinated by the British - was one of the defenders and promoters of freedom of the Caribbean island, on a par with Fedon in Granada, and Toussaint L'Ouverture and Petion in Haiti. The century of the lights in the Caribbean and the black leaders formed the basis for the independence movements of the rest of the Americas.

The governmental celebration of the 211 years - that took place under president Manuel Zelaya - is managed from the Ministry of Tourism and the Ministry of Sports and Culture; we understand that this will be a formal act with the presence of diplomats and donors, where some Afro descendents will dance to the rhythm of the mandates of state, forgetting the tragedy of AIDS, climate change and the systematic pillage of our territories.

In the meantime, without asking for any money from a shrunken and pillaged State, our organization will accompany the communities most marginalized who find themselves on the edge of being devoured by the sea, as almost occurred in 2005, when the Gamma storm turned Pueblo Nuevo into an island and five breaks were opened up along the cost of Iriona, unknown before that time.

The Garinagu people continue carrying the torch of Liberty, although some of our brothers addicted to power dance for the governments of the moment, and feel satisfied to be part of the rituals of a banana republic government.

For OFRANEH the divisions created from within the spheres of government are nothing new. Since last year some white collar Afro descendents have come threatening to take over our office, given their appetite for the funds of DIPA (loans from the IDB), money that we reject categorically, knowing that they come contaminated with a virus called PPP (Plan Pueblo Panama) with which they seek to defeat us along with what remains of our resources and ancestral territories.

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OFRANEH