Aurelio Martínez, who has died aged 55 in a plane crash off Roatán island in Honduras, was a musician and politician who became the leading cultural ambassador for the Garifuna people.
Known simply as Aurelio, the name he used for his recordings with Peter Gabriel’s Real World label, he kept alive, and updated, the music and stories of the Garifuna, descendants of African enslaved people who trace their history back to a 17th-century shipwreck on the Caribbean island of St Vincent.
