On May 28, 2023, the body of Martín Morales Martínez was found floating in the Gama River in Triunfo de la Cruz, Honduras. Morales Martínez was Garifuna—a people descended from enslaved Africans, Arawak, and Carib Indians. He was also a respected land rights activist who devoted his life to fighting the theft of Garifuna coastal lands by corporations, investors, and state authorities. His was the most recent in a series of murders of Black and Indigenous land defenders in the country that show how violence, economic development, and race are colliding there—and how little progress international efforts are making in building a more secure, equitable Latin America.

The Garifuna have a long history of insecurity and displacement in Honduras. Since the arrival of U.S.-owned fruit corporations in the 19th century, their communities have endured successive waves of resource extraction—from bananas to sumptuous beachside resorts—and have seen their rights, including collective property rights, increasingly eroded. In recent years, with the support of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), the Garifuna have turned to international courts to hold the country accountable. But despite significant judicial and electoral victories at a moment when the country’s human rights record should be improving, the violence against them has only worsened.

Murders of Black and Indigenous land defenders in Honduras started during the 1990s, after the country adopted economic policies designed to fuel development in tourism, industrial agriculture, and mining. The lush, water- and mineral-rich Caribbean coastline, which is home to 46 Garifuna communities, garnered the attention of investors in beach resorts and African palm plantations, including some of Honduras’s most prominent families. Land defenders fought back by retaking stolen lands and advocating, with surprising efficacy, for the legal recognition of their rights to the territory they have historically occupied. They achieved many successes, but even gaining title to their lands did not ensure they held them securely.

Tensions inflamed dramatically after the June 2009 coup d’état against President Manuel Zelaya, which thrust Honduras into a period of intensive, state-sanctioned resource plunder. Following his ouster, the government acted swiftly to overturn a moratorium on mining, passed legislation to hasten hydropower development, and in 2013 pushed through a law to incentivize foreign investment in the creation of semi-sovereign “start-up” cities in purportedly unpopulated areas of the country. Over the next decade, Honduras experienced widespread corruption at the highest levels of government and a rapid deterioration of human rights.

Amidst this political upheaval, two cases pertaining to Garifuna land rights disputes—one in Triunfo de la Cruz and the other in Punta Piedra—went to trial at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In both cases, Garifuna accused the government of violating property titles, failing to investigate and prosecute the political persecution of land defenders, and noncompliance with judicial decisions that established the communities’ prior claims over disputed lands.

In 2015, the court ruled in favor of the communities, affirming that the state had failed to protect Garifuna collective property rights. It called for several significant reparations, including returning illegally privatized land to the community and compensation for past harms. The communities were optimistic that justice would be served.

Yet the state has failed to comply with the court’s recommendations. Instead, the policies designed to foment investment and development remain largely intact. Violent attacks against land defenders have multiplied as well.

In 2019, at least 16 Garifuna people were murdered. In 2020, four community leaders from Triunfo de la Cruz were brutally abducted by men dressed in police uniform, leading many in the community to suspect direct state involvement. One of the disappeared men, Snider Centeno, was a member of OFRANEH and the acting president of the communal governing council. Meanwhile, the swelling violence and increasing death threats against activists further weakened the confidence of Garifuna in state institutions. Last year, two more land rights activists were killed in Triunfo de la Cruz—Morales Martínez and Ricardo Arnaúl Montero.

The election of left-wing president Xiomara Castro in 2021 was supposed to bring change. She ran on an anti-corruption and pro-democracy agenda that resonated among a large segment of the population—including many Black and Indigenous voters. But little has changed, underscoring the entrenched corruption within state institutions and the political and economic power of a handful of oligarchic families.

On August 29, 2023, the Inter-American Court again found Honduras responsible for the violation of Garifuna territorial rights in another significant victory. But like previous judgments, the court’s decision lacks an enforcement mechanism. Its implementation requires political will on the part of the Honduran government. That means it has not produced greater protections for Black and Indigenous Hondurans’ rights.

Due to their visible Blackness, the Garifuna people continue to be treated as non-native inhabitants without rightful claim to the lands they have resided on for hundreds of years. Change will not happen in Honduras until the state complies with the court rulings—and until the murders of Martín Morales Martínez and other Garifuna leaders are investigated and prosecuted.

