Are private cities the miracle cure for Honduras’ surging violent crime, state violence and institutional disarray?
For many Hondurans, the past few years have been among the worst in memory. In the wake of a June 2009 coup that removed leftist president Manuel Zelaya from office, violent crime has soared and state institutions have fallen into disarray if not outright failure. Five months after the coup, the de facto government held elections which members of the political opposition boycotted and regional heads of state overwhelmingly refused to recognize. Under the resulting government, led by the National Party’s Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa, lawyers, journalists, human rights defenders, and Zelaya loyalists have routinely been the victims of threats, arrests and assassinations.
The role of the national police in violent, often politically motivated crime became a liability for the Lobo administration, which responded by developing a highly publicized police reform law. The bill appeared on its way to passage until November 2012, when a Supreme Court panel, by a 4 to 1 vote, ruled the law unconstitutional. Shortly after the court’s decision, the congress, in an extraordinary session reminiscent of Zelaya’s ouster years earlier, voted to dismiss the four justices who rejected the cleanup law. The press raised concerns that the move could turn into a full-blown crisis, many commentators focused on the police reform ruling as the conflict’s source; others pointed elsewhere.
A month earlier, the same four justices had ruled unconstitutional a law that would allow the creation of privately run municipalities with their own police, tax structures, and judicial systems, known as Regiones Especiales de Desarollo, or RED. According to Russell Sheptak, a Research Associate at the University of California and co-author of the Honduras Culture and Politics blog, the proximate cause for the justices’ removal was their ruling on the police reform law. “However, the muttering against them began at the top with Lobo Sosa chastising them over the RED ruling,” Sheptak wrote in an email, “and remained in the background of the debate about removing them.”
A protest against Charter cities legislation in Honduras. Reading: Coup d’etat: Economic crisis + model cities. Image credits: Black Fraternal Organisation of Honduras (OFRANEH)
Charter cities in Honduras?
The idea of building private cities is a divisive one. Many of the country’s elite advanced the concept as something new to spur economic growth. The cities would facilitate foreign investment and development, which would reduce the influence of criminal networks. Those opposing the concept, however, variously rejected the proposition as a neoliberal gift to the rich, a continuation of oligarchic rule and a threat to democratic governance. These objections came in the context of economic policies that have exacerbated inequality, poverty and unemployment. According to a recent report by the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, from 2010 to 2011 over 100% of income gains went to the 10% of Hondurans at the top of the income distribution ladder.
In 2009 Paul Romer, an economist then teaching at Stanford University, started presenting his idea to build new cities in poor countries as an innovative economic development strategy. The RED came to prominence in Honduras shortly after Pepe Lobo met with Romer. The new “charter cities,” as the U.S. economist called them, would be overseen by developed countries with a stronger rule of law and would prioritize investments in infrastructure. Each city would resemble a country within a country and would compete for hard-working, law-abiding residents from around the world. The islands of economic development would, in Romer’s vision, pressure governments to clean up their act and, cumulatively, could have a massive global impact.
Honduras’ governing officials enthusiastically embraced the idea and, given the country’s poverty and crime, Romer likely saw it as a natural fit. Yet after Lobo’s emergence through fraudulent elections, with the country’s institutions in shambles and many leading officials suspected of having ties to criminal networks, one could begin to see the plan’s inherent contradiction: How could you build brand new, principled institutions in partnership with a government so plagued by corruption?
Honduras attempts to solve their violent crime problem with private cities
No comments:
Post a Comment