by Luis E. Aguilar (co-edited and
translated by Colectivo Morazán; Source: Resistencia Honduras)
Photo caption: Hondurans protest charter cities proposal. Banner reads: Model Cities Expulsion of Garifuna People from Honduras. Photo G. Trucchi.
Edited for Today’s Insight News by
Carolyn Bennett
Leveraging country against itself, against its people
Leveraging country against itself, against its people
At issue in Neoliberals’ boondoggles, Luis Aguilar says, are
at least two critical elements:
The
Relationship between proposed projects and a country’s tradition of
“development” strategy [and]
The
Cynicism with which circles of power in a country plan and present a substantially
ambitious model to the society that is clearly contrary to the collective
welfare of the people of that country
“Charter Cities”: short term, returns to few, foreign counseled
The “Charter Cities” scheme, proposed at the Honduras Open for Business
or HOB conference of May 2011, Aguilar says, is linked to a “plan by Stanford University
professor Paul Romer.” Though Aguilar was writing about Central America's Honduras,
his observations on the neoliberal invasion of Honduras are the neoliberal
invasion of North America's USA.
“We do not know with
exact certitude what the master design for Honduras is or whether it is being
prepared in Tegucigalpa [Honduras’s capital] in association with Washington or
exclusively in Washington,” Luis E. Aguilar writes.” And the issue is not
whether neoliberal projects can be
implemented, or whether they are being used simply as ‘development’ bait for
public consumption; but what is clear is that ─
Counseling
for the projects comes from abroad and in close collaboration with pro-market
liberalists and the right wing which functions as a transnational network
society.
They
attack a problem they see as temporary and respond with even more elements of
the neoliberal agenda… even creating a particularly new element such as charter
cities.
Imperialists export “American Dream”: divide to conquer
The “Charter City” project (like U.S.
charter schools and cities within cities) in Honduras is a major boondoggle that“falls within the
framework of the anti-union strategies, the last scream of globalization.” It is “a plan to make Honduras (as with other
Latin American countries) a guinea pig for one of the most nefarious
conspiracies of Western imperialism on the working classes.”
In these proposed autonomous cities, where authorities could
sign their own treaties and international free trade agreements, labor laws
would be rendered inapplicable, Aguilar says.
The few vs. the many: In the “Carter Cities” construct, inhabitants
“could establish their own privatized security forces and courts (parallel cities
within cities in U.S. state of Georgia or U.S. Iraq), while offering the
typical tax-exemptions, among other neoliberal policies.
“The Charter City is a physical barrier that offers a legal
framework coveted by transnational capitalists. This experiment ─ which in
essence breaks down the structure of the Nation State ─ is put in place to join
the global system of tax havens, duty-free export processing zones” (maquilas
or maquiladora, processing fees: e.g., foreign-owned factory where imported
parts are assembled by lower-paid workers into products for export) “and other
as yet undefined schemes that place the
desires of corporations above all else.”
Vultures descend into manufactured or inevitable distraction
A society battered by violence facilitates a process of short-sighted
individualization, he says.
Vacuum in infrastructure: In the aftermath of Honduras’s
2009 coup, “right-wing politicians filled with a desperate desire (the United
States’ long-neglected, poorer states and cities) to turn Honduras into some
sort of model of development [invited] neoliberal proposals which continue to
create hotter and more polluted cities,” Aguilar said, “where desperate drivers
stuck in traffic are idiotically happier to have their own space ─
away from crowds of people and protected by
the glass and metal of their own cars as opposed to using public
transportation, requiring people to make contact with each other.
 |
| Together we stand |
“Among other benefits,” Luis Aguilar correctly observes, “large
scale collective means have much longer life …; “they promote local industry
and the transfer of technological know-how.”
But the vultures thwart expansion of collective means. In the
best of cases, as happened in North America, imperialists “halt support of advancements
in technology and research.” From the start of the neoliberal period, Aguilar says,
“imperialism has been erasing collective means from the continent.”
 |
| We stand together |
Sources and notes
“Three Neoliberal Tales in Honduras: The Inter-oceanic
Train, Metro-buses and Charter Cities (Luis E. Aguilar, co-edited and
translated by Colectivo Morazán; Source: Resistencia Honduras), July 29, 2011, http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3138-three-neoliberal-tales-in-honduras-the-inter-oceanic-train-metro-buses-and-charter-cities
Honduras
Republic of Honduras (Spanish: República de Honduras), a Central
American country situated between Guatemala and El Salvador to the west,
Nicaragua to the south and east; on its northern coast the Caribbean Sea, on its
narrow coast to the south the Pacific Ocean. Honduras’s area includes the
offshore Caribbean department of the Bay Islands.
The capital is Tegucigalpa (with Comayagüela) and another
city of equal importance industrially and commercially, though half the capital’s
population. is San Pedro Sula. The bulk of Honduras’s population, citizens presented
with innumerable economic and social challenges in a “developing
nation,” lives a generally isolated existence in the mountainous interior. Britannica note
Coup of June 2009 (Wikipedia
notes)
The 2009 Honduran coup d’état was part of the 2009 Honduran
constitutional crisis that occurred when the Honduran Army on orders from the
Honduran Supreme Court ousted President Manuel Zelaya and sent him into exile
on June 28, 2009. Soldiers stormed the presidential residence in Tegucigalpa
early on the morning of the 28th. They disarmed the presidential guard, woke the
president and put him on a plane to Costa Rica.
Many governments, media, and human-rights organizations
outside Honduras have termed the ouster a coup. Though the U.S. government was
not as unequivocal in its official statements at the time, soon after the event,
a confidential U.S. Embassy cable (later leaked by WikiLeaks) summarized the
legal situation this way:
The
Embassy perspective is that there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court
and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and
unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch, while accepting that there
may be a prima facie case that Zelaya may have committed illegalities and may
have even violated the constitution.
There
is equally no doubt from our perspective that Roberto Micheletti’s assumption
of power was illegitimate.
Nevertheless,
it is also evident that the constitution itself may be deficient in terms of
providing clear procedures for dealing with alleged illegal acts by the
President and resolving conflicts between the branches of government. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Honduran_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
Upside Down World
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Marielle Cauthin
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