COMMUNIQUE
More than 13 months after the forced disappearance of the president of the Board of Trustees of the Garifuna community of Triunfo de la Cruz, Albert Snaider Centeno Thomas and with him three more young Garifuna from the same community (Milton Joel Martínez Álvarez, Suami Aparicio Mejía García and Gerardo Misael Trochez Calix), we are still waiting for an answer regarding their whereabouts. The young men were disappeared in an operation executed by elements of the Department of the Honduran Investigative Police (DPI) on the morning of July 18, 2020, a day decreed in absolute curfew, in which only the security forces of the country could move freely. These disappearances occurred in a context in which there were other acts of violence, murders, persecution and intimidation against defenders of Garífuna ancestral territories. Today, August 30, in the framework of the International Day against Enforced Disappearances and in a state of total defenselessness characteristic of a failed State and a justice system totally co-opted by the country’s criminal groups,
We demand the following:
We demand that the Public Ministry (Attorney General’s Office) and the Attorney General’s Office of the Republic incorporate the Garífuna Committee for the Investigation and Search for the Disappeared of Triunfo de la Cruz (in Garífuna SUNLA) in the search and investigation processes of the missing young people, based on the principles of the customary law of our People and the Guiding Principles for the search of persons (principles 5, 6, 7 and 8).
We demand that for the due coordination and effective search, a Special Search Commission for the search of the young people of Triunfo de la Cruz and the installation of a Special Prosecutor’s Office for the Fight against Forced Disappearance, based on the guiding principles for the search of persons (principles 10, 11, 12 and 13) be urgently constituted to comply with the Guiding Principles for the search of persons, 12 and 13) that complies with the requirements of due diligence for all stages of the search and investigation process (including officiousness, immediacy and thoroughness of the investigation), and that complies with the guarantees of independence, professional competence and impartiality of the institutions and professionals involved.
We demand compliance with the judgments of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in favor of the communities of Triunfo de la Cruz and Punta Piedra (2015), which will help reduce hostility and pressure from intruders and criminal groups on the territories and prevent the destruction of social, cultural and economic alternatives for the survival of the communities.
We demand to demarcate and title the ancestral lands of collective property to the Garífuna Communities and also guarantee the use and enjoyment, through the regulation of the same.
We demand that a date and time be set for a meeting between the Attorney General and SUNLA representatives, which we have been requesting since July 20 of this year and to date we have not received any response.
Alive they took them, Alive we want them!
Given in the city of La Ceiba on the 30th day of the month of August.