The stakes are high, and global: Many Garifuna have fled to the U.S. searching for a stable future that is increasingly hard to imagine back home. Our thirst for infinite economic growth is not only fueling our climate and biodiversity crisis, but also the displacement of and violence against environmental defenders in Honduras, Latin America, and around the world. From Standing Rock to Triunfo de la Cruz, Black and Indigenous activists are often on the front lines of fights against the expansion of extractive industries and the destruction of ecosystems. The Garifuna peoples’ struggle to defend their territories is just one theater in a shared global struggle over the future of the planet and who gets to share in it.

The post In Honduras, Defending Your Land Can Be Deadly appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But, as someone who has been analyzing asylum since the 1980s, I look at these announcements and see continuity. Sessions’ policies fit a pattern, going back decades, of excluding asylum seekers from Central America from the human rights protections afforded by U.S. and international law.

Central America should not be singled out in this way. After all, asylum law is supposed to be politically neutral. But the reality for decades has been anything but. Concerns about admitting asylees from Central American countries that are close to us, and who are fleeing from regimes that the United States supports, have led to disparate outcomes for citizens of these nations.

Such exclusions began during the civil wars of the 1980s when Central Americans immigrated to the United States in increased numbers, fleeing political violence in their homelands. Because the United States supported repressive right-wing governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, accepting refugees from those countries threatened to undermine U.S. foreign policy.

In this process, politics trumped reality. Central American civil wars were actually fought over such issues as access to land, a more equitable distribution of resources, and political repression, but the United States saw these wars as part of a Cold War fight against communism. So, for example, the United States provided more than $1 million a day in military and economic assistance to El Salvador, despite its government committing widespread human rights abuses, including massacres of peasants and death squad activity.

In 1984, less than 3 percent of the asylum claims filed by Salvadorans and Guatemalans were granted, in contrast to approval rates in the range of 32 to 60 percent for applicants from Poland, Afghanistan, and Iran. U.S. detention centers also used coercive practices to pressure Salvadorans and Guatemalans to agree to depart the country voluntarily instead of filing asylum claims. Detainees generally were not informed of their right to apply for asylum, were threatened with lengthy detention, and were prevented from meeting with attorneys.

This discriminatory treatment gave rise to a community of advocates who, throughout the 1980s, pursued redress in the courts while also trying to sway public opinion. A class action suit, Orantes Hernandez v. Meese, resulted in a permanent injunction in 1988 preventing coercive tactics against detainees.

The process for Central Americans was so unfair that, beginning in the 1980s, religious congregations declared themselves to be “sanctuaries” for Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees in order to draw attention to the need for asylum while also challenging U.S. aid to the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments. Following the conviction of two priests, a minister, a nun and four layworkers on alien-smuggling and conspiracy charges, religious groups and Central American community organizations sued the U.S. government, charging that asylum processes were discriminatory.

This case, known as American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh or “ABC” was settled out of court, enabling these asylum seekers to file claims under rules designed to ensure fair consideration of their cases. At the same time, the 1990 Immigration Act created Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and designated Salvadorans as the first group to receive it.

By joining forces across political divides, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans were able to secure passage of the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) in 1997. To do so, they, their allies, and Central American leaders argued successfully that the U.S. government had granted these immigrants temporary documentation, and that they should be exempted from immigration restrictions adopted in 1996. Importantly, NACARA provides a precedent for creating a pathway to lawful permanent residency and eventually citizenship for TPS recipients.

During the post-war years, violence in Central American countries continued, but shifted from civil war to gangs and crime. The gang violence is the product of multiple factors: impunity granted to human rights abusers; an abundance of weapons; corruption; income inequality; the trauma of the war years; and the rise of drug cartels and U.S. deportation policies, which have sent U.S.-based gang members to Central American countries.

