{"id":26436,"date":"2013-03-11T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2013-03-11T12:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=26436"},"modified":"2013-03-22T00:32:04","modified_gmt":"2013-03-22T00:32:04","slug":"how-the-media-sanitize-hondurass-brutal-regime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/03\/how-the-media-sanitize-hondurass-brutal-regime\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Media Sanitize Honduras\u2019s Brutal Regime"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the evening of Saturday, September 22 [2012], human rights lawyer Antonio Trejo stepped outside a wedding ceremony to take a phone call. Standing in the church parking lot of a suburb of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, he was shot six times by unknown assailants. Despite his requests, he had been granted no police protection in the face of death threats; Trejo had believed he would be targeted by wealthy landowners over his outspoken advocacy on behalf of small farmers seeking to reclaim seized territories.1<\/sup> In his death, Trejo joined dozens of fallen peasant leaders whom he had defended, as well as murdered opposition candidates, LGBT activists, journalists, and indigenous residents. All were victims of the violence and impunity that has reigned in Honduras since the 2009 coup d\u2019\u00e9tat against its democratically elected and left-leaning president, Manuel Zelaya.<\/p>\n

Earlier that day, Trejo had appeared on television, denouncing the powerful interests behind the government\u2019s push for ciudades modelos<\/i>\u2014swaths of land to be ceded to international investors and developed into autonomous cities, replete with their own police forces, taxes, labor codes, trade rules, and legal systems. He had helped prepare motions declaring the proposal unconstitutional.<\/p>\n

This concept of \u201ccharter cities\u201d has been promoted for a couple of years by Paul Romer, a University of Chicago\u2013trained economist teaching at New York University. He described his brainchild in a co-authored op-ed as \u201can effort to build on the success of existing special zones based around the export-processing maquila<\/i> industry.\u201d A \u201cnew city on an undeveloped site, free of vested interests\u201d could bypass the \u201cinefficient rules\u201d that hinder \u201cpeace, growth and development\u201d worldwide, he argued. With new and stable institutions, the charter city could become an \u201cattractive place for would-be residents and investors.\u201d2<\/sup><\/p>\n

The international press swooned over Romer\u2019s revolutionary idea: Foreign Policy<\/i> magazine named him one of its Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2010 for \u201cdeveloping the world\u2019s quickest shortcut to economic development\u201d;3<\/sup> that same year, The Atlantic <\/i>dedicated a 5,400-word paean to Romer and his \u201curban oases of technocratic sanity,\u201d which held the promise that \u201cstruggling nations could attract investment and jobs; private capital would flood in and foreign aid would not be needed.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the applicability of Romer\u2019s radical vision in Honduras always depended on the enthusiasm of the authoritarian, post-coup government of Porfirio Lobo. Lobo owes his presidency to the sham elections of 2009, which took place under the U.S.-backed de facto military government that overthrew Zelaya and were marred by violent repression and media censorship. With the exceptions of the U.S.-financed International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute, international observers boycotted the electoral charade that foisted Lobo into power.<\/p>\n

Romer\u2019s lofty theories also remained utterly detached from the brutal nature of the collaborating government. \u201cSetting up the rule of law\u201d from scratch in a new city, he contended, would be an antidote to \u201cweak governance\u201d (weak in no small part due to Lobo\u2019s appointment of coup perpetrators to high-level government positions).4<\/sup> In a co-authored paper, Romer also mischaracterized his allies, the \u201celected leaders in Honduras,\u201d as earnest in their intent to end a \u201ccycle of insecurity and instability that stokes fear and erodes trust.\u201d5<\/sup> (Romer offered no comment when Lobo designated Juan Carlos \u201cEl Tigre\u201d Bonilla, accused of past ties to death squads, as the national chief of police.)6<\/sup><\/p>\n

