Black English Speaker communities in Bay Islands Under Pressure

Black English Speaker communities in Bay Islands Under Pressure

By Wendy Griffin (2014)

The problem that Black Bay Islanders are being displaced is not just about Sandy Bay on Roatan where Ms. Post Dye whose death was reported around the world was murdered in December 2013.  William Davidson notes in his analysis of Black English Speakers who were counted during the 2001 Ethnic Census which reports in Censo etnico de 2001, that  even in 2001, the Black English speakers were being pushed out of Western Roatan and were a majority only in 15 communities in a corner of (arinconado en) Eastern Roatan. And since then, foreigners have been buying land near them, too, even areas that have no access like mountains or parts of the islands with no roads.

 

 In Bay Islander Artlie Brooks’ 2012 book on the Bay islands and Black English speakers “Black Chest”, he identifies these Eastern Roatan villages as very poor and people waiting money sent back from relatives in the US or on ships.  The pressure on Bay Islander lands has become substantially worse now that tourists come on the cruise boats to see what the islands are like and then return to buy the land to stay and start tourism related businesses like Ms. Dye’s.

 

This is exactly what the Canadian developers of Trujillo are counting on in that area on the North coast of Honduras. When they originally sold lots, they sold them to investors for $20,000, but now that cruise boats are coming, the lots are starting at $40,000 and houses at over $225,000 according to Banana Coast’s tourist maps in a country where many people earn under $3,000 a year. The amounts they paid the local people were significantly less, and in some cases were not enough to get land elsewhere and rebuild. The Garifunas of Trujillo have been working through legal channels regarding irregularities of the land transfer of Garifuna land to the Canadian owned Campo Vista and its subsequent sale to other Canadian investors. They have also complained about significant levels of environmental damage associated with the development.

 

Interestingly the new Liberal Party Mayor of Roatan, Dorn Ebanks, is a Black Bay Islander, one of the founding members of NABIPLA, the native Bay islanders Laborers and Professionals Association.who grew up in Coxen Hole and he still lives there. He has also been Governor of the Bay islands, Pastor of the Baptist Church in Coxen Hole and founder of Christian Broadcast Network, a local access cable TV station in Coxen Hole that tried to provide local programming different from the rapes, theft, murders, seen on cable TV in the Bay Islanders.  That station has been replaced by ENLACE, a Christian broadcast company reaching most of Latin America.

 

Most of the members of NABIPLA, like Dorn Ebanks, were leaders in Roatan’s Protestant churches. The Christian Broadcast network under Dorn Ebanks did social problem programs that addressed issues like  drug and alcohol issues, bilingual intercultural education, and  problems like AIDS and others associated with young women and women.

 

The Black Bay Islanders, in general, and those in NABIPLA in particular, have been very concerned about the effects of their islands being turned into places where people go for sun, fun, alcohol, and girls, which are totally against the very conservative values of the Protestant churches the Black Bay Islanders belong to like Church of God, Methodist, Seventh Day Adventist, and Baptist. It is not unusual to see Native Bay Islanders carrying Bibles in the middle of Coxen Hole. Their weekends and their years used to be organized around church activities. See my book The History and Culture of Bay Islanders and BlackEnglish speakers of Honduras which is available for free on the Internet. Search Bay Islanders Wendy Griffin.

 

The land problems of the Black Bay Islanders have been extreme, even affecting the new Roatan Mayor’s mother who used to be very active in the Liberal party and would organize all the Liberals of the Bay islands when the big wigs of Teguicgalpa would come. Dorn's father was a merchant marine his whole life and lost the visión of one eye due a shipboard accident for which he received no compensation.

 

Even though he and his mother have been active in politics, they have lost at least two pieces of land which his mother inherited in the Bay Islands, one because a tenant, a white Bay islander sold it, and the other because she jointly inherited some land with a cousin from her grandmother, and the cousin sold it. Usually the buyers are foreigners who offer so much money compared to the local economy that people are tempted to shady business deals. In Keri Brondo’s 2013 book Land Grab on the land problems of the Garifunas ,she notes the tendency for human rights abuses like land theft to go up if larger sums of money are involved.

