2025: Libertarian City Dream in Honduras Becomes $11 Billion Nightmare (archived)
Hagerty, a Tennessee Republican, and Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, quoted a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Prospera that said the project would help address the “root causes” of immigration in Honduras and counter Chinese influence in Latin America. Neway Capital is a corporate sponsor of the Center, according to its website [The CIA front Peoples Temple and Jonestown come to mind, for some reason].
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Brimen and Magatte Wade [Atlas Network], a Senegalese businesswoman, launched Próspera Africa last March, hoping to expand the low-tax and self-regulation model operating in Roatan globally. The Wyoming-registered venture raised nearly half a million in investments in its first few months, according to SEC filings.
Much of sub-Saharan Africa could make sense for such a project, Lutter said. Rapid urbanization and a young population make the region ideal for rapid economic development. Some of its countries “are some of the most rural in the world,” led by governments eager to create a lot more jobs and opportunities, he said.
A patchwork of special economic zones already operate there, but none are as ambitious as the Honduras ZEDEs.
Wade and Brimen are tight-lipped about where exactly they are looking to go. But Wade, whose husband, Michael Strong, has been involved with the Prospera project for a decade, said they are talking with leaders to gauge support.
Related:
CSIS: The Geopolitics of Honduras’s Special Economic Zones
2024: Prospera, the eccentric private libertarian enclave in Honduras
Prospera may be presented as a Honduran project first and foremost, but Honduras Prospera Inc is an offshoot of NeWay Capital LLC and is registered in the US state of Delaware, a tax haven. Its founders are Erick Brimen, a Venezuelan who calls himself a “finance professional,” and Gabriel Delgado Ayau, a Guatemalan.
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According to Le Monde’s research, by the end of 2023, the ZEDE had raised $100 million from some 30 investors. Among them are libertarians, anarcho-capitalists and far-right ultra-liberals, including the Pronomos company founded by Patri Friedman, a former Google employee and the grandson of ultra-liberal economist Milton Friedman, one of the founders of the Chicago School and the inspiration behind the Chilean and Argentinean dictatorships of the 1970s. Pronomos investors include the German Peter Thiel, co-founder with Elon Musk of the online payment website Paypal, a billionaire who wants to cheat death and is convinced that “freedom and democracy are not compatible.” He is also one of Minicircle’s investors.
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The relationships with Friedman and Thiel aren’t Prospera’s only ties with libertarians. ZEDEs are supposed to be overseen by a Committee for the Adoption of Best Practices (CAMP), whose members give the green light to the creation of autonomous zones and appoint their general secretaries. When the CAMP was created in 2013, 17 of its 713 members were foreigners. Half were libertarians with connections to the Atlas Network. [1]
Partly financed by American billionaire Charles Koch and the tobacco andoil industries, the New York-based Atlas Network is a mesh of foundations, think tanks and academic institutions designed to promote free-market policies and state subsidiarity. This capitalist international brings together 589 organizations from 103 countries. In Latin America, it financed projects worth $2 million in 2023. It supports election candidates – Guillermo Lasso in Ecuador, Mauricio Macri and Milei in Argentina [2], Maria Corina Machado [3] in Venezuela – funds scholarships and seminars, and promotes far-right influencers.
Among the first CAMP members linked to the Atlas Network are Argentine Alejandro Chafuen, who was its president for 17 years – he attended Milei’s investiture in Buenos Aires on December 10, 2023 – and Austrian Barbara Kolm, one of the masterminds behind Austria’s far-right FPÖ party. Colindres is himself a member of the Eléutera Foundation, an influential neoliberal think tank close to the Atlas Network. His partner, Gabriel Delgado Ayau, is the grandson of the founder of Guatemala’s Francisco Marroquin University, the nerve center of the Latin American far-right libertarian movement, and the former president of the ultraliberal Mont Pelerin Society. “Prospera’s territory is, in fact, a libertarian laboratory in a poor country little known to the world,” said Jimena Garcia Merino, the founder of HN Resurge, one of the main movements opposing the ZEDEs.
