The Venezuelan diplomatic mission in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines attended the 11th International Garifuna Conference 2024, which was held from March 11–13.
The conference was held under the slogan “Promoting Reparatory Justice: Towards the Development and Implementation of a 2030 Indigenous People’s Development Plan,” organised by the Garifuna Heritage Foundation.
The Mission in a X posting said, “This conference is held every year in the month of March, in commemoration of the mass expulsion of the indigenous Garífuna people, which occurred on March 11, 1787.”.
The opening ceremony for the conference was addressed by Professor Jovan Scott Lewis, an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke University Press).
As part of the sessions, there was a panel of speakers presenting on the topic “The Significance of Balliceaux to Garinagu in the Diaspora.” These panellists described the situation of Garifuna communities in various countries, including Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.
The Garífunas come from a mixture of the Caribs and the blacks who arrived in St. Vincent in 1635 from Nigeria.
The Garifuna people were exiled in the 18th century to Balliceaux Island, where they were subject to persecution and genocide by the British crown that was colonising Saint Vincent at the time, the Embassy stated.