 

The land titles on Roatan are now computerized, reported one foreigner who owns land there, but there is also a lot of speculation of land in the islands by foreigners, just as there is now in the Trujillo and Santa-Guadelupe areas. The websites of the land developers of Trujillo say specifically we are a cheaper alternative to Roatan and the Bay Islanders which has become so expensive young Bay Islander men can not buy land to build houses, also a problem in the Guadelupe area west of Trujillo. Developers say Trujillo was chosen as a cruise boat destination partly because the Bay Islands are so small there is limited space for tourist related businesses to grow, while they felt that the North Coast offered unlimited possibilities of expansion, even though there are local people living all along the coast. The people of NABIPLA have identified Black Bay Islander children as the Islands’ most endangered species.

 

It is interesting that Honduran Ministry of Culture no longer exists in Honduras, having been absorbed into the new Ministry of Investment together with the Ministry of Tourism. The Ministry for the Development of Honduran Indians and Afro-Hondurans (SEDINAFRO) has also lost its Ministerial status and is in the process of being incorporated into a Ministry of Development, both changes showing interesting interpretations of the places of Culture, Art, Indians and Afro-Hondurans.

 

 

 

Native Bay Islanders, Garifunas, and the Stresses Caused  By Cruise Boat Tourism

 

By Wendy Griffin

 

Before Anthony’s Key Resort, a dive resort, was built, Sandy Bay existed as a Black Bay Islander village, although there were some Honduran Ladinos who lived, and most people farmed and fished.  I have a met a mulatto man who only speaks Spanish, who considers himself isleño because he was born on the island, but he is not a Black English speaking Bay islander and that is not the origin of his family. Sandy Bay was a fairly traditional community in his youth, and this man remembered seeing the Bay Islanders dance John Canoe in Sandy Bay with the dancer dressed in plants, similar to Warini among the Garifunas when he was Young.

 

 Miss Vi was a Black Bay Islander who sold chicken in Sandy Bay when I was there. She said she knew the old Nancy stories, the traditional Bay Islander stories, and ring plays, the traditional bay islander songs with games, similar to Ring around the Rosies or London Bridges or here we go loopty loo or Hokey Pokey  among Americans or Cascara de huevo among Ladino children in Honduras who call these rondas.

   

I looked at www.roatanisalndtimes.com/city/roatan-sandy-bay  which is a business guide. Now there are 3 dive shops, 4 bars, 13 hotels, 9 restaurnants, 5 Real Estate developments, 7 places that have apartments to rent in Sandy Bay, Anthny's key resort with Museum, restraurant, hotel, dolphin show, there are at least 5 people selling real estate in Sandy Bay, most associated with Anthony's Key Resort.   If you search google for Sandy Bay Roatan honduras you will also see at leat three other hotels in Sandy Bay which are not listed on the roatanisland times, so there are at least 16 hotels in Sandy bay.

 

The displacement of the Native Bay islanders in this área has been drastic since 1996.  Most of Roatan does not have have Sandy beaches. It is a coral island, and in fact if sand gets on the coral it kills the coral, a process called sedimentation, and it kills the conchs on the coral, too. Honduran conchs are so over fished by the commercial seafood industry based in the Bay islands their export to the US is now prohibited as an endangered species and Miskito divers are still being affected by the bends to get them at deeper levels.

 

The tourism industry originally grew in the Bay islands as dive resorts, when scuba was introduced to Honduras. There are resorts on Roatan that imported sand, I was told from Jamaica, and at Fantasy island they had to replace the sand every 6months, because it got washed away by the sea, so they imported more, and thus are successively killing the reef.

 

Many of the low level workers in the resorts are Spanish speakers whose families are from the mainland. There are Little busitos that take the Spanish speaking employees on the tourist route between Coxen Hole, Sandy Bay, West End and West Bay, so that they can work all day or all night at the hotels.

