Much as I might like to do so, I don’t have the time to comment on everything (though sometimes I admit to trying to do so).  Working as I do in a tourism related field, or at least, having book sales that depend largely on foreign interest in this country, which is usually the result of, or results in, tourism, I though one of the most profound remarks I have ever read came from “Heyduke”, writing about tourism in Chiapas (where he lives) in a thread on the Lonely Planet’s Thorntree Message Board.

Tourist love every place to death

Which I thought of, when I read Karen Spring’s “Tourism & Ethnocide in Honduras” posted on Quotha.

On the beach of Trujillo, Caribbean coast of Honduras, at sunset in the now disappeared Garifuna community of Rio Negro, steps away from where Randy Jorgensen’s “Banana Coast” cruise ship dock is set to be built.

Supposedly, the cruise ship dock is an important piece of the privatized “Model City” construction plan.

Various Canadian investors – including Canadian ‘Porn King’ Randy Jorgensen and the Canadian Shield Fund (with investments from Barrick Gold, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Canadian oil and gas companies and others) – have partnered up and have held meetings with President Pepe Lobo of the post-military coup regime to plan the construction of a large-scale tourist project, presented as a privatized Model City, on the north coast of Honduras, in Trujillo.

Canadians investors are pushing the project forward while indigenous Garifuna communities, resisting the illegal incursion of this “development” project onto their communities, are being threatened and forced out.

Lands that have been ‘acquired’ illegally are being pitched and sold to buyers in Canada. Poor Hondurans are being exploited and excluded from decisions pertinent to their community and cultural survival under the so-called banner of ‘developing Honduras’ that the post-coup regime and Jorgensen are so desperate to promote.

(Read the whole article here)