The fight against foreign developers buying Caribbean beaches

On the small Caribbean island of Barbuda, the Pink Sands Beach Bar played host to locals - and the occasional tourist - for more than 20 years.

"It was a very warm place," says Miranda Beazer, its former owner, describing how people used to gather there to play dominoes, or to relax after church on Sundays.

Named after the rose-tinted sand it stood on, the bar was a cornerstone of the local community, until Hurricane Irma hit the island in 2017, when all of the roughly 2,000 Barbudans were evacuated to sister island, Antigua.

Miranda's bar - and her house - were destroyed. "There's nobody that was unscathed... it was devastating. I cried for two weeks," she says.

Before the bar could be rebuilt, her husband died. Foreign developers started to offer her large amounts of money for her plot - but she refused them all.

"It's not the money that I'm after," Miranda says, "I actually want to retain my land."

Then, the bulldozers came. What remained of the bar after the hurricane was demolished by foreign developers, Miranda alleges.

Since then Miranda has been fighting a legal case to regain access to what she argues is her land.

However, this is complicated by Antigua and Barbuda's property laws.

Land ownership in Barbuda is collective, meaning that individual citizens have the right to occupy a plot of land by applying for a lease, but technically, they do not privately own it. Instead, all land is owned communally, and citizens share the collective right to be consulted and to have the final say on major developments.

The ownership system was established after slavery ended in Barbuda in 1834 and was officially recognised by the government of Antigua and Barbuda in 2007, when the Barbuda Land Act was passed.

Miranda says she owns the lease to 30 acres of coastline, but currently she only has access to eight.

The Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), a network of lawyers that is supporting her, says the rest of the land is being illegally occupied by foreign developers Murbee Resorts and Peace Love and Happiness (PLH).

In a statement, Murbee says that........

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