 

Some of the technical Jobs at resorts like air conditioner repair man are also Spanish speakers from the mainland. Bay Islanders generally do not have the opportunity to study technical careers like plumbing, masonry,  air conditioning, many of which are either learned by the apprentice program by Spanish speakers, like plumbing and masonry or in tech schools like air conditioning. The Spanish speakers also make up the majority of the bus drivers and taxi drivers in the Bay Islands. The only Black Bay Islanders my sister saw in  February 2013 in West Bay were security guards and the receptionists when we checked into the hotel.

 

Spanish speakers also take most of the government jobs, including being most of the teachers. While the official bilingual intercultural education program has started in a few schools in the Bay islands like the PROHECO school in Pensacola, Roatan, most Bay Islander communities still do not have even one English speaking teacher, and the training of the teachers for the extremely complex linguistic and cultural situation in the Bay islands has been very deficient.

 

University of California at Santa Barbara anthropologist Dr. Susan Stonich's book the Other side of Paradise published in 2000 is still for sale on Amazon.com about the destruction of Bay islander’s  hábitat and culture.  One problem is the Island could run out of fresh water as development is done totally without regard to how much water is available, warned a resident there. There is a quantity of garbage on the reef and in the wáter and would be on the beaches, too, if they didn't keep after it. 

 

Some of the garbage may be coming from the Mainland of Honduras, where it is definitely not being dealt with adequately,  but also inadequately dealing with it by the businesses and residents of the Bay islands has been an ongoing problem and on top of that there are often two cruise ships a day in Roatan. I was told by a former employee of the cruise ships that they dump waste wáter, solid waste like from toilets, and also garbage before they dock, so probably part of the garbage is coming from the cruise ship tourists themselves. Cruise boat staff reported previously in some Caribbean ports you could see from the top of the ship all the way to the bottom of the sea and see fish, but as cruise boat tourism increased, the water became murky and they saw no more fish.

 

 The issue of new foreign residents and foreign owned hotels in the Trujillo area that want swimming pools in communities where some local residents go without water for months at a time is a hot  issue for the Garifunas. In Roatan the size and elegance of the swimming pools for an island with very limited water should be a concern. The members of NABIPLA said, ”If Roatan runs out of water, these tourists can all go home, but what about us? We have nowhere else to go?” 

 

In Roatan,the cruise boats have also been upset with the locals because the cruise boats insist that if they are in harbor, they must have access to electricity.  Honduras does not have enough dollars to pay for its fuel bills for its electric plants, and so there are frequently power outages, but the cruise boats feel they should get priority. Why?, if this is our country, people wonder.  This has led to confrontations in Roatan and will probably be an issue in Trujillo where power outages are almost daily and frequently are all day. For some reason, no one thought if you invite dozens of maquila companies to have factories in Honduras, many running 24 hours a day, they are going to use a lot more electricity, and so not only do Hondurans often have to do without, but varying levels of the electricity causes their expensive appliances to die quickly. 

 

I did see cruise boat tourists lining up to go to a zipline near West Bay on Roatan and there is also an all inclusive área called Mahoghany Bay where one of the cruiseboat companies go in, I think Carnaval. Spa Baan Suerte which Ms. Dye ran was definately catering to the cruise boat tourists.Their whole website is set up to tell you  about being picked up going there for treatment and then going back to the cruise ship. There is a trend internationally to go on vacation and go to Spas. There is one outside of Copan Ruinas called Jaguar Luna. Europeans who used to live in Trujillo talk about going to Thailand to go to a spa. The original idea of the owner of Spa Baan Suerte was to go to Asia and set up her spa.

 

Cruise boat people hear about crime in the Caribbean, although sometimes not until they are actually on the ships, report people who have travelled on them. That is why they go off ship without any money, a recommendation of the cruise boat staff, and so they do not add much to the local economy. At Anthony's Key resort in Sandy Bay they encourage tourists not to go out of the resort. A scuba diver who has often gone to the Bay islands and recently published a book of photographs of the reef there, said that in fact she did not know anything about the island or the people there as she was usually out on a boat during the day and at night she was tired. The main reason most tourists do anything other than dive in the Bay islands is because you are not supposed to dive 24 hours before you get on an airplane, so a few people go to the Carambola Garden or the Museum and Dolfin Show at Anthony’s Key Resort.

