The quest for a charter city has taken Paul Romer to Honduras, where they seem oddly interested:
Back while Mr. Romer was courting Africans, a group of Hondurans was pondering how to improve their country’s prospects. One idea, a turbo-charged version of existing free-trade zones, was to lure investors to a super-embassy, an area governed by another country’s laws. Then they spotted an online video of a Romer presentation to a conference. “As soon as we watched it,” says Xavier Arguello, “we knew this is what we were talking about.”
In November, Mr. Arguello, an aide to a previous Honduran president and now with a U.S. real-estate company, called Mr. Romer. He arranged for his group, including Juan Orlando Hernandez, president of the Honduran Congress, to meet Mr. Romer in Washington. A few weeks later, Mr. Romer was meeting with President Lobo and aides in a Miami hotel. When Mr. Romer’s abstract explanations were unconvincing, someone suggested Mr. Lobo watch the conference presentation video. He did. He was sold. “What risk am I taking if they come here and build factories, schools, universities, hospitals — and where the people can live,” Mr. Lobo later told skeptical local reporters.
In early January, Mr. Romer went to the capital, Tegucigalpa, to meet privately with various groups, then make his case at a public gathering. “You can’t change the rules in the middle of the game,” he said, flashing a photo of a soccer game on a screen. “Create a new playing field and see if anyone wants to play.” Think big, he pleaded. Build an airport big enough to be a hemispheric hub, he said, turning to his father Roy, former governor of Colorado, to tell the story of how Denver got its big airport.
The next step is for Congress to reaffirm the constitutional amendment, then craft a charter for the new city, which requires approval by two-thirds of the Honduran Congress.
Romer spells out some of the details behind these special development regions (or REDs, as they’re abbreviated in Spanish), which would not be sovereign city-states.
David Wessel’s Wall Street Journal piece briefly mentions two fascinating historical quasi-precedents: Henry Ford’s Fordlandia, in Brazil, which I had heard of, and William Walker‘s so-called filibustering throughout Latin America, which somehow I had not.
Fordlandia was an American-style prefab industrial town established in, of all places, the Amazon Rainforest, in 1928, to cultivate rubber for Henry Ford’s extremely vertically integrated car company. In return for 9 percent of the plantation’s profits, the Brazilian government granted the company 10,000 square kilometers of land — again, in the jungle, or, rather, a hilly, rocky, and infertile region within the jungle.
The Ford managers didn’t understand tropical agriculture, the closely packed rubber trees succumbed to natural predators, and the indigenous workers rebelled against their American-style food, housing, and practices — especially the rules against alcohol, tobacco, and brothels.
The whole thing collapsed, and Ford’s grandson sold it off in 1945, for a loss of over $20 million.
William Walker’s story involves hubris, but not progressive Yankee can-do hubris. Walker, who graduated summa cum laude from the University of Nashville at the age of fourteen, went on to study medicine in Europe and then at Penn, to study law in New Orleans, to run a paper there, to become a journalist in San Francisco, where he fought three duels, and then to go filibustering, or freebooting — conquering vast regions of Latin America, where he would create new slave states to join the federal union. This was just before the War between the States:
In the summer of 1853, Walker traveled to Guaymas, seeking a grant from the government of Mexico to create a colony that would serve as a fortified frontier, protecting U.S. soil from retaliations by Native Americans. Mexico refused, and Walker returned to San Francisco determined to obtain his colony, regardless of Mexico’s position. He began recruiting from amongst American supporters of slavery and the Manifest Destiny Doctrine, mostly inhabitants of Kentucky and Tennessee. His intentions then changed from forming a buffer colony to establishing an independent Republic of Sonora, which might eventually take its place as a part of the American Union (as had been the case previously with the Republic of Texas). He funded his project by “selling scripts which were redeemable in lands of Sonora.”