Even on its own terms, Romer\u2019s development theory is disconnected from reality. He has repeatedly invoked Hong Kong as the sunny inspiration for the remaking of Honduras: \u201cIn a sense, Britain inadvertently, through its actions in Hong Kong, did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we\u2019ve undertaken in the last century,\u201d he claimed.7<\/sup> Romer neglected to add that the city developed as a hub for the largest narcotrafficking operation in world history, through which Britain inflicted untold misery on the Chinese mainland. Britain dealt a humiliating military defeat to China (which had attempted to prohibit illegal British opium from entering its borders), took over Hong Kong, and forced China to abandon its tariff controls in 1842. Given that Hong Kong was one of the spoils of a drug war, and that its inhabitants were permitted democratic elections only 152 years after its incorporation into an empire, Romer\u2019s dream for Honduras could just as easily be considered a nightmare.<\/p>\n

Romer\u2019s focus on good rule making is similarly fanciful; his effort to change the rules that engender poverty conspicuously excludes the international legal privileges that allow undemocratic leaders to sell a country\u2019s resources and borrow in its name (he wrote positively of a trade agreement that Lobo struck with Canada this summer).8<\/sup> Romer also approved of the legal architecture that \u201cgives the United States administrative control in perpetuity over a piece of sovereign Cuban territory, Guantanamo Bay,\u201d through a 1901 treaty that he failed to mention was ratified by a militarily occupied Cuba. Whether Romer knows it or not, his endorsement of power politics is clear: Investor-owned cities would be safe from future efforts by governments to repossess sovereign territory, because \u201cCuba respects the treaty with the United States, even as they complain bitterly about it.\u201d9<\/sup><\/p>\n

Romer rebutted criticisms that his idea smacks of neocolonialism: \u201cThere are some things that it shares with the previous colonial enterprises,\u201d he admitted, \u201cbut there\u2019s this fundamental difference: at every stage, there\u2019s an absolute commitment to freedom of choice on the part of the societies and the individuals that are involved.\u201d10 <\/sup>Which choices are available to individuals living under a coercive, illegitimate government is a question left unanswered, and the adulating press could not be bothered to probe further.<\/p>\n

After all, it would be impolite to reveal Romer\u2019s close cooperation with a government whose security forces\u2014many of whom are personally vetted, armed, and trained by the United States\u2014killed unarmed students Rafael Vargas, 22, and Carlos Pineda, 24, as well as pregnant indigenous Miskitu women Juana Jackson Ambrosia and Candelaria Trapp Nelson, among others.11<\/sup> Indeed, the Committee of Families of the Detained and Disappeared of Honduras observed that more than 10,000 official complaints have been filed against Honduras\u2019s military and police since the coup. Such unsavory details might have chastened The Atlantic<\/i>\u2019s ebullient portrait of the \u201celegant, bespectacled, geekishly curious\u201d professor, and would have tarnished President Obama, who praised Lobo for his \u201cstrong commitment to democracy\u201d while providing his brutal security apparatus with $50 million in aid last year.12<\/sup><\/p>\n

In their coverage of Romer\u2019s charter cities, the media have almost entirely excised the innumerable human rights violations occurring under the undemocratic Honduran regime. The New York Times<\/i> is a case in point. About a week after Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and even the U.S. State Department were compelled to release statements of condemnation over Antonio Trejo\u2019s assassination, Times <\/i>reporter Elisabeth Malkin fawned over Romer\u2019s idea while ignoring the killing of one of its most prominent critics. (Romer himself offered no public statement in the wake of Trejo\u2019s death-squad-style killing.) Charter cities promised to \u201csimply sweep aside the corruption, the self-interested elites, and the distorted economic rules that stifle growth in many poor countries,\u201d asserted the imperturbable Malkin. She added with uncommon journalistic authority, \u201cNobody disputes that impoverished, violent Honduras needs some kind of shock therapy.\u201d13<\/sup><\/p>\n