 

 Apparently the spa of Ms. Dye who was murdered in December 2013 inSandy Bay Roatan was set up so that cruise boat people did not have to get out and see any of the rest of the island, but rather be picked up, delivered at her door, and returned to the ship, after spending the afternoon in a sanctuary away from the people who live there. A similar move is planned in Trujillo where some of the tourists will be taken to a park by the sea for about 7 hours where they do not have to see the local people.

 

People in the Bay islands are worried about the relationship between tourists and cruise boats and prostitution of Young Black Bay Islander women.  The Garífunas are also concerned in Trujillo that cruise boats will bring "una prostitución barbara"  a terrible prostitution problem to Trujillo. I was told by a former cruise boat worker that in each port half the crew gets off, about 1,100 crew for the ships proposed in fall of 2014, mostly men, and they are stuck on the ship without their wives for 4-6 months at a time, so what do they do in port?

Low income people and rich income tourists a recipe for the sext tourism industry, which in addition to the North Coast, also affects Comayagua where Palmerola Air base has had  American soldiers since the Contra days. The presence of US soldiers was noted by high incidences of penicillin resistant gonorrhea known as Flor de Vietnam in Honduras and AIDS spreading in the Tela area where they went on vacation and in Comayagua.  Comayagua saw an influx of prostitutes some of whom were lucky enough to marry gringo soldiers and go back to the States, however, usually abandoning their children in Honduras to find for themselves.  These abandoned children grew up to members of “maras” or gangs in Comayagua which is why they have such a gang problem in an otherwise sleepy area. 

 

The subject of children in Honduras  abandoned by their mothers who go to the US have even generated novels in Honduras like Dogboy, by a Swedish novelist who writes about a Honduran boy who works in the garbage dump in Tegucigalpa and lived in the ruins of Comayaguela after hurricane Mitch after his mother goes to the US where she lives with a Mexican who does not want her son to go there.  The Movie El Espiritu de Mi mama (The Spirit of My Mother) available for sale on the Garifuna in Peril website, is about a Garifuna girl from a Mosquitia Garifuna village who got pregnant by an American solider from the Contra War and goes to look for him in the US, where he acts like he does not know who she is, and she has to raise the child on her own. 

 

Sex trade tourism on the Honduran North Coast, which already exists to some extent such as with recent arrests in the Puerto Cortes area, would not only be socially problematic, but also a public health and development issue, as the AIDS rate among Garifunas is 12 times the Central American average and the hidden rate of HIV infection rate (the rate of HIV people who are HIV positive, but have not been tested) is possibly as high as 25% in some North Coast communities.  The high level of AIDS orphans in Honduras has led to the need for special projects like a Comunidad de Cristales y Rio Negro program of needing to provide food for AIDS orphans who  are living with other relatives.  Promiscuous behavior such as unprotected sex is often combined with other problematic behaviors like drinking and using drugs. One Garifuna friend lost his oldest son because  he was sharing needles for shooting cocaine with tourists in Trujillo and he got AIDS and died. Some Garifuna women have died of AIDS in Trujillo and Santa Fe as single mothers of 5 children, leaving a considerable burden to their parents or sisters.

 

The fact that some of the business people who are interested in the proposed Model City areas of Trujillo and Choluteca area are associated with factories does not necessarily mean that this is not also a trend related to the sex trade.  In the US such as in the Los Angeles airport area (LAX) or in New Jersey and in the Port of St.Louis, Missouri there are Free Enterprise Zones. They also existed on American Samoa. An eye witness of the LAX Free Enterprise Zone described 12 foot tall fences, a set of three fences with the second one appearing to be electrified, razor wire on top, the people who appeared to women were shackled and escorted from building to building by guards with guns similar to AK-47’s.  The outside walls of the St. Louis Free Export Zone which had a sign stating that it was such looked identical to those at LAX’s Free Enterpise Zone and the men who guarded it carried similar looking automatic weapons according to eye witnesses.

