Afro-Descendant & Indigenous: News & Updates

Recent elections in Honduras have returned right-wing leadership to power, with immediate implications for the autonomy of Indigenous communities.

learn about small scale banana and cacao farms 

learn about small scale banana and cacao farms 

This Equal Exhange article tells the story of two women who found hope in cooperatives 

Between 2015 and 2025, Honduras recorded 113 murders of environmental defenders, and nine out of ten cases remain unpunished, according to data from the Association for a More Just Society (ASJ). The departments of Colón, Yoro, and Atlántida account for the majority of these crimes, in territories marked by conflicts over land and natural resources. Meanwhile, environmental organizations and defenders denounce the lack of progress in investigations and the absence of state protection for those who defend the environment.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has now ruled in favor of four communities harmed by the government of Honduras and outside investors.

The ancestral homelands of the Garífuna people are the coastal lands of northern Honduras and islands just off  the coast. In 2003 they began filing legal complaints with the the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (based in Washington, DC for their government’s violation of its cultural and territorial rights.  Now more than a decade since the first court ruling in their favor, the government of Honduras has failed to implement the court orders. A big stumbling block is that the communities that won their cases in the Inter-American Court (2015: Triunfo de la Cruz and Punta Piedra; 2023: San Juan) are fighting private corporations and foreign investors who have a lot at stake. Some have already illegally usurped lands and built tourist resorts, so it’s tricky to figure out how to return ancestral lands to the Garífuna people and compensate the companies and investors for their losses.

As Garífuna leaders have become more vocal after the 2015 ruling, the persecution against them has increased—surveillance, intimidation, violence, criminalization. Repression is expected to increase following the fourth favorable ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. On March 4, 2026, the international body “declared the State of Honduras responsible for the violation of the rights to collective property, participation, access to information, cultural identity, food and personal integrity of the Garífuna Community of Cayos Cochinos and its members.”

 Cayos Cochinos or Cochinos Cays consist of two small islands and 13 smaller coral cays situated 19 miles northeast of La Ceiba on the Atlantic coast of Honduras. The archipelago of cays is an ancestral home for the Garífuna people, whose subsistence, cultural identity and spiritual relationship are closely linked to the sea and artisanal fishing. Once the state declared the cays a protected environmental area, it authorized tourism and reality TV filming but restricted the Garífuna’s fishing rights. All of this done, of course, without prior, free and informed consultation of the community—in violation of international law.