Garifuna leaders have paid tribute to a prominent musician from their community who died in a plane crash that killed at least 13 people off the coast of Honduras.
Aurelio Martínez was onboard a Lanhsa Airlines flight that crashed into the sea late on Monday while taking off from Roatán, one of the Central American country’s main tourist destinations.
The aircraft, which was heading to the port of La Ceiba on the mainland, “made a sharp turn to the right of the runway and fell into the water”, civil aviation official Carlos Padilla said.
“The plane almost fell on us. I was fishing,” a fisherman told HCH television.
Five people were rescued from the sea.
Martínez, who between 2006 and 2010 was the Honduras’s first Black congressman, had recorded a string of records as well as a Tiny Desk concert for US National Public Radio. He was described by the Guardian in 2017 as “the finest living exponent of the lilting, soulful music of the Garifuna people”.
“We’re devastated,” his nephew Ángel Aparicio Fernández, also a musician who played with his uncle, told the AP. “He was the family’s pillar.”
Martínez was a member of Los Gatos Bravos before forming his own group Lita Ariran. His first album, Garifuna Soul, took him to Europe, the United States and other parts of the world.
“He was the greatest model from Honduras of Garifuna music on a worldwide stage,” his nephew said.
“It is very traumatic, not just for Garifuna, but the world, because he was someone who brought people together from all walks of life,” said Ubafu Topsey, a Garifuna activist from Belize.
Describing Martínez as a visionary and a “Bob Marley type of person”, she added: “The beautiful thing about Aurelio is that he didn’t want to do things just for himself… He came from such humble beginnings and he never forgot where he came from. He spoke and wrote about the reality of our lives and how to be determined to overcome and to be consistent with how our history”.
Freda Sideroff, the Garifuna Queen Mother, said Martínez was a cultural ambassador who would take his place among other Garifuna heroes.
“His death is going to have a deep impact on the Garifuna community because we are still quite a small community and it feels intimate to us,” she said. She added that he has left an enduring legacy as a Garifuna musician and as someone who was proud of “understanding and being connected to Africa”.
The Garifuna people are descendants of enslaved Africans and Indigenous Kalinago and Arawak people. Ejected in 1796 by British colonial forces from their homeland on St Vincent and Grenadines, their descendants settled across the coast of Central America and around the world.
Dramatic video uploaded to social media by the national police showed officers and other rescue workers carrying survivors on to a rocky coastline, some in stretchers, as a nearby boat shone a bright light amid the darkness.
The injured passengers included a 40-year-old French citizen, who will be transferred to hospital in the city of San Pedro Sula on the mainland, said Maj Wilmer Guerrero of the fire department.
Fifteen passengers were onboard the plane, along with two pilots and a flight attendant, police said.
The crash, which happened about 1km from the coast, was caused by an “apparent mechanical failure” on the British-made Jetstream 41, the statement added.
The Honduran president, Xiomara Castro, said she had “immediately activated” an emergency committee made up of the armed forces, firefighters and others to assist the victims of the accident.
Agence France-Press and Reuters contributed reporting