In American Samoa, not only did the women provide cheap labor under coersive conditions, but they were also made available to the people visiting the zone, which eventually cost an American Congressman his job being caught doing that. This is the type of coercion that goes in the Thailand sex trade which is infamous worldwide. This is what type of labor conditions you get in when a special part of the  country within a country with no recourse to national law.  In this way, the reason why support of the International Labor organization (ILO) for indigenous land rights such as in ILO Convention 169 which is the law in Honduras becomes clearer. 

 

Every ethnic group in Honduras had a traditional system for proving that a young man was going to be a good husband before he was given permission to court and take a young woman for his wife. Taking a woman to be a wife without her parent’s permission is known as “robbing a girl”.

 

There are still traditional stories in Honduras of Indian boys who stole Indian girls of another tribe and this led to war between to the two tribes such as the Lencas and the Mayas, and this is one of the origins of the traditional myth of the La Llorona (she who cries). Another version of the La Llorona myth in Honduras is the stealing of La Malinche by Hernan Cortes and she became pregnant and has a child and kills it she is so anguished over having a mixed race child.  I have heard anguished stories of Pech grandmothers, of Garifuna mothers, of  Ladino women, of Miskito fathers in Trujillo who were distressed by the fact that their daughter was “robbed” from them and she went to form a couple with someone who would not always stay with her or provide for her and her children. And in every case, the parents were right that within a year, the person who the girl had gone off with was no longer with her.

 

That many of these young women are from very Evangelical Protestant households, their mothers and they themselves are very conflicted about the girls forming families or households or relationships with someone they are not married to and who would be likely to leave them and their children, causes a great deal of anguish for the parents and the young women themselves.

Try to Find Out About Honduras Before investing in Land or Businesses There

 

By Wendy Griffin

 

Someone in Trujillo asked me if I write these articles on crime or problems of application of land laws, because I don’t like foreigners coming to Honduras. Actually I see so much money and time and effort lost because foreigners in Honduras ,who often do not have a lot of money, have to go to court to try to get some issue resolved with  land, or permits, and sometimes it is cheaper and safer just to leave the country and abandon their investment, that I write about these issues so people who want to invest can make informed decisions and not walk into some morass of Native rights or environmental issues, or crime or variable application of laws and justice and corruption, that they did not know existed.

 

How are people deciding to invest in the lands west of Trujillo? A man wrote a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which is about how rich people become rich because at home their parents talk to them about things like investing money, while poor children hear other kinds of stories at home. So then he went on a talking tour where he says he will share these insights with Canadians. At these seminars, they then learn about investment opportunities, which include investing in land in one of the Life Visions developments around Trujillo. The company which recruits them to buy is called Fast Track. Most buy sight unseen. So far 550 lots have been sold. After they buy, they still have to pay significant monthly fees for water, lights, security, access to the beach club, even though most of the lots have no houses. People have been known to come to look at their property and find it was inaccessible due to mud. Many of the buyers never intended to build on their land,they bought it on speculation, figuring they could sell it at a higher price later,a practice known as flipping in the US.

 

The quality of information most people have about the Bay Islands before they get there such as seen  on the English language site www.roatanislandtimes.com  was so bad that I was shocked. That site said the Bay islands became part of Honduras in 1980 from Great Britain when the correct date is 1860.  They recommend tourists see the Garífuna people in Punta gorda and Politilly bite. While Punta gorda is Garífuna, Politilly Bight is a traditional Black Bay Islander community.  I assume whoever wrote the site in on the Bay Islands, but they have not studied it enough to know that Black Bay Islanders are not Garífunas.

 

The Black Bay islanders hate being confused and taken for Garífunas. They hate being invisible in Tegucigalpa. But to arrive in their village in the Bay Islands close enough to see them, and still not know they are not Garífunas is seriously distressing.

 

There was an incident reported in Artlie Brooks’ book Black Chest in which he quotes Glenn Solomon, also a Baptist minister on Roatan. Mr. Solomon said, “On Roatan,the whites are Black,the browns are Black,the blacks are Black. If you do not like Black people do not come to Roatan.”  But instead the idea has apparently been to push them off the land, to give it to other people who are judged of more worth.