This is not the first instance in which the Times<\/i> has glossed over inconvenient facts to laud shock therapy, a doctrine of massive privatization and investor-friendly deregulations developed at the University of Chicago.14<\/sup> Many years after Chile\u2019s coup government pushed through a rash of measures designed by economist Milton Friedman and his acolytes, the Chicago Boys, the Times<\/i> reported that \u201cChile has built the most successful economy in Latin America, and one of the vital underpinnings of that growth was the open economic environment created by the former military dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet.\u201d15<\/sup> Leaving aside Pinochet\u2019s torture and murder of tens of thousands of dissidents, Chile\u2019s per capita gross domestic product was practically unchanged 13 years after the coup; Pinochet\u2019s \u201cfree-market\u201d experiment also ended with re-nationalizations in banking and copper extraction, the institution of capital controls, and continuous state support for Chile\u2019s exports.16<\/sup><\/p>\n

Following in this dubious tradition of portraying a reactionary societal experiment as a formula for prosperity, the Times<\/i>\u2019 first piece on Honduran charter cities appeared in its Sunday magazine in May 2012. Author Adam Davidson, co-creator and host of National Public Radio\u2019s Planet Money<\/i> program, considered charter cities a \u201cridiculously big idea\u201d for fixing an \u201ceconomic system that kept nearly two-thirds of [Honduras\u2019s] people in grim poverty.\u201d Davidson related the story of Octavio S\u00e1nchez, Lobo\u2019s chief of staff, who met with Romer to develop a \u201csecure place to do business\u2014somewhere that money is safe from corrupt political cronyism or the occasional coup.\u201d17 <\/sup>Davidson, however, scrupulously avoided S\u00e1nchez\u2019s own role as an apologist for the 2009 military overthrow of Zelaya. Days after Zelaya\u2019s ouster, S\u00e1nchez advised Christian Science Monitor<\/i> readers not to \u201cbelieve the coup myth,\u201d and in an Orwellian flourish, the Harvard Law graduate declared that \u201cthe arrest of President Zelaya represents the triumph of the rule of law.\u201d18<\/sup><\/p>\n

In November, Planet Money<\/i> provided an obsequious follow-up on Romer and S\u00e1nchez\u2019s collaboration, scrubbing any mention of the 2009 coup and Lobo\u2019s emergence from it, and portraying S\u00e1nchez as an idealistic dreamer. \u201cInstead of fighting to do two, three or four reforms during the life of a government,\u201d S\u00e1nchez asked, \u201cwhy don\u2019t you just do all of those reforms at once in a really small space? And that\u2019s why this idea was appealing. It\u2019s really the possibility of turning everything around.\u201d19<\/sup><\/p>\n

Planet Money\u2019s<\/i> co-hosts unwittingly conveyed the fundamental obstacle to shock therapy: \u201cPaul Romer has this killer idea and no real country to try it in; Octavio has the same idea, but no way to sell it to his people.\u201d They acknowledged that even with \u201ca government that\u2019s ready to go,\u201d the \u201cpeople in Honduras\u201d viewed Romer\u2019s plan as \u201cbasically Yankee imperialism.\u201d The episode concluded by explaining the apparent collapse of the charter cities initiative, resulting partly from the post-coup government\u2019s lack of transparency (Romer was \u201cstunned\u201d), as well as a Honduran Supreme Court ruling in October that found charter cities unconstitutional. Romer remains unfazed, the hosts said. He has a promising lead in North Africa\u2014another opportunity to answer \u201cone of the oldest problems in economics: how to make poor countries less poor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regardless of what Romer and his media sycophants think of the charter city\u2019s (questionable) efficacy, their deafening silence on its antidemocratic implications and Honduras\u2019s human rights abuses is unconscionable. In this insulated world, Honduran victims of economic hardship and state terror, and their own proposals to solve poverty, remain invisible. Pinochet, the original administrator of shock therapy, distilled the insouciance of today\u2019s intellectual and media culture when, in 1979, he remarked, \u201cI trust the people all right; but they\u2019re not yet ready.\u201d20<\/sup><\/p>\n

NOTES:<\/b><\/p>\n

1. Alberto Arce, \u201cSlain Honduran lawyer Complained of Death Threats,\u201d Associated Press, September 25, 2012.<\/p>\n

2. Paul Romer and Octavio S\u00e1nchez, \u201cUrban Prosperity in the RED,\u201d The Globe and Mail<\/i>: April 25, 2012.<\/p>\n

