Locals threaten Fiesta's giant hotel development

PAUL RODGERS Business Editor rodgersp@jamaicaobserver.com

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

PLANS to build the largest holiday resort in the Caribbean could be delayed by opposition from local residents, some of whom say their families have lived on the land since the end of slavery in 1834.

The Spanish-owned Fiesta hotel chain announced in March that it would expand its Grand Palladium Jamaica Resort in Point, Hanover, beginning this year.

The first US$280 million ($24 billion) phase was to comprise 900 rooms, including 245 Royal Suites, on land acquired in 2005, the resort's general manager, Dimitris Kosvogiannis, said at the time.

Existing suites at the hotel can rent for as much as $27,600 a night.

Eventually, the company hopes to add another 2,000 rooms, making it, according to Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett, "the largest mega-tourism entity in the Caribbean" with more than 3,000 employees.

But some 200 people who live at Point are disputing the ownership of the land and have recruited the human rights group Jamaicans for Justice to help them.

Residents argue that the National Housing Development Corporation, now the Housing Agency of Jamaica, had no right to sell the land to the resort six years ago, said St Rachel Ustanny of Jamaicans for Justice.

"They're not mere squatters," she said. "Some were able to trace their history on the land to soon after Emancipation."

Locals support their case with various documents, including leases from the Ministry of Agriculture that show that the Government knew they were there, and birth certificates proving that they were born on the site, some of them going back nearly a century.

The community is still poor, with no electricity or running water, but the location is beautiful, with a view across Highway 2000 to the hotel and the sea beyond, said Ustanny

Janice Nicholson, a cleaner who lives at Point with her boyfriend and two sons, has 40 goats on her plot. "I have banana and fruit trees," she said. "Those take a long time to grow."

But even though her family doesn't want to move, Nicholson said she might be deterred from going to court by high legal fees. "If I had the money and it didn't cost too much I might fight it," she said.

Although the residents do not have formal title to the land, they may be able to claim rights under a United Nations charter, said Tamara Muhammad, the senior legal counsel for Jamaicans for Justice.

"It raises indigenous rights issues. These have not been incorporated in national law. But what you can do is write to the UN under special procedures," she said.

Residents said they received eviction notices shortly after the sale in 2006, but have not been contacted by anyone from the hotel company since.

Nor have they received any offer of compensation or seen any plans for their relocation.

But Kosvogiannis said the "squatters" were not on the hotel's land but on property adjacent to it. "If they're evicted and move even two feet onto our land we'll take whatever measures are available under the law to protect our rights," he said.

The expansion project has been delayed slightly, he admitted, but not because of the residents, and the ground breaking is now due to take place in January.

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Locals threaten Fiesta's giant hotel development