Five Years Later, No Answers for Disappeared Garífuna Defenders 

Image Description: Confidencial HN.

Five years ago today, four land defenders were kidnapped from their homes in Triunfo de la Cruz, a Garífuna community on Honduras’ Caribbean coast. In the early morning of July 18, 2020, armed men wearing the uniforms of the Honduran Criminal Investigation Department (DPI in Spanish) abducted Sneider Centeno, Milton Martínez, Suami Mejía and Gerardo Tróchez from their home. These four were members of the long-standing and resilient fight by the Garífuna people to reinstate communal sovereignty over their ancestral lands, in the face of corporate and political interests that threaten their communities.

In 2015, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) ruled that the state of Honduras had violated the rights of the Garífuna community of Triunfo de la Cruz by supporting violent land theft, and that the state had a responsibility to implement reparative measures, including demarcating land belonging to the Garífuna community, and investigate acts of violence against them. Garífuna community defenders have denounced the kidnappings as part of a wave of violent retaliation in response to the IACHR case. Before his disappearance, Sneider Centeno was the president of a Triunfo de la Cruz community council which advocated for the state to implement this ruling and end the illegal appropriation of Garífuna land. Milton Martínez and Suami Mejía were members of the Garífuna Land Protection Committee.

After five years of seeking justice and safe return, the whereabouts of the Triunfo de la Cruz defenders remain unknown and nobody has been held accountable for their kidnapping. Activists have decried this event as just one instance of a systemic effort to violently displace Garífuna communities from the Caribbean coast and punish their resistance, with the complicity of the Honduran state. 

The Garífuna Struggle

The Garífuna people are an Afro-Indigenous group with a presence across Central America, but concentrated on the northern coast of Honduras, descended from Indigenous Caribbean and African peoples. The Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), a leading Garífuna organization, has fought for decades against a campaign of displacement and genocidal violence against Garífuna communities in Honduras.

National and international business interests have attempted to push Garífuna communities out of their lands along the coveted north coast to make way for neoliberal development projects. As the Honduran tourism industry expands, beachfront resorts and properties along the Caribbean coast have violently displaced Garífuna communities. This includes in Triunfo de la Cruz and surrounding communities, where tourism megaprojects like the Indura Beach and Golf Resort and the Playa Escondida Beach Club have been built on stolen Garífuna land. Palm oil giant Dinant Corporation, which has long waged a campaign of violence against campesino farmers in the Aguan Valley, has also violently stolen significant tracts of Garífuna land, some of which has been recovered by OFRANEH. The imposition of ZEDEs, special economic development zones which permit foreign investors to act outside of the confines of Honduran law, have also threatened Garífuna communities – OFRANEH has stated that 20 of the 47 Garífuna communities on the Caribbean coast face threats to their sovereignty due to ZEDEs. The law on ZEDEs allows for projects to proceed without community consultation in “low population zones” and areas along the Caribbean Sea, which encompasses much of Garífuna territory – depriving Garífuna people of their right, enshrined in international law, to free, prior, and informed consent of development on their territories.

These patterns of violence have not only been enabled by the Honduran government, but also supported and funded by international financial institutions, including the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Garífuna communities are also vulnerable to the violence of criminal groups using the Caribbean coast to traffick drugs, and subject to false accusations by the state of collaborating with the same drug traffickers that threaten their communities. Community leaders who have sought to fight against these campaigns of mass displacement have faced extreme violence in retaliation, often with the assent of the Honduran state.

The kidnapping of the Triunfo de la Cruz defenders is not an isolated incident; Garífunas who speak up for their community’s right to self-determination have been violently targeted, while their cases remain in impunity. The latest incident of forced disappearances faced by the Garifuna people occurred in April of this year, against a community member from Punta Piedra, where another IACHR ruling demanded the restitution of Garífuna land to the community. Max Castillo, the brother of the president of the Punta Piedra Community Council, was kidnapped by self-identified police officers; after three months, the State has provided limited information about his whereabouts, despite formal complaints and demands for his return. Garífuna defenders face violence beyond forced disappearances; in 2023, a member of the Land Defense Committee in Triunfo de la Cruz, Ricardo Arnaúl Montero, was murdered after facing months of death threats, one of over 150 murders of Garífuna land defenders between 2018 and 2024. Miriam Miranda, the general coordinator of OFRANEH, has faced violent attacks and threats to her life as recently as April 2025. Honduras continues to be one of the most dangerous countries on Earth for those who defend their land and community against the encroachment of extractive and violent megaprojects.  

