The Patronato of the community of San Juan Tela (Durugubuty) and the community Lands Defense Committee denounce the intervention of Vice Minister of Culture Salvador Suazo the evening of Wednesday the 13th, when he arrived in our community, asking to meet with Jessica García, President of the Patronato and Wilfredo Guerrero of the Lands Defense Committee.

The objective of the visit was to warn us of the supposed danger to the community leaders who are at the forefront of our community's struggle for our territory.

Vice Minister Suazo arrived in the evening at the house of Jessica García, where the President was speaking with Yolanda Lambert, another member of the community Patronato. Suazo pointed out that only a few days before he had spoken with members of the Rosenthal family, who had expressed the need to come to an agreement in private with members of the Patronato, so that the community cease to reclaim Nuevo San Juan, part of the community's ancestral lands being claimed by powerful businessman and politician Jaime Rosenthal.

He also stated that the community's struggle is getting in the way of the development of a tourism mega-proyecto in the region.

When the two Patronato representatives explained that they could not reach an agreement without the participation of the entire community, Suazo responded that if he were a politician and had plans to carry out a mega-project, the easy solution would be to eliminate one or two key opponents in order to complete the project without obstacles. Furthermore, he wondered aloud -- if there are already two dead, how many more will there be?

The threats uttered by Suazo, a governmental representative in the current administration, have created great unease and tension in the community. Two weeks before the current government was even inaugurated, the community was already under pressure from the Rosenthal family attempting to take over the sector known as Nuevo San Juan, home to some 300 families, around 1500 San Juan community members. The community Patronato President has formally denounced Vice Minister Suazo's visit and threats to the local authorities.

It confuses us that under the so-called Government of Citizens' Power, the situation begins to replicate that of the massacre of 1937. Over the past few months, we have lived through the February 26 murder of community youth Epson Andrés Castillo and Yino Eligio López by agents of the armed forces assigned to protect the planned construction site of the Los Micos Beach & Golf Resort, numerous threats to our Patronato president Jessica García, and the recent murder of young Mirna Isabel Santos.

These grave violations caused the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to order protective measures both for our community leaders and for our community's ancestral lands; however, national and local government authorities have ignored these measures. Despite several meetings with the corresponding government bodies -- Ministries and Secretariats of the Interior and Justice, Security, Finances, Foreign Relations, Supreme Court of Justice, among others -- measures have still not been taken to defend the lives and safety of those threatened nor to halt the negative actions of the Municipality of Tela affecting our territory.

It is lamentable that Vice Minister Suazo, considered a prestigious Garifuna intellectual by many, has allowed himself to become a spokesperson for the most reactionary wing of the Liberal Party instead of defending the interests of his People. But it is not the first time that he has represented the interests of the Honduran oligarchy. The land titling process carried out by his NGO CEDEC in the communities of Iriona in the 1990s served to exclude the functional habitat of the communities from the community land titles, ignoring the fact that the communities' ancestral lands extend southward up to the Sico river, limits previously identified in ejidal titles. We understand that there exist Afro-decendant NGOs who struggle for inclusion at the expense of the Garifuna people's rights.

We alert national and international public opinion to the campaign that exists against the rights of our community and our leaders and to the complicity of Vice Minister Suazo in the economic interests that threaten the lives of those of us who defend the territorial rights of the Garifuna people.

San Juan Tela, September 18, 2006.

Jessica García, San Juan community Patronato President Wilfredo Guerrero, San Juan community Lands Defense Committee