The Proposed Model Cities (ZEDE) of Northeastern Honduras Raise Many Concerns

The Proposed Model Cities (ZEDE) of Northeastern Honduras Raise Many Concerns

By Wendy Griffin December 2014

The area around Gracias, Lempira is scheduled to be included in a Model City or ZEDE according to the Honduran government’s Model City website www.zede.gob.hn. One of Juan Orlando’s first acts as President was to authorize funds for an airport in Gracias, Lempira where few people have the money to afford airlines tickets, and for the airport in Tela for the Tela Bay project, which is not scheduled to be included in a Model City. Tela is located only 45 minutes from the San Pedro Sula airport, actually located in La Lima, the Honduran headquarters of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) in Honduras. Why does Tela need its own airport? It even already has an airstrip on the way to the Garifuna village of San Juan. With the highest murder rate in the world, who are the people they think will use it? 

Brus Laguna in the Mosquitia where the Nationalist Party also won according to the Zede website has two airports, but currently no Honduran airlines flies there due to lack of money among Miskitos, so who do you think is using the airports there, and why are there two if there is no legitimate demand for air travel there? Estimates are that there are 37 illegal airstrips in the Mosquitia.

The fact that many of them, including those owned by people denounced as narcotraficantes by the Garifunas and known to the US Embassy like Punta Farallones near Limon of Miguel Facusse and Sangrelaya which has been invaded by the Los Cachiros drug kingpin family, and Las Marias, also thought by the Pech to belong to Miguel Facusse as well as three illegal airports in the Sico valley are on the official Honduran government website for Model Cities  made me very concerned about what is the real motive for the ZEDE’s in Northeastern Honduras such as ZEDE Trujillo-Puerto Castilla, ZEDE Sico-Paulaya which overlaps with the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, and ZEDE Santa Maria del Real in Olancho which are proposed to be linked by a highway called Ruta Kao Kamasa (Kao Kamasa is known as the archaeological ruin Ciudad Blanca in Spanish but means White House in Pech).

 Currently Ruta Kao Kamasa inaugurated under Pepe Lobo’s government links Santa del Real on the main Tegucigalpa to Catacamas, Olancho highway with the Rio Platano Reserve  in Olancho facilitating the extraction of fine woods and other resources from the area. An illegal highway also built without a municipal construction permit or an environmental impact statement from SERNA connects the North Coast road of Honduras through the Garifuna area of Iriona, Colon to the Rio Platano Reserve in the area of Sico.

The construction of this  illegal highway was denounced in the award winning video by the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras and Witness.com “Garifunas Holding Ground” (Lucha Garifuna) in 2004, but has since become a major road for drug trafficking out of the Mosquitia. The road was built through the mountains instead of the Truxillo Railroad route known as Terra Plen and trucks have been known to slide off it and landslides cause the road to close. The extension of the Ruta Kao Kamasa seems to be an attempt to build a safer drug highway, both to transport marijuana grown in Culmi to the Coast and to get cocaine from drug airplanes out of the Mosquitia and also to facilitate to getting drug payments to drug lords in Olancho, under the disguise that it is really to help cruise boat tourism between Puerto Castilla and the Ciudad Blanca.  

The Santa Maria del Real  lands  of  the drug trafficker Matta, currently serving a life sentence in Marion, Illinois because he was extradicted to the US, even though Honduras has no extradition treaty with the US and those lands he titled to his children in the 1970’s and 1980’s  were  confiscated in early 2014 and are precisely where the Honduran government plans  to put ZEDE Santa Maria del Real.  The confiscation of the 1970 titled lands seem unfair to me, as cocaine smuggling in Honduras did not really taken off until the Iran Contra affair in the 1980’s and so the 1970 lands were probably acquired prior to his being involved in cocaine smuggling.

Matta’s quote in La Tribuna on the same page as Pepe Lobo narco comments, “Better a tomb in Honduras than in jail in the United States”  might be part of what is fueling the Honduran women and children leaving Honduras for the US.  University Professors whose families and friends still live in Olancho say that trying to put Model Cities or ZEDE’s in Olancho is a time bomb waiting to happen. Both ZEDE Santa Maria del Real and ZEDE Sico Paulaya will affect powerful Olanchano cattle ranchers, including the area of Pepe Lobo’s ranch and Mel Zelaya’s family’s traditional ranch on the Rio Guayape although I am not sure if he personally owns it.

Under ZEDE legistlation, the Honduran government can take the land under Eminent Domain, especially if it classified as having some other vocation, like being land apt for gold mining like the Rio Guayape lands, when the person who owns it is using it for something else like cattle ranching.  This same problem affects Garifuna and Miskito lands in ZEDE’s which have been or could be classified as de vocacion turistica (for tourism use), which also makes them open for foreign investment. The Honduran government has already announced plans to expand the currently almost dead port of Puerto Castilla from one dock to four docks, and in the process displace  probably the entire community of Puerto Castilla which has land titles to their lands.  The people of Puerto Castilla have already begun protesting such as taking over the highway. The destruction of the Garifuna neighborhood of Rio Negro appears that it was in vain as the water is too shallow for post Panamax cruise ships and they will have to use Puerto Castilla after all.  