 

But to be honest,  who needs land on the beach more—farmers who have lived there for 200 years and grow coconuts and fish and collect cocoplums and crabs or heiresses with enough money to live anywhere in the world and people who can pay for a cruise and on top of that pay $119 for a facial? What happens to people who are displaced?

 

In Garifuna stories of relatives who have lost land, the stories usually end, “and now they are renting in La Ceiba”. Many taxi drivers I talked in San Pedro used to have land in Colon, but it was lost due to the expansion of African palms.

 

The high level of urbanism in Honduras like in San Pedro or LaCeiba is often directly caused by some stressor in the countryside, including loss of land, and thus the people in the city who have no access to food or water or shelter with Honduras’s current high levels of unemployment, are at more risk for being recruited to work in crime. For many, stopping in Honduras’s big cities is just a stepping stone on their way to the US’s big cities which have their own problems right now with unemployment and economic crisis and crime.

 

When people stay at the Christopher Columbus Hotel in Trujillo on the beach, sometimes they are upset, because there is a tall cyclone wire fence between the hotel and the beach and it blocks their view. But high level Honduran people stay at this hotel, and if you don’t have a fence, people try to get in and rob or worse.  And sometimes even if you have a fence, and a second story, sometimes people still get in, even into the second story to rob in Trujillo, and sometimes while you are home.

 

This is particularly a problem at the beach in Trujillo, and the area between Trujillo and Santa Fe is definitely not recommended to walk on the beach. So I was not surprised to hear someone on the beach in Sandy Bay in the Bay islanders on a large lot was attacked in their home. People in Trujillo have been told there are murders and other problems of foreigner in the Bay Islands, but some of the media do not report it, “because it is bad for business.” Real Estate values will go down you know. It could affect advertising.

 

One cruise boat official told someone in Trujillo, that they looked around for other places to go, but Trujillo seemed kind of like the least worst, for example on issues like crime and infrastructure issues. What does tell you about the state of other places in the Western Caribbean that they are not telling you about before you sign up for a cruise? Over 2,000 people are expected to get off the cruise boats with each visit to Trujillo starting in the fall in 2014. And where are there bathrooms for over 2,000´people in Trujillo who don’t live there and so can’t go at home?

 

In sub-Saharan Africa, some people took to heart the idea of building really elegant resorts for tourists who want to see big game. But the problem of moving poor people off the land to make way for people who can pay $200 a night for a hotel plus airfare, is that the poor people get desperate and attack back, and the people who have the kind of money that they can pay $200 a night can choose to go anywhere in the world, and so they don’t go where there is unrest and high crime. Whole countries in Southern Africa are falling off the tourism list while at the same time governments like Kenya are trying to push people out of the national parks where they have always lived, to try to encourage tourism.

 

The Garifunas on Hog Keys in Keri Brondo’s book Land Grab tried to take a little advantage of tourism by selling seashell jewelry.  Garifunas have been using seashells in distinctive ways since before Columbus came to St. Vincent or Honduras. But it is now prohibited for the Garifunas of Hog Keys to sell seashells or seashell jewelry said a recent official brochure. The high cement walls that separate where the cruise boat tourists go shopping in Roatan and where  the tourists shopped in Trujillo obviously kept most tourists from even seeing many of the people who made crafts.

 

 Honduras now has professionally designed golf courses on Roatan and outside of Tela, but just Tampa,Florida has 26 golf courses. People don’t have to come to Honduras to play golf, but if you move Garifunas or Black Bay Islanders off the land to make room for golfers who may not even come due to Honduras’s crime and infrastructure problems, what have you gained? Making enemies of your own citizens?

 

Whole countries in Africa that had fledgeling tourist industries have seen their significant infrastructure investments lost due to rising crime, and the crime is rising because the people are in social or economic distress, often caused by neo-liberal policies that were supposed to bring “development”.

