By Tony Phillips*
Older people on Roatán still speak English on this island chain formerly associated with British Honduras (now Belize). The islands still have more of a Caribbean than a Central American culture and lie just south of the wildlife sanctuary of Half Moon Caye in Belize.
Apart from diving tourism revenue at the West End resorts on Roatán, the island has also historically been used to run cocaine and bananas to eager markets in the US. Some US coastguard vessels used to dock in the private ferry port of the Island’s governor.
Roatán also hosts a strange new experiment in corporate sovereignty, locally resented schemes called ZEDEs. ZEDE is short for “Zone for Employment and Economic Development”. They grew out of experimental legislation conveniently added to Honduran law by disgraced drug-running President Juan Orlando Hernández before he was jailed for 45 years in the US in 2024.
Hernández served less than 2 years as he was pardoned and released by Donald Trump. He had been convicted for exporting about four and a half billion bumps of cocaine to the US (about 400 Tonnes). Hernández’s ZEDEs were so unpopular in Honduras they became an election issue and helped Xiomara Castro become president (2022-2026) after Hernández.
Xiomara Castro removed some of the legal basis for the ZEDEs but pressure from two US senators “to strongly encourage the commencement of good faith consultations and negotiations with US investors in ZEDEs” and a law suit against the Honduran State for $11 Billion Dollars in the World Bank ICSID court by associates of Peter Thiel with investments in Próspera, allowed Próspera to remain open. Castro, in a surprise vote, lost her re-election bid to Hernandez’s partner NasryAsfura who is from the same party as the disgraced drug-runner.
A “ZEDE” is similar to a duty free port but the concept of a ZEDE goes way further. ZEDEs replace national sovereignty becoming a nations within, in this case, Honduras. A ZEDE is a mini-States something like a European principality. They have their own currencies, their own laws and police (even private corporate courts). Rather than being run by a prince or princesses, they’re run by corporations.
Many of the Próspera corporations are medical offering experimental medical procedures that are not yet permitted in any real nation yet. Their patients are often very rich Silicon Valley men trying to extend their miserable lives way beyond a century with experimental procedures in human longevity.
NasryAsfura had a miracle win for the anti-communist, conservative, Honduran National Party. Within days Donald Trump pardoned and released Castro’s predecessor Hernández. Telephone conversation audio recordings were leaked that showed that Hernández had taken on a little disinformation job (a sort of privatised CIA focused on attack journalism and lawfare) to be headed up by himself but financed illegally by Trump and Argentina’s Javier Milei to attack left-wing governments in Latin America.
The fake-news team is run out of the US by Hernández and the first two targets of the disinformation campaign were to be Presidents Claudia Scheinbaum of Mexico and Gustavo Petro of Colombia. Hernández himself is in many of these ‘HondurasGate’ audio recordings explaining his new role to Asfura. His illicit group (Hernánez calls them an information cell) were tasked with attacking progressive governments in psyops involving staff journalists and lawyers. Hernández, in the leaked recording, asks Asfura to send the seed money to start this group referring to the Zelaya family which are the National Party’s political adversaries on the left of centre. Xiomara Castro was married to former president José Manuel “Mel” Zelaya ousted from power by a right wing coup in 2009.
The conversation ran as follows:
ASFURA: “I’ll transfer it to you from a friend’s account. Let’s see if they can give it to you in cash, but explain to me – what are we going to do with that? What’s in it for us?”
HERNÁNDEZ: “We’re going to set up a cell, President. From here, from the United States, an informational one, so they can’t track us down in Honduras. It’s going to be like a Latin American news site. I was on a call with President Javier Milei and it went well. Very, very, very good, and I think at this point we can do great things for all of Latin America. There are cases coming against Mexico, cases coming against Colombia, and most importantly against Honduras – in this case, against the Zelaya family.”
Of course the ZEDEs are important to Trump’s Silicon Valley friends so another leaked telephone conversation from May, 2026 we hear Juan Orlando Hernández revealed how he had been given $350,000 dollars by Javier Milei to fund the lawfare and disinformation campaigns. In another audio on that site we can hear the two presidents Hernández and Asfura discussing how they are working to expand the Próspera ZEDE , with a new airport in Roatán, as well as cancelled contracts for Chinese companies, new ones for US corporations and plans for US military bases. etc…
Trump’s MAGA followers are anti “deep state” but Trump himself is not above using the National Security Agency or the CIA to further US geostrategic interests (as well as those of his sponsors in Silicon Valley). His new approach revealed in HondurasGate seems to want to privatise the deep state, on a mafia model, to expand US influence in the rest of Latin America using narcotics and political contacts. This is a kind of electronic Plan Condor, a dirty media war, sponsored by Silicon Valley and aided by Mossad operatives.
In May of 2026 the International Reactionaria exposed Honduras Gate and noted that the Website for international journalism on the topic hosted at HONDURASGATE.CH had been the victim of cyberattacks most of which originated in Israel which the same audios revel is firmly behind the operation. These attacks continue to this day. As of Sunday 21 June HONDURASGATE.CH Website has been taken down for about a week by another attack in mid-June. HONDURASGATE seems to be the template for implementing Trump’s declared interest in the hemisphere which he calls the Don-Roe Doctrine (from Donald Trump and Monroe Doctrine).
*The author is an Irish writer and political ecologist living in Buenos Aires, Argentina
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