Canadian tourists blaming Garifuna people (Honduras) working and struggling to not lose lands and communities to relentless onslaught of tourism industry

Canadians Lead Defamation Campaign against Indigenous Garifuna People
By Karen Spring, Honduras Solidarity Network, October 15, 2025

Over the past year, and particularly most recently, a group of Canadians that irregularly obtained land inside ancestral Garifuna land titles in the Trujillo Bay region, have been waging a campaign to discredit, defame and promote hate against the Black Fraternal Organizations of Honduras (OFRANEH) and Garifuna land defenders.

Since last week, images and videos of Garifuna land defenders entering gated tourist complexes on land that has long belonged collectively to Garifuna communities, were circulated to the Honduran media. The TN5 national outlet falsely reported that over 200 properties were being “invaded” in the Trujillo region. Noticias 24/7 falsely claimed that OFRANEH and the government are providing young people with “weapons, drugs and hate … to invade land.”

In response, Miriam Miranda, OFRANEH’s general coordinator, denounced the campaign on her X account: “Televicentro with TN5 Matutino, Hoy Mismo, la Tribuna and other media are carrying out a hateful and racist campaign against OFRANEH and the Garifuna people. Whose interests is this campaign serving? We demand a chance to response and take legal action against these media outlets.”

Painting themselves as victims

The recent campaign is an escalation of efforts to discredit OFRANEH and provoke additional attacks against Garifuna communities.

In April 2024, a Honduran court seized hundreds of hectares of land from Canadian investor, Randy Jorgensen, one of the lead tourist developers in the Trujillo Bay region. Jorgensen is known as the Canadian “King of Porn”, a name coined by a MacLean’s magazine report in 1993.

With Jorgensen in legal troubles because of fraud and money laundering accusations, other investors such as the Canadian company, NJOI are worried. Two of NJOI’s gated-community properties, NJOI Trujillo and NJOI Santa Fe, are located on the ancestral lands of the Santa Fe Garifuna community. Like Jorgensen, NJOI also obtained the lands inside ancestral Garifuna territories in an irregular manner.

Using neo-colonialist language, and their privileged position as investors, Canadians are lashing out against Garifuna land defenders that are gaining ground and recovering land that has been farmed and used by their communities since the late 1700s. The Garifuna communities hold registered land titles dating back as far as the mid-1800s. 

In a video posted to Tiktok in August 2025, Lucia Todos, one of the Canadian owners of NJOI Trujillo Beach Residences, tells Truijllo Noticia, a local media outlet:

“I came in for the first time in 2008, and I have always worked to support the community and bring foreigners, like tourists to this part of the country. I come again to ask, please help because yesterday, we were victims of violence by a group … help, help! Please! I want them to hear me, the President of the Republic that is a woman like me, the Attorney General, please, can you send help to this zone to help me investigate who is behind this … we are scared … please, I ask the President of the Congress, congress representatives, whoever can help, international media, human rights, please. We are in a very, very difficult situation. We are victims of physical violent aggression against people and property … Thank you. Grateful.”

Calling on the Honduran government to help foreign investors instead of Honduran communities is not just a ridiculous request but also a dangerous one for Garifuna that have historically been the targets of racism and discrimination, State repression and violent attacks.

Lucia Todos and NJOI decided to invest in Honduras in the context of a U.S. and Canada-backed military coup in June 2009 that ousted the elected government of President Zelaya. The political situation in Honduras at the time paved the way for irregular land purchases to foreign developers in the Trujillo Bay region. Despite multiple warnings and widespread local knowledge of the existence of collective Garifuna titles, the foreign investors moved forward with their investments, build their beach homes and claim to be supporting “development” in the bay. 

They cannot and should not be requesting assistance for their own mistakes that have long had grave consequences for local communities and OFRANEH. 

Karen Spring
Honduras Solidarity Network
[email protected], www.hondurassolidarity.org 

Recent information

U.S. and Canadian tourism investors at center of land conflicts and criminalizations of Indigenous Garifuna people in Honduras
By Karen Spring, Honduras Solidarity Network, August 26, 2025
https://mailchi.mp/rightsaction/us-canadian-tourism-investors-at-center-of-land-conflicts-and-criminalizations-in-honduras

Canadian and U.S. tourism in Honduras, cases of child pornography and sex crimes, past and present
“A network of child sexual exploitation, human trafficking and other crimes”
By Grahame Russell, March 27, 2025
https://mailchi.mp/rightsaction/child-pornography-sex-tourism-in-honduras

Post includes:

• 2001 article: “[Randy Jorgensen], once known as the porn king of Canada, has been accused of making X-rated videos of children at his vacation home in Honduras”
• 2024 article: “Three Americans and a Honduran ordered detained … in a sex trafficking … [related to] the disappearance of a Honduran university student in 2022”
• 2025 article: “[U.S. citizen] Lee Johnston convicted of aggravated human trafficking in the form of sexual exploitation and crimes of production of child pornography…”

OFRANEH

Since 1998, Rights Action has supported and worked with OFRANEH, the lead Garifuna rights, culture and territory defense and promotion organization based in the Garifuna communities, lands and territories all along the north Caribbean coast of Honduras, and nearby Islands. Karen Spring did this work with Rights Action, since 2009, and then with the Honduras Solidarity Network from 2014 forward.

Tourism and ethnocide

With the risk of over-simplification, the greatest current threat to the Garifuna people – their way of life, lands, culture, and existence as a unique, Indigenous people - is the global tourism industry ‘writ large’ (including gated communities, cruise ship docking areas, five-star exclusive resorts and timeshare condos) that are trying to operate all along the north Caribbean coast of Honduras, and nearby islands, wresting control of Garifuna lands step by step, sketchy or outright corrupted property “sale” by property “sale”.

Land & indigenous rights defense work of OFRANEH & Garifuna people
https://mailchi.mp/rightsaction/ofraneh-garifuna-people-against-ethnocidal-violence-land-theft

In Rights Action’s OFRANEH-Garifuna land & rights defense archive, find significant posts going back some 20 years, about all. 

OFRANEH
@ofraneh / [email protected] / www.ofraneh.org / http://www.ofraneh.wordpress.com

Tax-Deductible Donations (Canada & U.S.)

To support land and environmental defenders, and human rights, justice and democracy defense struggles in Honduras and Guatemala, like OFRANEH, make check to "Rights Action" and mail to:

• U.S.: Box 50887, Washington DC, 20091-0887
• Canada: Box 82858, RPO Cabbagetown Toronto, ON, M5A 3Y2

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Resolution of landmark Hudbay Minerals lawsuits

TESTIMONIO–Canadian Mining in the Aftermath of Genocides in Guatemala
Edited by Catherine Nolin & Grahame Russell (Between The Lines, 2021)

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