 

What kind of development is it like the Mayan Riviera in Mexico, where Mexicans can not enter for a 30 mile stretch?  What kind of development is it if the Aché Indians of Paraguay were mostly killed, because the government gave investors access to their lands and investors’ workers killed them? What kind of development moves people away from their traditional sources of foods and plants, which they have sometimes cared for for centuries? These types of stories are all over the Internet including Afro-Brazilians being moved away to make room for the World Cup facilities, notes the videos available through  Witness.org.

 

People who have travelled by cruises, say that often the businesses that serve cruises are not owned by local people. The same people who sell to Alaskan cruise tourists in Alaska in the summer, go to the Caribbean and sell to Caribbean cruise tourists in the winter. Most of the people I have met in Roatan who offered services to tourists, were not born in Honduras. Several of the bars and hotels and restaurants that try to capture the small foreigner tourist trade in Trujillo and Santa Fe area are foreign owned, which means they are in direct competition with locally owned restaurants and hotels who usually much less access to funds to improve their places or learn English, which in some places is deeply resented.

 

In Honduras foreign investors also run into  the added complication of corruption, which has affected almost every land deal I have heard of involving foreigners in Trujillo. Many foreigners in the Bay Islands having noted it too, with a Wall Street Journal writer who was affected, saying he had covered business in Asia and in Africa and the corruption was definitely worse in Honduras than anywhere he had gone.

 

I can understand why some poorly advised Honduran official might think if I can just get these Indians off the land where there is a mine or these Garifunas or Ladino famers off the land where I want to put a Model City, I can make some money (and maybe I will live to tell about it). Honduras’s first Model city is going into the Choluteca area, but just so that they can practice for two years there to work out the details and then roll out the rest of the plans. But I don’t know who the foreign investors are who would want to come, especially not in the large numbers people like at The Economist throw around, given the current situation in Honduras.

 

The Garifuna organization OFRANEH  says that POSCO, the parent company of the South Korea company Dae Woo is one of the companies that has signed a memorandum of understanding regarding Model Cities.  Dae Woo got thousands of acres of land for free in Madgascar in recent years, and Madgascar is considered an even hotter hot spot for rain forest and medicinal plants and exotic animals than Honduras.  Dae Woo had been a company controlled by the late Sun Yan Moon. The Economist in London has been following foreign investments in the tuna fishing industry in Madagascar, thinking that people are investing in that, but their real aim is to get more land when the tuna fishing industry does not pan out. Money lenders in Honduras are often like that, they do not really lend money for the interest, but rather to be able to keep the land after the borrower is unable to pay.

 

Madacascar is where the medicinal plants used to treat leukemia that Eli Lilly company markets and has made millions of dollars on. Although rainforest Indians are more famous for knowing medicinal plants Blacks in Africa know between 2-3,000 medicinal plants and those in Central American more than 1,000. The move by agencies like the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank to protect the rainforest was motivated by the dreams of millions in medicinal plant sales. Why are they now funding cutting down the rainforest for Korean developments? Koreans are the main people behind the Southern Honduran Model city to go into the Choluteca and Valle areas, which includes a national park in the Gulf of Fonseca and Valle still has Lenca Indians.

 

The Economist has also been following Model Cities in Honduras, even though usually neither Honduras nor Madagascar are usually on the radar on big investors in London. The people attracted to these places are looking for no governmental regulations such as the Liberatarians behind the Model Cities and some people thinking they can make big profits in areas of the highest risk, even beyond Emerging Markets, beyond Fronteir markets, where only those who have so much to invest that even if they lose it all, they will still be OK, at the expense of hungry and poor Hondurans .Why is someone of the importance of Ronald Reagan’s son Michael Reagan, on the board of Honduran Model cities?

 At some point the danger becomes that poor Hondurans get so desperate that  they are willing to kill or be killed first. If Honduran gangs charge a “war tax” and they have raised millions more than the Honduran government in taxes who  are they in war against and why? What has been happening in rural Honduras that there are so many angry and violent young men who are  desperately in San Pedro and Choloma, the heart of the Maquila industry, which the Honduran government spent millions in World Bank loans in schools and roads and infrastructure to attract, and which now have the highest homicide rate in the world, and now these companies are leaving because it is too dangerous?