The Honduran government’s website for ZEDE’s confirms that the Honduran Congress has passed a law and it was published in the La Gazeta that Common Law, based on the English and American systems, will be used in the ZEDE’s, and not Civil Law, based on the French and ultimately the Roman system, which Honduran laws are currently based on. Under Common Law, subsoil rights belong to the government not to the land owner who has title to the surface rights. There is every indication that the Honduran Congress approved this law without the faintest idea what is Common Law or how the change could affect them.

In ZEDE’s they will be able to develop their own laws and their own courts, althoughthe  courts of the Islands of Mauritius have also been proposed to handle the court cases (Really?  In a country that does not have gas for its policemen?) OFRANEH the Garifuna organization calls the ZEDEs liberatarian delirious dreams, as one of the supporters is Silicon Valley millionaire and Liberatarian Michael Strong, and the originator of the idea was Liberatarian Economist Paul Romer. Ronald Reagan’s son Michael is named to the Committee which will manage the ZEDE, as is the head of Austrian School of Economics.

Being able to create their own laws,  means that Honduran laws like the National System of Protected Areas of Honduras (SINAPH) and the Law of the Modernization of Agriculture, which govern Honduran protected areas like the Rio Platano Biosphere (both are available from libreroonline.com), will not have effect in the ZEDE’s like ZEDE Sico Paulaya which almost perfectly corresponds to the Rio Platano Biosphere map found on ICF’s (Institute for Forestry Conservation, the replacement Honduran government organization COHDEFOR) website. The Miskitos of MASTA have sent out email alerts and have up on their website concerns about the land problems in the Rio Platano Biosphere. The President of MASTA in the video on their website call the plans to search for hydrocarbons and the plans to put in dams in the Mosquitia, "Homicide" of the Miskito people. ZEDE Sico Paulaya will also affect at least 5 Garifuna communities in the departments of Colon and Gracias a Dios. MASTA includes both Honduran military people and Joint Task Force Bravo (Tarea Conjunta Bravo on the MASTA site) of the US military forces in Honduras, as the people who are attacking the Miskito people in the Honduran Mosquitia.

The controversial digital mapping project Centroamerica Indigena (Indian Central America) being done by the University of Kansas, the American Geography Society, the US Military (Ft. Leavenworth Kansas, Southcom, Joint Task Force Bravo (Tarea Conjunta Bravo on the MASTA site), DoD Minerva funding), the Radiance Corporation and the Universidad Pedagogica Nacional (UPN) is also exactly in the ZEDE Sico Paulaya area (a link to the map of the mapping project on the American Geography Society website is found on the website www.crisisderechoshumanoshonduras2015.blogspot.com) , which gives the idea that its real purposes are to facilitate the construction of the highway which will help drug traffickers, to take land away from Garifunas and Miskitos and title it to other people, to open the land for gold mining and petroleum exploration and concessions which now internationally require digital maps and  to connect to the old copper mine in Manto, Olancho,  to facilitate the stealing of archaeological artifacts in the White City area, and to facilitate logging in what is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, on the Endangered List.

It would also facilitate military operations which the Miskitos of MASTA complain are now common against the same Miskitos and the Military who carry them out say, "These are the orders of President Juan Orlando Hernandez and the Gringos"in their open letter to President Juan Orlando Hernandez of September 2014 approved by representatives of the all the regions of the Honduran Mosquitia. A geologist in Trujillo said, "In geology and in war you can never have too many maps."

An ethics review of the project was requested through the Ethnics Review person at the University of Kansas Dr. Susan MacNeil because the ethics statement of the American Geography Society says if the project is done without being clear that the funding is coming from the US military and other issues of free and informed consent, or if the people doing the study are in put in danger, or if the environment is threatened by doing the geographical study, the expedition should be recalled immediately.    The Tawahkas have said they did not know the funding came through the US military and that reporting was directly to them, the Garifunas of OFRANEH have complained that there was no free and informed consent in the mapping of their villages of Iriona and Gracias a Dios and in fact they were opposed to the mapping.

 I personally was concerned for the safety of the UPN bilingual education students doing the study. If there are at least 37 illicit drug airports in the area, a process Geographer Dr. Kendra Mc Sweeny calls narcodeforestacion and the people involved narcoganaderos (drug traffickers who have cattle ranches), will the UPN students be safe going around to people with GPS’s connected to nanosatellites (unmanned drones) and asking, “What are you doing here?”  I think not.