Central American families—particularly in the Northern triangle of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—experienced extreme insecurity including forcible gang recruitment, extortion, sexual violence, assault, and murder in the late 1990s and the 2000s. Yet, just as during the war years, the U.S. government is now arguing that the violence experienced by Central Americans is generally not grounds for political asylum. For example, in a 2008 Board of Immigration Appeals decision, three Salvadoran youth who had been beaten, harassed, and threatened with death and rape for refusing to join the MS-13 gang were denied asylum, despite widespread evidence of such abuses, including the shooting and killing of another youth in their neighborhood who had also refused to join.

While obtaining asylum remained restricted, immigrants living in the United States were increasingly treated as suspects, a process of criminalization that increased their risk of being deported. Immigration reforms adopted in 1996 expanded the range of criminal convictions that incurred immigration penalties, restricted avenues for immigrants to legalize their status, and made detention mandatory for many. Secure Communities, a program launched under President George W. Bush and expanded under President Obama, increased collaboration between police, prisons, and immigration authorities, with the result that for noncitizens, coming into contact with the criminal justice system could result in being deported from the United States.

Prosecution of immigration violations escalated to the point that these now comprise a significant portion of the federal docket. Individuals who had spent most of their lives in the United States and who may even have acquired lawful permanent residency were being removed permanently, resulting in devastating family separations. Latinos—particularly Mexicans and Central Americans—are disproportionately targeted in these enforcement practices.

The current administration’s policies toward Central Americans extend this history of criminalization and of restricting access to asylum—by defining the violence that is part of everyday lives as outside the boundaries of U.S. protection. President Trump has repeatedly associated Central Americans with crime and gangs, referring to their homelands as “shithole countries,” and suggesting that all who enter the country without authorization might be MS-13. Such statements fly in the fact of criminologists’ findings that the foreign-born commit fewer crimes on average than do people born in the United States.

Other Trump actions revisit the past. The administration rescinded TPS, or temporary protections, that had been issued to Salvadorans and Hondurans following natural disasters, despite ongoing violence in Honduras and El Salvador. Sessions also reversed progress that had been made in making the legal case for domestic violence and gang violence as a basis for asylum. It’s true that even before Sessions overruled these rationales, asylum cases based on such violence were very difficult to win, with 75 to 80 percent of such claims being denied. But one impact of Sessions’ ruling is that many asylum seekers will not even pass the first hurdle for asylum seekers—interviews at which they must demonstrate credible fear—and therefore will be unable to submit their claims.

Likewise, even though family separations have garnered attention since the Trump administration adopted a zero tolerance policy on unauthorized border crossings, immigrant families have had to contend with separations of various sorts for decades, if not longer. When legalization opportunities were restricted by the 1996 reforms, immigrant parents were unable to acquire lawful permanent residency, which would have enabled them to petition for children who were left behind in their countries of origin to immigrate legally. Temporary statuses such as TPS do not confer the right to leave the United States and reenter without permission from the U.S. government, so TPS recipients have been unable to visit family members in their countries of origin for years. Deportees are often separated from family members in the United States, and are unable to return legally for visits. Such separations are not as dramatic as those that have currently captured public attention, but they are nonetheless devastating. When I have interviewed immigrants who are seeking legalization opportunities, interviewees have broken down in tears describing their inability to visit their parents on their deathbeds to say goodbye.

This history of exclusion has not prevented immigration. On the contrary, a study by the Pew Research Center found that between 2007 and 2015, the U.S. immigrant population from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras rose by 25 percent, at a time when the immigrant population from Mexico declined by 6 percent. Perhaps this is because immigration is driven less by U.S. policies than by conditions in immigrants’ countries of origin. If so, what is being accomplished by exclusionary policies?

Ending the repeated exclusion of Central American asylum seekers would require bringing asylum policies into alignment with the forms of violence that actually occur in the communities these individuals are fleeing. Then, protections must be zealously enforced, for example, by creating meaningful opportunities for individuals to apply for asylum, providing those who pass credible “fear interviews” with temporary permission to remain in the country instead of placing them in detention, allowing parents and children to remain together; in short, caring for victims of persecution instead of punishing them. Doing so would promote family integrity, support human rights, and alter the dynamics of the historic relationship between the United States and Central American nations.

The post Why the U.S. Is So Unfair to Central American Refugees appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.