Suspicious: public-privatized states-within-a-state planned in Honduras

[flamingdem]

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680402/how-do-you-make-a-city-from-nothing

** So the tech and biz types like this idea?

excerpt:
A year after the coup, Honduras still found itself an international pariah, cut off from foreign aid while investors streamed toward the exits. Aides to the new president Porfirio Lobo were brainstorming ways to lure them back when a friend sent them the link to Romer’s charter cities TED talk.

Lobo, his chief of staff Octavio Sanchez and Juan Orlando Hernandez, president of the Honduran Congress, flew to Miami in November 2010 to hear Romer’s pitch. Impressed, Lobo invited him to the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, to make his case to Congress. Accompanied by his father, a former governor of Colorado and past chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Romer traveled to the capital in January, and within weeks Congress had passed a constitutional amendment granting Lobo’s government the power to create Special Development Regions (“las Regiones Especiales de Desarrollo” or “REDs”) modeled on charter cities. The vote was 126 in favor; one opposed (with one abstention).

The Lobo administration wants to get the first RED up and running in the next year or two, before the next presidential elections. To get this done, the administration has empowered Coalianza, an agency created in March 2011 to manage the country’s public-private partnerships. Overseeing a handful of staff are three commissioners, including Sanchez and Carlos Pineda, a 41-year-old lawyer and the eldest member of what he calls “our de facto think tank”--a close-knit group of free market reformers who go back a decade together. “The international community was against us, unemployment was 42 percent,” and foreign direct investment--never more than $1 billion annually to begin with--had been almost halved, Pineda told me recently at Coalianza’s headquarters, an airy, unmarked villa on a gated street in Tegucigalpa.

Unlike a previous generation of instant cities such as Brasilia, or debt-fueled fantasies like Dubai, the REDs are deliberately being planned on the cheap. “How do we do things with no money down?” Pineda asked rhetorically. “How do we not max out the credit card?” One answer is to let others pay. To that end, the Constitutional statue passed last July enshrines the principles of free trade, low taxes and open immigration in the zones, in the hopes of making them more attractive to manufacturers than Mexico or China. On top of that, the REDs can establish--or outsource to foreign governments and companies as necessary--their own hospitals, schools, courts, judges and even police. They are public-privatized states-within-a-state, or rather pieces of states-within-a-state.
"They are public-privatized states-within-a-state, or rather pieces of states-within-a-state."

In practice, this means creating separate police for the REDs under the tutelage of foreign instructors or private security forces. Judicial nominees might come from outside Honduras (as they are in Hong Kong), and the final court of appeal might be the Supreme Court of Mauritius--an island nation ten thousand miles away.

Day-to-day governance is hardly less complicated--local governors will be watch-dogged by audit committees and report to a nine-member “Transparency Commission,” whose pro tem chairman is Paul Romer. From there, the REDs dissolve into a welter of overlapping and competing jurisdictions--municipal governments, unincorporated areas, even “opt-out” zones administered under Honduran law, not the RED’s. MORE AT LINK