Imperialism Redux: Canada Colonizes Honduras?

[Judi Lynn]

31.05.12
Imperialism Redux: Canada Colonizes Honduras?
by Dave Broad

A curious article recently appeared in Canada's Globe and Mail. The authors are US economist Paul Romer and Octavio Sanchez, chief of staff to the President of Honduras. They are promoting Romer's idea for "charter cities," in which Canada is invited to play a role in an ostensibly new model to promote development and prosperity in the Third World. As the authors put it:

With the near unanimous support of its Congress, Honduras recently defined a new legal entity: la Región Especial de Desarrollo. A RED is an independent reform zone intended to offer jobs and safety to families who lack a good alternative; officials in the RED will be able to partner with foreign governments in critical areas such as policing, jurisprudence and transparency. By participating, Canada can lead an innovative approach to development assistance, an approach that tackles the primary roadblock to prosperity in the developing world: weak governance.1

This special development region would be a step beyond special enterprise zones now existing in the Global South in that it would have its own government. Romer argues that traditional aid and development models have not worked because they are hamstrung by corrupt and inefficient governments. So the charter city is offered as an alternative to traditional aid and to migration of Third World peoples to First World countries in search of work and a better life.

This proposal is spelled out in more detail in a paper Romer co-authored for the Canadian right-wing think tank the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.2 In critiquing traditional development aid, Fuller and Romer make the bold claim that charter cities can "offer people a chance to live and work in a safe and well-run city, a city that provides economic opportunities for Canadians and Hondurans alike, and a city that has the potential to inspire reform in Honduras and throughout the Americas."3 The plan is to have internal city self-government modeled on and assisted by a First World partner like Canada. Such a partnership would also give the charter city legitimacy. Fuller and Romer set their proposal in the context of a report by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs forecasting a wave of urbanization, with the global urban population doubling over the next four decades.4 "The Charter Cities Initiative aims to channel this unprecedented scale of urban growth in a positive direction, offering new choices to reform-minded political leaders as well as new choices to migrants in search of better places to live and work."5

More:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2012/broad310512.html