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
On August 8, 2025, a hearing took place at the courthouse in the Caribbean coastal town of Trujillo, Honduras. Five Garifuna land defenders and members of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) – Cesar Bernárdez, Luis Fernández, Cesia Guillén, Cindy Barbareño and Gilma Bernárdez – were accused by self-claimed landowners Dagoberto Castillo and Niobi Constantindi Padilla of usurpation and forced displacement.
Criminalized Garifuna land defenders. Photo courtesy of Radio Progreso
As the hearing began against the five defenders, OFRANEH and more than 10 Garifuna communities from across the north coast accompanied by other human rights and Indigenous groups, protested the trumped-up criminal charges. Peacefully confronting rows of police that appeared the day before the judge’s ruling, and denouncing intimidation tactics by the Public Prosecutor Juan González who arrived with a gun on his hip to the hearings, OFRANEH and the communities persisted (1).
This particular land conflict, like many along the north coast, stems from an irregular sale and purchase of land that forms part of the Santa Fe ancestral Garifuna land title.
The issue started when U.S. citizen Connie Lee Makuch, who had irregularly obtained land within the Sante Fe title in the 1980s, irregularly expanded what she had originally obtained and then sold in parts to at least two buyers: The first was 5 manzanas (or roughly 12 acres) to Castillo and Padilla, and the second to the Canadian tourist company NJOI Beach Residences.
When local Garifuna community members began a land recovery project on the plot that Castillo and Padilla had obtained, the couple filed charges against the five Garifuna community members.
Yet across the Trujillo Bay region, the Garifuna communities have been recovering their lands from tourist and gated-community projects for years. Since Canadian tourist companies and investors, like the Canadian “King of Porn” Randy Jorgensen, NJOI Beach Residences and individual investors like Makuck, began to use corrupt and irregular practices to buy and sell land in the Trujillo region, the Garifuna comunities have consistently made their ancestral land rights known.
With respect to this most recent criminalization against the five Garifuna land defenders, investors like NJOI are nervous that their gated communities, that they had pitched and sold to U.S. and Canadian investors, are at risk, particularly given that NJOI obtained the land for their project in a similar manner as Castillo and Padilla.
Miriam Miranda, Coordinator of OFRANEH, leads the spiritual drumming ceremony outside the courthouse as the initial hearing kicks off, August 8, 2025. Photo by Karen Spring
On August 19th, and largely because of the political pressure and legitimate claims of the Garifuna to the land at question, the Trujillo judge dismissed all (trumped up) charges against the five defenders. The judge ordered that the issue involved a land dispute that needed to be resolved in a civil court.
Randy Jorgensen (and other Canadian investors) linked to money laundering, fraud, and trafficking artifacts
The struggle to reclaim Garifuna land in Trujillo is far from over. Since April 2024, a specialized Tegucigalpa-based court ordered the seizure of all assets and properties tied to Canadian investors Randy Jorgensen, Malik Zachariah, and Darren Wade Weeks, including gated community projects Campa Vista, Alta Vista Beach, Campo del Mar, Alta Vista Mountain, and Corazalta.
Screenshot: https://trujillohoacommunity.frontsteps.com/
In the legal file, Honduran investigators outline how the implicated Canadians worked together like a transnational organized criminal group to commit money laundering and fraud. Despite the seizures across Trujillo Bay, none of the Canadians have been formally charged.
In light of the seizures, the Garifuna and other Indigenous communities in Honduras began a land recovery effort and declared the property previously known as Campo de Mar where Randy Jorgensen once lived, as the New Ancestral Center of Garifuna Knowledge ‘Hachari Wayúnagu’ (2). But when they first entered the land, they came across thousands of Indigenous artifacts that they suspected were stolen.
In response, on November 26, 2024, OFRANEH, their legal team, and Indigenous and women’s organizations presented a formal legal complaint against Jorgensen for stealing and illicitly trafficking and commercializing Indigenous artifacts (3).
Meanwhile, despite the land and asset seizures and the legal complaints against him, Jorgensen remains in the Trujillo Bay region. Together with other nervous Canadian investors concerned that the land issues associated with their tourism and gated community projects are being exposed, Jorgensen continues to try and find ways to evict the Garifuna from the land around what once was his personal residence.
Karen Spring, Honduras Solidarity Network
karen@hondurassol.org
www.hondurassolidarity.org
https://twitter.com/hondurassol
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1-https://criterio.hn/delegacion-internacional-denuncia-por-practicas-racistas-y-corrupcion-a-fiscal-de-trujillo/; https://x.com/baraudawaguchu/status/1955640326439456774
Rights Action and 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.
Tourism and ethnicide
With the risk of over-simplification, the greatest 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”.
Canadian and U.S. investors are deeply involved in this slow, relentless process, along with sectors of Honduras’ wealthier “elites”, and investors and companies from Europe and beyond.
What is the land & indigenous rights defense work of OFRANEH & the 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 / garifuna@ofraneh.org / www.ofraneh.org / http://www.ofraneh.wordpress.com
Recent post
Canadian and US tourism in Honduras: Cases of child pornography and sex crimes, past and present
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…”