Cruise Boats Have Arrived in Trujillo and Tela Bay Prepares for Business

Cruise Boats Have Arrived in Trujillo and Tela Bay Prepares for Business

By Wendy Griffin 2014

As promised the first cruise boats have arrived in Trujillo at the new Trujillo Cruise Boat Port.  During the month of February 2014, a small cruise boat, the Yorkton of the Horizon Lines, was scheduled to arrive three times.  This was a difficult time for cruise boats as a cruise boat had forced to turn back after hundreds of passengers and some of the crew got sick on a cruise boat in the Caribbean which had planned to visit Haiti, yes the same Haiti that has hundreds of people sick with cholera, widely reported to be caused by the shit of UN Peace keeping forces in the rivers,  and the island has not yet fully recovered from the earthquake. While the last of the spring cruise boats has left, plans are already being made and schedules are up for cruises to Trujillo starting back up in October 2014, the heart of the hurricane and rainy season of Honduras’s North Coast.

 

The first Monday, the cruise ship was scheduled to come to Trujillo, it did not. It had mechanical difficulties and so was unable to keep its schedule and actually arrive in Trujillo. Because some local restaurants had bought a lot of food and had it ready to serve the tourists and then they did not show up, one businessman offered food at his restaurant at reduced prices to residents so that at least it did not go bad.  On other occasions when cruise boats had been expected in Trujillo, the major complaint of local restaurant owners was that they invested in a lot of extra food to have it ready and then no one came to their restaurants.  In Trujillo it is not a good idea to have a lot of frozen seafood or meat on hand as the electricity can go out for long periods and they can lose all their food. Robberies of seafood and meat have also been known to happen.

 

When Randy Jurgenson first began to build the cruise port facility in Trujillo, local people were told that the deal was going to be 10% of the gross of the store was going to be the rent of the little stalls at the cruise port dock.  That actually seemed reasonable, so local people would be sure not lose anything.  However this year when it actually came time to rent places, people who led local craft groups were told it would cost $1,200 a month to have a space inside the cruise dock area, whether or not any cruise boats came in.  My initial thought was that almost no businesses in Trujillo except maybe a few grocery stores even gross $1,200 a month better yet have that much to pay in rent.

 

Not unexpectly no one took up the possibility to rent a place at $1,200 a month and finally he let one craft group made up of Ladino women mostly from the Guadelupe Carney area outside of Trujillo which sells at the Tesoros de Honduras gift shop by the Trujillo airport sell on a table in the cruise boat port area.  They did sell $400 worth of crafts.  The women in the group speak almost no English and cruise boat tourists usually only have dollars, but this craft group has an American missionary who helps them sell and market and so the sales went OK for them. They used to sell more when medical brigades came through, but there were reportedly less than 50 people on the ship. The Pech craft people went once to meet the cruise boat and they reported selling nothing, and the cruise boat tourists were not very interested in the crafts. She also said the other people sold nothing the day she went. As she has to pay bus or taxi to go and meet the boat, on the other days, she felt it was a better use of her time to stay home and tend her yucca and plantains and her elderly mother in law.

 

An American woman who was a long time resident of Trujillo had a table near the dock and on the beach to sell crafts which were nice and not expensive. She sold nothing. In the center of Trujillo, a Garifuna woman Gina has a small kiosk where she sells crafts right in Central park in front of the fort and in front of the church. Her crafts are nicely displayed and they are typical of the area and they were not expensive and she sold nothing to the cruise boat tourists. The main restaurant on Central park said they had no cruise boat tourists, and a restaurant owner who speaks English at Rogues Gallery said she had no cruise boat tourists there.

 

Some cruise boat people did go to the restaurant which is below the Municipal building on Central park and overlooks the beach called Vino Tinto. The captain of the ship did get off and look around and he told the Englishman who gives the historical tours of the city that Trujillo was the most beautiful place he had gone in the Caribbean. One Canadian researcher said that he thought the way the tourist trade was being developed in Trujillo would make the local people even poorer than they were, and that would open the area even more the sex trade, which is something the Garifunas of Trujillo are warning there will be terrible prostitution as the cruise boats come in. Part of the problem is the large number of crew who get off, and the other is the number of older men who return as residents who are in search of younger women. So far no measures have been taken to prevent the development of a worse sex trade than there already is.

 

Before Randy Jurgenson was investing in Trujillo he was investing in the Tela region. The Honduran government has been trying to get a mega-tourism project going in the area west of Tela for about 20 years. It has been known as Touranasal, as Tela Bay and as Micos Lagoon and Resort. They seem to have gone back to the name of (Bahia de Tela) Tela Bay in their official communications. The area is located in the area between San Juan Tela, Tournabe and Miami, three Garifuna villages. A new turnoff road has been put in and paved. A new 60 room boutique hotel is scheduled to open in February 2014 besides an 18 hole golf course.

