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Abstract:
The Honduran Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve has become a place of struggle over natural resources. This paper examines a land contest between the Miskito Indians and the Garifuna, an indigenous group and Afro-indigenous group respectively. The area in question is Lasa Pulan, a one square kilometer of forest and farmland, historically shared by both Miskito and Garifuna collectives. Through discursive analysis, this paper traces contemporary discourse and practice that these actors employ to justify exclusive claims to Lasa Pulan. Such contemporary claims are structured by longstanding colonial and postcolonial racial ideologies that stereotypically label blacks as "immoral" and "violent" and Indians as "ignorant" and "backward." This paper argues, through analysis of Miskito and Garifuna claims to Lasa Pulan, that natural resource struggles are simultaneously racial struggles, and it acquaints policy makers with the multiple tenure arrangements in pluricultural Honduras.
INTRODUCTION
In 1958, on the north coast of the Honduran Mosquitia, the Garifuna village of Plaplaya challenged longstanding Miskito Indian control over natural resources. For almost four centuries, the Miskito had dominated natural resource access relative to other indigenous and Afro-indigenous populations in the Mosquitia.1 As a result of rising tensions between the Garifuna and the Miskito over differences in planned land uses, the Garifuna sought assistance from regional officials to divide the communal area of Lasa Pulan, a one square kilometer of forest and farmland located between Plaplaya and the Miskito village of Ibans. The Garifuna requested exclusive control of half of the area to protect agricultural crops against the Miskito cattle grazing in this, hitherto, common land.2 Officials, with the support of Miskito and Garifuna representatives, divided the area of Lasa Pulan between these two communities, marking the new boundaries with a barbwire fence (CACRC 2002b).
More than forty years later, and long after Miskito villagers reportedly destroyed the fence, Antonio Vera, a native Garifuna farmer from Plaplaya, arrived in Lasa Pulan to work on his yucca plantation. Upon arrival, he saw three large cows trampling plants and eating yucca leaves.3 Frustrated, not only at this most recent destruction of his crops, but "for forty years of Miskito disregard for Garifuna farmland," Antonio summoned three men to join him in Lasa Pulan. The men proceeded to kill the cows and then delivered...