On October 15, 1853, Walker set out with 45 men to conquer the Mexican territories of Baja California and Sonora. He succeeded in capturing La Paz, the capital of sparsely populated Baja California, which he declared the capital of a new Republic of Lower California, with himself as president and his partner, Watkins, as vice president; he then put the region under the laws of the American state of Louisiana, which made slavery legal. He moved his headquarters to Ensenada to maintain a more secure position of operations. Although he never gained control of Sonora, less than three months later, he pronounced Baja California part of the larger Republic of Sonora.
Lack of supplies and unexpectedly strong resistance by the Mexican government quickly forced Walker to retreat. Back in California, he was put on trial for conducting an illegal war, in violation of the Neutrality Act of 1794. In the era of Manifest Destiny, his filibustering project was popular in the southern and western United States and the jury took eight minutes to acquit him.
It gets even “better”:
In 1854, a civil war erupted in Nicaragua between the Legitimist party (also called the Conservative party), based in the city of Granada, and the Democratic party (also called the Liberal party), based in León. The Democratic party sought military support from Walker who, to circumvent U.S. neutrality laws, obtained a contract from Democratic president President Castellón to bring as many as three hundred “colonists” to Nicaragua. These mercenaries received the right to bear arms in the service of the Democratic government. Walker sailed from San Francisco on May 3, 1855, with approximately 60 men. Upon landing, the force was reinforced by 170 locals and about 100 Americans, including the well-known explorer and journalist Charles Wilkins Webber and the English adventurer Charles Frederick Henningsen, a veteran of the First Carlist War, the Hungarian Revolution, and the war in Circassia.
With Castellón’s consent, Walker attacked the Legitimists in the town of Rivas, near the trans-isthmian route. He was driven off, but not without inflicting heavy casualties. On September 4, during the Battle of La Virgen, Walker defeated the Legitimist army. On October 13, he conquered the Legitimist capital of Granada and took effective control of the country. Initially, as commander of the army, Walker ruled Nicaragua through puppet President Patricio Rivas. During Walker’s rule, the country became known as “Walkeragua.” U.S. President Franklin Pierce recognized Walker’s regime as the legitimate government of Nicaragua on May 20, 1856.
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Walker took up residence in Granada and set himself up as President of Nicaragua, after conducting a fraudulent election. He was inaugurated on July 12, 1856, and soon launched an Americanization program, reinstating slavery, declaring English an official language and reorganizing currency and fiscal policy to encourage immigration from the United States. Realizing that his position was becoming precarious, he sought support from the Southerners in the U.S. by recasting his campaign as a fight to spread the institution of black slavery, which many American Southern businessmen saw as the basis of their agrarian economy. With this in mind, Walker revoked Nicaragua’s emancipation edict of 1824. This move did increase Walker’s popularity in the South and attracted the attention of Pierre Soulé, an influential New Orleans politician, who campaigned to raise support for Walker’s war. Nevertheless, Walker’s army, weakened by an epidemic of cholera and massive defections, was no match for the Central American coalition. On December 14, 1856 as Granada was surrounded by 4,000 Salvadoran and Guatemalan troops, Charles Frederick Henningsen, one of Walker’s generals, ordered his men to set the city ablaze before escaping and fighting their way to Lake Nicaragua. An inscription on a lance reading Aquí fue Granada (“Here was Granada”) was left behind at the smoking ruin of the ancient capital city.On May 1, 1857, Walker surrendered to Commander Charles Henry Davis of the United States Navy under the pressure of the Central American armies, and was repatriated. Upon disembarking in New York City, he was greeted as a hero, but he alienated public opinion when he blamed his defeat on the U.S. Navy. Within six months, he set off on another expedition, but he was arrested by the U.S. Navy Home Squadron under the command of Commodore Hiram Paulding and once again returned to the U.S. amid considerable public controversy over the legality of the Navy’s actions.
Walker returned to the region and fell into the hands of the Brits, who then handed him off to the Honduran authorities — who executed him.