 

While they boast that they will provide a number of jobs in the area, Garifunas interviewed in the Tela area said tourism jobs are paying L200 ($10) a day and they can not feed their kids on L200 a day.  In the Trujillo area, Ladino workmen who were offered work with Randy Jurgensen also at L200 a day sometimes turned it down because they said they could make more money working on their own. The almost non-existant hiring of Garifunas by Randy Jurgensen’s developments has been noticeable. Give us your land and we will give jobs, they say, but then, in the end no jobs and no land. “With land you are poor,” said ODECO president Celeo Alvarez to the Trujillo Garifunas, “but without land, you will live in misery.”

 

Tela had already had a 9 hole golf course, leftover from its days as the location of United fruit company’s headquarters in Honduras, but now they have a real 18 hole golf course in the buffer zone of the Punta Sal National park which protects major wetlands and major rookeries of water birds. The use of Roundup to kill weeds in golf courses in rather notorious in the US and then that gets in the water. The need for water to keep golf courses beautiful is also notorious. The Garifuna communities west of Tela already have problems of salt water intrusion in their water supplies due to taking out a lot of water, and not letting more water get in like taking out the mangroves and drying up the wetlands.

 

One of the first acts of Juan Orlando Hernandez’s government is to authorize funds for the new airport in Tela. Tela has a small airstrip, but taxis usually use it as a road to go to San Juan. Tela is only an hour from the San Pedro Sula airport, actually located in La Lima, United Fruit’s current headquarters in Honduras. The Garifunas in the area of San Juan have been in serious struggles over land with banker, owner of Banco Continental, and politican Jaime Rosenthal who has on three occasions been candidate for President of Honduras. Former Presidents Maduro and Callejas were also from banking families in Honduras.

 

In the area of Tela Bay regional banks like a Guatemalan Rural Development Bank (Banrural) and Pichincha Bank (Panama-$5 million), are involved to the tune of millions of dollars as is FICOHSA, the Honduran bank which IDA branch of the World Bank has an equity position in. FICOHSA’s share in the development is $10 million. 

 

FICOHSA’s positions in Honduran development projects such as the RioBlanco problems with the Agua Zarka dam, and as making loans to Miguel Facusse and the Tela Bay project is what has led to an additional World Bank  Omnibudman’s Report, separate from  the one about Miguel Facusse. BAC Honduras and Ficensa Hondurs have invested $2 million. Remember that Regional and Honduran banks often have such significant amounts of money either because of laundering drug money, or because they are now traded on the Honduran stock market (Bolsa de Valores Centroamericana), plus in the case of FICOHSA the World Bank is funneling money through them.

 

One of the interesting trends noticed in foreign investing in the region since the time of United Fruit is that while the countries think they are getting foreign investors with money to invest, often what they get are people who borrow money on the local market, which is however not accessible to local people. And the Central American governments often guarantee the loans, and at some points in United Fruit’s past, actually put up the money from taxes.

 

Giving away land at much lower than fair market price to foreign investors is also a hallmark of Central American governments trying to develop under liberal or neo-liberal policies. It was done with cattle ranching land, and with banana land, and now tourism land. Who knows what local people might have been able to do if they had received the level of financial assistance that is being given to the foreign investors and the San Pedro elite?

 

When I spoke to Garifuna painters in April 2013, they said Canadians tourists were still coming to the Tela area and buying paintings. But even since April, the Honduran security situation has been declining.  Besides the large tourist resorts west of Tela, there are also newer resorts such as in the Garifuna community of la Ensenada. This is the resort in the Garifuna in Peril movie. Notice the huge swimming pool in an area with a water shortage, the manicured lawn. I have not heard what happened to the Garifuna women who used to sell fried fish on the beach in La Ensenada under little palm frond champas. In the movie there is a scene where someone tries to recruit a beautiful Garifuna girl which he describes as a Barbie, to work in the resort, and not does her brother get in a fight with him, but even older women attack him. Concern about Garifuna girls in prostitution is probably behind that scene. There are restaurants on the beach in Trujillo where no one goes for drinks or the view. The Ladina women who work there supplement their low wages by having sex with the clients, report Garifunas who have worked on the beach.  One man said, these women are like saints for him, he would not touch them. Given the high AIDS in Trujillo, getting involved with beach prostitutes is a way to die.

 

Garifunas who have visited the Garifuna villages around Tela note similar problems of crime, unemployment, drug use, and frustration that exist in the Trujillo and Santa Fe area Garifuna villages, which in addition to mega-tourism are threatened with the proposed Model City to go in based at Puerto Castilla although the Honduran government is working first for the next two year on the Model City going in the Choluteca and Valle Departments, notes the Ministry of Planning (Secretaria de Planificación) website to do the feasibility and citing studies. The area around Suyapa near the UNAH in Tegucigalpa was approved as a special Religious ZEDE or Model City in the November 2013 election, which had many other flaws.