World Health
Conference and “Censored” Topics in Health- Incomprehension and Destruction of
Plants Puts in Danger Traditional Medicine
By Wendy
Griffin
In the
Internet video “La Aventura Garifuna” about his life, Honduran Garifuna singer Aurelio Martinez who has played in Seattle several
times, including most recently at the Bumbershoot Music festival this year, also tells the story behind his song “Yalifu”
(The Pelican) which is related to how his father left Honduras when he was 3
years old and he never saw him again until he was over 20 and playing in a
concert in New York City. He wrote “Yalifu” when he was about 14 years old and
the song talks about how he wanted to fly away like the pelican, and be where
his father was (in New York).
Modern
Honduran Garifuna music songs frequently has themes related to immigration-why
people left, why their family did not want them to leave, how they feel when
they are gone and the poverty of those at home, and how they feel when their
family members are coming back from the city where the buildings scrape the sky
to the humble and often very poor Garifuna villages along the Central American
coast.
Some of the
reasons they come home is to participate in traditional healing ceremonies for
themselves or for family members or to bury their dead relatives or to spend
their last years in a Garifuna village close to the sea and die there, close to
the ancestors who saw them grow up and leave. Sometimes they go home for treatment with
plants, like a New York Garifuna who told his mother, a famous healer with
plants, that he had diabetes, and she made him a tea of a bark of a tree common
in Trujillo, Honduras. He took some of the tree bark hidden in his suitcase to
finish the treatment in New York City.
When he went back to New York, after finishing
drinking the tea, he was tested, and he had no more diabetes. The doctor asked
him, “What did he take?” and he lied, saying “Nothing.” Whether his doctor would drop him, or his
insurance would drop him, for taking a medicine not on the prescribed protocol,
he was frightened to tell the doctor what he took, even though it cured him.
Five years later, still no diabetes.
A Maya
Chorti plant specialist said one of his patients went to a Honduran university
trained doctor after he saw him, and told him about taking medicinal
plants. The doctor yelled at the
patient, “What? You are going to die!” The issue that maybe insurance protocols
and doctor prejudice are keeping patients from getting well because they try to
prevent them from accessing alternative treatments, is also up there with
“censured” topics.
When my
sister in Florida had a sinus infection, the doctor gave her a medication, that
I kid you not, said right on the box “causes death in children under 10 years
old”. She thought if this kills children under 10, it can not be good for
people over 50 either. I treated her with a Honduran cure of hot chilis
dissolved in water, which made the sinuses open up and all the infection to
come out. Hot chilis do not cause death. The fact that home medicine (medicina
casera) based on plants is cheaper, safer, and often more effective than
hospital medicine is a common topic of conversation among the Garifunas, Pech
Indians, and Hispanics in Trujillo, Honduras, but it is probably a censured
topic, too, at a conference about “health”.
In the
video about the Ciudad Blanca Honduras, on Youtube, there is a Garifuna guide.
He shows some of the medicinal plants in the Honduran Mosquitia rainforest in
the Rio Platano Biosphere, which has 5 Garifuna communities living there. He
comments that aid is coming to supposedly protect the Rio Platano Biosphere,
the aid is coming, but the Biosphere remains the same. That video was made in 2000 and the people in
the video are shown travelling through heavy rainforest cover.
In 2011 another
video was made of the Rio Platano Biosphere called “Paradise in Peril” which is
on Vimeo.com. It begins with showing the Biosphere burning, and then the
cattle, and the Hispanics, and you realize looking at the two videos, that in
fact much of the Rio Platano Biosphere’s rainforest and many of those 600
species of known medicinal plants that they were using that were known there are gone, just as the
Pech Indians have been telling me.
The Commissioner for the Rio Platano Biosphere
under Pepe Lobo’s government that left office in Janaury 2014, was Pepe Lobo’s
son Jorge Lobo. He is now head of the Ministry of Agriculture and Cattle
Ranching under the new government of Juan Orlando Hernandez which took office
in Janaury 2014, and said he would seek the advice of his father Pepe Lobo a
noted cattle rancher in his new post. Pepe Lobo was linked to illegal logging
in the Rio Platano biosphere in the Honduran press even before he was elected. La Prensa newspaper devoted many pages to the
destruction of the Rio Platano biosphere especially near Sico where the Illegal
Highway in the Witness.org video “Lucha Garifuna” goes to.
Two recent
articles by Dr. Kendra Mc Sweeney in
Science and in NACLA links the money
behind the increased deforestation in the Honduran Mosquitia which includes the
Rio Platano biosphere to the need for landing strips and investing drug money
in cattle ranches and African palms in the area as related to drug trafficking,
as these people are known as “narcoganaderos” (cattle ranchers who are drug
traffickers) and “narcodeforestacion”.
The topic that US taxpayers who funded the
projects Path of thePanther and the Mesoamerican Biological Corredor and German
taxpayers who funded specifically the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve sent money to
protect the Central American rainforest, specifically because it had medicinal
plants in it, and then it did not get protected and these resources are
disappearing at an alarming rate, is probably another one of those “Censored”
topics.
That
sometimes parks were established and funded through US tax dollars, that
purposely kept traditional people out of the parks so that they could not get
to traditional medicinal plants or woods needed to make drums or medicinal fish
or animals, while the native people had protected the forest there for
centuries specifically so that they could collect plants, animals or fish
there, that too probably fits in the “Censored” topics. See Keri Brondo’s 2013
book Land Grab or my books Los Garifunas de Honduras and Los Pech de Honduras
for examples. This issue is affecting Africans in African parks too like in
Kenya, where World Bank money is related to the expulsion there, just as it is
linked to the African palm industry in Honduras. The president’s brother and long time politican
and congressman for the department of Colon where Sico is, Moncho Lobo, lived
in the same fairly small town Bonito Oriental as the drug king pin family Los
Cachiros who were heavily invested in African palms and their processing, and
that Moncho Lobo, another nephew, and Los Cachiros all had investments related
to promoting tourism in the Trujillo area which are worsening the situation of
the Garifunas there, is one of those situations that made her say, The
different people involved in cattle ranching, African palms, deforestation, and
drug trafficking in the area are just one relationship away from each other.
The whole issue of drug companies or seed
companies trying to patent traditional knowledge and plants that God gave us,
known as biopiracy in Latin America, and how these types of Intellectual
Property laws actually inhibits medicinal plant study and prevents sharing and
developing better methods or better medicines, instead of improving access to
health as the Intellectual Property Law proponents claim, is also probably one
of those censored topics at a conference about health. It is noticeable that in
English we equate medicine with health, like the words medical schools, and
medical conferences, but in Spanish “salud” health is actually considered to
have been attained when you are not taking medicine.
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