3. \u201cThe FP Top 100 Global Thinkers,\u201d Foreign Policy<\/i>, November 26, 2012. Sebastian Mallaby, \u201cThe Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty,\u201d The Atlantic<\/i>, July\/August 2012.<\/p>\n

4. Romer and S\u00e1nchez, \u201cUrban Prosperity.\u201d Dana Frank, \u201cHonduras: Which Side Is the US On?,\u201d The Nation<\/i>, May 22, 2012.<\/p>\n

5. Brandon Fuller and Paul Romer, \u201cSuccess and the City: How Charter Cities Could Transform the Developing World,\u201d Macdonald-Laurier Institute, April 2012.<\/p>\n

6. Katherine Corcoran and Martha Mendoza, \u201cNew Honduras Top Cop Once Investigated in Killings,\u201d Associated Press, June 1, 2012.<\/p>\n

7. Sebastian Mallaby, \u201cPolitically Incorrect Guide.\u201d<\/p>\n

8. Romer and S\u00e1nchez, \u201cUrban Prosperity.\u201d<\/p>\n

9. Can \u201cCharter Cities\u201d Change the World? A Q&A With Paul Romer,\u201d Freakonomics.com, September 29, 2009.<\/p>\n

10. Jacob Goldstein and Chana Joffe-Walt, \u201cEpisode 415: Can a Poor Country Start Over?\u201d NPR\u2019s Planet Money<\/i>, November 9, 2012.<\/p>\n

11. Javier C. Hernandez, \u201cAn Academic Turns Grief Into a Crime-Fighting Tool,\u201d The New York Times<\/i>, February 24, 2012; Annie Bird and Alexander Main, \u201cCollateral Damage of a Drug War,\u201d Center for Economic and Policy Research and Rights Action, August 2012.<\/p>\n

12. U.S. Office of the Press Secretary, \u201cRemarks by President Obama and President Lobo of Honduras Before Bilateral Meeting,\u201d whitehouse.gov, October 5, 2011; Dana Frank, \u201cHonduras.\u201d<\/p>\n

13. Elisabeth Malkin, \u201cPlan for Charter City to Fight Honduras Poverty Loses Its Initiator,\u201d The New York Times<\/i>, September 30, 2012<\/p>\n

14. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism<\/i> (Metropolitan Books, 2007).<\/p>\n

15. Nathaniel C. Nash, \u201cTerrorism Jolts a Prospering Chile,\u201d The New York Times<\/i>, April 9, 1991.<\/p>\n

16. Paul Krugman, \u201cFantasies of the Chicago Boys,\u201d The Conscience of a Liberal (blog), The New York Times<\/i>, March 3, 2010.<\/p>\n

17. Adam Davidson, \u201cWho Wants to Buy Honduras?,\u201d The New York Times Magazine<\/i>, May 8, 2012.<\/p>\n

18. Octavio S\u00e1nchez, \u201cA \u2018Coup\u2019 in Honduras? Nonsense,\u201d The Christian Science Monitor<\/i>, July 2, 2009.<\/p>\n

19. Goldstein and Joffe-Walt, \u201cCan a Poor Country.\u201d<\/p>\n

20. John B. Oakes, \u201cPinochet in No Rush\u201d, The New York Times<\/i>, May 3, 1979.<\/p>\n

___________________________<\/p>\n

Keane Bhatt is a regular contributor to the MALA section of NACLA Report and the creator of the Manufacturing Contempt blog on the NACLA Website.<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 nacla.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the evening of Saturday, September 22 [2012], human rights lawyer Antonio Trejo stepped outside a wedding ceremony to take a phone call. Standing in the church parking lot he was shot six times by unknown assailants. In this insulated world, Honduran victims of economic hardship and state terror remain invisible. Pinochet, the original administrator of shock therapy, distilled the insouciance of today\u2019s intellectual and media culture when, in 1979, he remarked, \u201cI trust the people all right; but they\u2019re not yet ready.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}