Garífunas Confront Their Own Decline

Garífunas Confront Their Own Decline

The Garífuna culture, a "masterpiece" of human heritage according to UNESCO, could disappear as the result of the privatization of Central America's beaches.

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

MIAMI, Honduras, Oct 6, 2008 (Tierramérica).- "The Garífuna were the best sailors in the world," says Jermonino Barrios, standing barefoot on this slender thread of land between the Laguna de Los Micos and the blue Caribbean Sea.

Barrios, 67, a former soldier, speaks proudly of his ethnic group, whose members are scattered across Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

"Before, we had 200 or 300 Garífuna living here; now there are only a few," he tells Tierramérica.

"They went to the United States for work, and other places," he explains with a note of regret, gazing back at the collection of thatched-roof huts lazing under palms trees that front the crashing surf.

In the tumultuous history of Europe's incursion into the Americas and the trafficking of slaves from Africa to its shores, their are few stories as dramatic or moving as that of the Garífuna.

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