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Some observers believe such an experiment would not have been possible without a state as corrupt as Honduras. Its previous president, from 2014 to 2022, Juan Orlando Hernandez (“JOH”) of the right-wing National Party (NP), was sentenced on June 26 to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking in the United States. “In a country respecting the rule of law, the law allowing ZEDEs would never have passed,” argued Gerardo Torres Zelaya, the current Honduran vice-minister of foreign affairs.
Honduras’s first private city was conceived after the 2009 coup that brought the NP to power. Special Development Regions (REDs) were created at the time, based on the model of the “charter cities” of American Paul Romer – the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics laureate – who became an adviser to the elected government after the coup. His idea was to have developed nations build “start-up” cities on the territories of emerging countries to bring prosperity to local populations and keep them from migrating. But the REDs ran up against the Supreme Court, which ruled in October 2012 that they infringed on the country’s sovereignty. No matter: Honduran Congress, then led by JOH, simply dismissed the reluctant magistrates and passed a new law, to which the reworked court raised no objections, and thus the ZEDEs were born.
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Faced with the hostility of Castro’s government, Prospera retaliated: On February 3, 2023, the company filed a complaint against Honduras with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a World Bank-affiliated institution. It is asking $10.7 billion in compensation, the equivalent of a third of the country’s GDP. Ever since, Honduran authorities have been paralyzed by this sword of Damocles. Their only answer was to withdraw from the ICSID convention, which they announced on February 24 and is due to take effect on August 25. Prospera warned that “the livelihoods of thousands of Hondurans” were at risk.
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Libertarians continue to defend their model. “I don’t know anyone in my world who has turned their back on the ideals of the ZEDEs,” said Chafuen. They now dream of creating other private cities elsewhere on the planet and in February, Senegalese entrepreneur Magatte Wade announced a partnership with NeWay Capital to create Próspera Africa.
2022: Zero Government Control Emerges in New Breed SEZs
The dream of Próspera, founded by a U.S. corporation off the coast of Honduras, was to escape government control. The Honduran government wants the new SEZ gone.
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There’s not much else to see yet. But the Delaware-based company that founded this experimental town in 2017 has raised $120 million in investments — including from venture-capital funds backed by the Silicon Valley billionaires Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen — to transform the territory, about twice the size of Monaco, into the most developed start-up city in the world. Built in a semiautonomous jurisdiction known as a ZEDE (a Spanish acronym for Zone for Employment and Economic Development), Próspera is a private, for-profit city, with its own government that courts foreign investors through low taxes and light regulation. Businesses can choose a regulatory framework from a menu of 36 countries or customize their own.
*2020: Who Should Regulate Free Trade Zones in Honduras? – There’s too many names to list, but Grover Norquist [4] stands out to me.
2025: A Startup Linked to Peter Thiel Wants to Build the “Next Great City” in Greenland
For Praxis, the negative response may seem insurmountable, but there are also tailwinds: President Trump has nominated Ken Howery, another member of the PayPal Mafia, to become the ambassador to Denmark. The official response from Denmark’s governing party to inquiries from Trump has been sullen as well, but the president’s efforts have landed a request for a meeting from the Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen amid attempts to ease security concerns in the region. Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte B. Egede also signaled he was ready to speak with Trump, though he drew a line in the sand on the issue: “We do not want to be Americans.”
Previously: Techno Feudalism (company towns)
[2] Argentina election 2023: what you need to know (Milei)
[3] Vente Venezuela document (Maria Corina Machado)
[4] Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform and a prominent conservative activist/lobbyist, was actively involved overseas during the 1980s, providing support to anti-Communist rebel forces across regions such as Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The Republican’s 1994 Contract With America was written with Norquist’s assistance by the Heritage Foundation.
Grover Norquist: ‘Field Marshal’ of the Bush Plan / The Wrecking Crew / Norquist on SourceWatch
Working document: Freedom Cities-Magatte Wade-Próspera Africa-Atlas Network
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 