In Honduras, Defending Your Land Can Be Deadly

Amid Deepening Climate, Criminal, and Economic Crises, Indigenous Activists Are Being Murdered

On May 28, 2023, the body of Martín Morales Martínez was found floating in the Gama River in Triunfo de la Cruz, Honduras. Morales Martínez was Garifuna—a people descended from enslaved Africans, Arawak, and Carib Indians. He was also a respected land rights activist who devoted his life to fighting the theft of Garifuna coastal lands by corporations, investors, and state authorities. His was the most recent in a series of murders of Black and Indigenous land defenders in the country that show how violence, economic development, and race are …

by Christopher A. Loperena | April 3, 2024

Where I Go: Seeing Panama City Through the Eyes of Elders

Experiencing the History of Black Life in the Country Where I Was Born

by Kaysha Corinealdi | October 16, 2023

In 2001, I made my first visit as an adult to Panama City, Panama. The city was both familiar and alien to me. My family migrated to the United States …

Why Did Governments Compensate Slaveholders for Abolition?

Across the Americas, Emancipation Moved Slowly, and Profited Those Who Had Benefited from Slavery Most

by Yesenia Barragan | June 19, 2023

The records are difficult to make out at first—blurred rows listing the names of slaveholders, enslaved individuals, and prices under the dim light of the microfilm reader. But once brought …

What Does the U.S. Owe Climate Refugees?

Central Americans Are Fleeing an Ecological Disaster They Didn’t Cause

by Michael B. Smith | October 11, 2021

Last fall, back-to-back major hurricanes, Eta and Iota, slammed into the Caribbean coast of Central America, creating storm surges and flooding from Belize to Panama. In parts of Honduras and …

Why the U.S. Is So Unfair to Central American Refugees

For Decades, American Foreign Policy Positions Pre-Determined Which Asylum Seekers Get Accepted or Rejected

By Susan Bibler Coutin | June 26, 2018

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ announcement on April 6, 2018 that all unauthorized border crossers will be federally prosecuted might sound like a reversal of U.S. policy. So might his …

Surviving Managua’s Government Crackdowns and Torrential Rains

A Refugee Couple Tends Their Garden in Nicaragua's Ruined Capital

By Douglas Haynes | November 15, 2017

On an overcast afternoon, Julio Baldelomar carries his metal ring of bagged chips past a new tourist attraction called Paseo Xolotlán, named for the nearly Los Angeles-sized lake on Managua, …

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