honduras_hawkey_20170814_402.jpg
Marco Rosalio Duarte laughs "Get that horse out of my picture!"
Marco Rosalio is one of the leaders of the Federation of Pech Tribes in Honduras, I interview him in Pueblo Nuevo Subirana, an hour from Dulce Nombre de Culmí, Olancho, Honduras.
The village has 850 inhabitants, almost all of them are indigenous Pech. There are only 6,000 Pech people.
"About a quarter of the people in the village speak Pech as their mother tongue, everyone speaks a bit. Pech is taught now in the schools, but most people communicate with Spanish, particularly the young people."
"The village is surrounded by forest, mainly broadleaf but some pine. The area is now a protected area, the National Congress recently approved it."
"There are flaws in the reservation agreement. There are 16 white ladino families inside this new anthropological reservation, they have a bit of money too, and it's harder to move rich people than poor people in this country. It will be very hard to move them."
"For protecting our area, we are threatened. Some families have entered our territory recently and have cut down forest and burned the trees to make pastures for cattle. Their intention is to make money. Our intention is to protect the environment, the forest, the water. We've made declarations to the police, and those people will go to court. This isn't the normal way of doing things here, a lot of violence is used, that's the mentality here. Berta Cáceres is just one of hundreds of people who've been killed for protecting the environment and indigenous rights. At the moment we have death threats against us for trying to protect the environment and our territory. We insist on the use of law to resolve these problems."
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- (c) Sean Hawkey All Rights Reserved sean@hawkey.co.uk
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- Keywords
- Contained in galleries
- Honduras: Maya ChortĂ, Pech, Lenca, Tolupán