Garífuna communities continue to actively face violent displacement. In Nueva Armenia, the community has sought to recover its land from theft by a palm oil company, while the community of Vallecito continues to struggle to recover land stolen by Dinant. In Trujillo, Randy Jorgensen - a “businessman” accused of fraud and known as the “Canadian King of Porn” - has violently stolen land for his personal real estate projects, as well as stealing Garífuna artifacts. On his behalf, the private security company Fenix Security recently entered the ancestral Garífuna knowledge center in Trujillo to forcibly evict the community there. In the face of immense violence and eviction with no justice, Garífuna communities continue to resist corporate land grabs and revindicate their rights as Indigenous people. 

Forced Disappearances in Honduras

Forced disappearances, as defined by the United Nations, are abductions or arrests that occur with state approval outside of existing frameworks of justice. The abduction can be done by state officials or by those acting under the approval or complacency of the state. After a forced disappearance, the state typically refuses to acknowledge that an injustice has occurred, and conceals the location and status of the detained person. The detained person lacks the legal protections afforded to those formally arrested, and disappearances continue in impunity without answers or justice for the impacted communities. 

In Honduras, forced disappearances have been used against human rights defenders fighting to defend their lives, lands, and communities. The four defenders kidnapped in Triunfo de la Cruz and the disappearance of Max Castillo in the Garífuna community of Punta Piedra are some of the most significant recent cases. However, other groups have faced similar violence. In January 2024, José Abel López Perdomo, a member of a campesino cooperative in the Bajo Aguán, was forcibly kidnapped by armed men and has not been seen since. Police reaction to his kidnapping was slow, and the paramilitary groups who persecute campesinos in the Aguán are suspected to have ties to police and military officers. Many other campesinos who have been forcibly disappeared or abducted were later found murdered

Justice Is Yet to be Reached

In the wake of the forced disappearances, Garífuna communities mobilized to demand the safe return of their neighbors, declaring that las vidas garífunas tambien importan - Garífuna lives matter too. In response to the state’s unwillingness to thoroughly investigate the case, the local community created SUNLA, the Garífuna Committee to Investigate and Search for the Disappeared of Triunfo de la Cruz. OFRANEH has denounced the government for excluding SUNLA from their investigation of the case, despite recommendations from the UN and IACHR. Five years later, the State’s investigation has yet to produce any concrete answers about the whereabouts of the four disappeared defenders, and the extractive projects which they protested against remain in full force against their community. In 2022, when OFRANEH members attempted to demand information about the investigation from the Public Prosecutor’s office, their leaders were met with baseless criminalization charges. The State has further refused to implement the restitutions mandated by the IACHR rulings in favor of the communities of Triunfo de la Cruz, Punta Piedra, and San Juan; in April of this year, OFRANEH denounced the government commission to implement the rulings, saying that the state’s action was so limited and ineffective that the commission was, in fact, dead. 

During their April 2025 mobilization to Tegucigalpa, OFRANEH declared the CIANSI dead.

The Calan Institute stands in solidarity with OFRANEH in demanding justice and answers in the kidnapping of Sneider Centeno, Milton Martínez, Suami Mejía and Gerardo Tróchez, and in demanding an end to the campaigns of displacement and land appropriation against Garífuna communities. Multinational corporations and development banks must cease their support of violent displacement and ensure that they make reparations for their harms against Garífuna communities. The State of Honduras must commit to protecting the Garífuna people and restituting their land, in line with the now decade-old IACHR rulings. In the face of continued violence against Garífuna lives and territories and impunity for the kidnapping of Garífuna land defenders, we stand with Honduran communities in insisting: vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos. You took them alive, we want them alive.

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Aguán News Alert | June 2025