The University of Kansas used its graduate students during the equally controversial Mexico Indigena mapping project in 2009 (see the Wikipedia in English article on it), but the University of Kansas thinks Honduras is too unsafe for its students and prohibits its professors from taking University of Kansas students into Honduras, even Copan Ruinas.  If the Honduran Mosquitia is too dangerous for University of Kansas students, isn’t it a question of labor rights to use bilingual indigenous Honduran university students instead, students that cost us so much time and effort  to get the schools built, and get scholarships for high school and college?

I was also concerned that confusing US academics with US military projects put me as a US academic in Honduras more at risk.  The linguists of ACALING (Central American Linguists) also denounced the project on their website  and the Miskito language course by University of Kansas anthropologist Dr. Laura Herlihy. The Society for Applied Anthropology’s journal has raised concerns about being an anthropologist in past, present or future war zones when the US military is using anthropologists in its Human Terrain projects, and the American Anthropology Association has also raised concerns about using anthropologists by the US military. The controversy caused by using US academic geographers in US military funded projects such as Mexico Indigena is what caused the American Geography Society to adopt such strict ethics guidelines.

The UPN professors asked what has been the response of the University of Kansas to this request for an ethics and human subjects review of the project. There has, since June, been no response from them except “Documents Received”. The Chairman of the Geography Department at the University of Kansas is also the lead investigator of the Dod funded project and he is the president of the American Geography Society (AGS). I have told Hondurans if you want to commit crimes in the US, the best thing to do is become sheriff. Why would the President of AGS want to respond to a request for an ethics review when it is his $1.3 million research project?  When news about the mapping project was published in the Lawrence, Kansas newspaper, one of the comments was, “I assume from the article that we are planning to go to war with the Honduran Indians soon.”

These types of mapping projects by the University of Kansas called Bowman Expeditions are always done in areas where there is conflict, oil and gas, drugs, and usually indigenous peoples (Columbia, Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico, Iraq) and usually result in higher drug exports than before the project.  The exports of heroin from Afghanistan ( a land locked country so the exports leave through Iraq) are now three times higher that the US military is there than it was before.  

Previously the participation of professional geographers in US military projects was funded through ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence)/ONR (Office of Naval Research) and included mapping the Honduran Mosquitia savannas without seeing the sea. The mapping sponsored by the US government during the Contra war opened the area to drug airports according to FITH president Edgardo Benitez.  The Honduran government generally does not use digital maps to give land titles, and there have already been at least 6 mapping expeditions of the area. In fact  it is a good thing that they do not as the Municipal governments  and their land offices (Catastro, Registro Municipalidad de Propriedad) in the Mosquitia have no access to electricity for computers.  For the purpose of indigenous land titles, the Honduran government does not need these maps, but for other purposes like the petroleum exploration concessions currently going on in the area, and gold mining concessions they do.

The chances that the uses of these maps will hurt the environment of the Rio Platano Biosphere and the indigenous people who live there is almost 100%, especially if the resulting digital maps are put up on the Internet with the ZEDE maps, which are multilayered which show very sophicated webdesign skills. One of the groups which is behind the push for ZEDE or Model Cities in Honduras is a Real Estate company in Guatemala. The selling of land which belongs to someone else is an old trick in the region.

The participation of Radiance Technologies, makers of spying equipment, in this mapping exercise seems to be to test the effectiveness of GPS’s connected to nanosatellites (drones) under three layers of canopy, which is on the Southcom website under public private ventures. Is this in anticipation of going into the Ecuatorian rainforest where two uncontacted tribes have had their lands given away in petroleum concessions? Or is this for Africa, where the US Military’s Africa.com website scares the bejeezits out of me with its talks of “US national interests in Africa”?  

On Voz del Soberano newspaper’s website,  it shows President Obama saying in Spanish, “I only have two words for you, Attack Drones”.  Will the drug traffickers thus alerted who see the students with GPS’s connected to drones think that the UPN students are setting them up for attack? I was afraid when the UNAH president authorized the use of students to go around the Garifuna lands of Trujillo and ask do you have land title to this land and similar questions. People are dying for land issues in the Trujillo area. In the Mosquitia with all those drug traffickers (70% of drug flights to the US go through the Honduran Mosquitia according to El Heraldo), “Ni siguiera Dios” (not even if Gods wants it) do I think using students like this  is a good idea.

Honduran anthropologist Danira Miralda’s book on the Guerra de Baja Intensidad y los Pueblos Originarios de la Mosquitia, República de Honduras (The War of Low Intensity and the original Peoples of the Honduran Mosquitia) alerted me to the fact that there was a 2009 Memorundum ofUunderstanding which was included in Wikileaks documents about public private development of the Mosquitia (now a topic on the Southcom website) and the extensive maps already existent for petroleum exploration in the area. It is almost impossible to get this book as after publication the IHAH refused to distribute it and when the two international book distributions or “libreros” Libros Centroamericanos of California and Literatura de Vientos Tropicales of North Carolina tried to buy the book for export, the IHAH refused to sell them the book. That also sent up smoke signals that it was important to read to know what the Honduran government was trying to hide from getting out.