Honduras economic development zones worry residents, experts

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

Honduras economic development zones worry residents, experts

By MARLON GONZÁLEZ
September 3, 2021

SAN MARCOS DE COLON, Honduras (AP) — Row after row of gleaming new greenhouses are rising on fields just a short walk from the land where the family of Zonia Amparo Vásquez has grown corn and beans for four decades.

Construction began in January, but it wasn’t until June when locals learned their community was part of a controversial government initiative creating semi-autonomous economic development zones that are exempt from many national laws and taxes.

The peppers and tomatoes the greenhouses produce will be for export and other businesses are expected to someday arrive too.

President Juan Orlando Hernández, whose comments revealed the nature of the project to locals, promised the Agroalpha project would be be the largest of its type in Central America, eventually creating more than 4,500 jobs in Las Tapias, a tiny settlement in San Marcos de Colon, a rural municipality of some 30,000 people near the Nicaraguan border.

Vásquez and others in Las Tapias say jobs would be welcome, but they are anguished by fear their property could one day be expropriated — something the law potentially gives such development zones the right to do.

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Read more: https://apnews.com/article/business-honduras-caribbean-d0496aa49fa1ae75547b56ad5476d790

[Judi Lynn]

1. It may take generations for Hondurans to lose the predators' death grip on their lives. n/t