The New Colonialism, How Honduras Became a Laboratory for Transnational Oligarchy

The New Colonialism, How Honduras Became a Laboratory for Transnational Oligarchy

The inauguration of Nasry Asfura as president of Honduras is not merely a political transition in a small Central American nation. It is a stark and alarming blueprint for a new world order, one being actively architected by a powerful alliance of American right-wing ideologues, Silicon Valley moguls, and global capital. This alliance, with former U.S. President Donald Trump as its most visible champion, is using nations like Honduras as testing grounds for a radical model of governance: the erosion of national sovereignty in favor of corporate-controlled, law-light enclaves that serve a transnational elite. The story of how Trump intervened in Honduran politics—openly backing Asfura, pardoning convicted narco-president Juan Orlando Hernández, and aligning with the threat of gang violence—reveals a coherent, cynical project. It is a pilot program for a future where democracy is subordinated to profit, where state power is wielded to protect oligarchs, and where the brutal tactics long exported by the U.S. to the Global South are being imported back, not as karma for the elite, but as a weapon against the working class everywhere.

The Naked Intervention: Gangsters, Pardons, and “Hell to Pay”

The 2025 Honduran election was a brazen display of hybrid warfare. Days before the vote, Donald Trump publicly urged Hondurans to vote for Nasry Asfura, a construction magnate from the traditionally right-wing National Party. This was not passive endorsement. It coincided with reports of MS-13 gang members, posing as election observers, threatening to kill anyone who did not vote for Asfura. Trump then compounded this atmosphere of intimidation with a direct threat, warning Hondurans of “hell to pay” if they chose a different outcome.

This intervention cannot be understood without the precedent set just months earlier: Trump’s controversial pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH). In 2024, Hernández was sentenced in a U.S. court to 45 years in prison for leading “one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.” His presidency (2014-2022) was a narco-kleptocracy that fueled massive corruption and violence, directly causing a surge in migration to the U.S. as citizens fled. Trump, dismissing the conviction as a Biden-era “witch hunt,” set Hernández free.

The connection is explicit. Trump’s pardon was publicly advocated by key figures like the Claremont Institute—an intellectual hub of Trumpist thought—and his longtime advisor Roger Stone. Their stated goal was to “re-empower the right-wing party” in Honduras by rehabilitating its most toxic figure. The Asfura campaign was the vehicle for this resurrected party. Trump’s support, therefore, was not about ideology or democracy; it was an investment. He backed the political faction most likely to restore the conditions for a specific, lucrative project that Hernández had championed and that the subsequent progressive government had tried to dismantle: the start-up city of Prospera.

Prospera: The Silicon Valley Dream of a Corporate Utopia

Prospera, located on the Honduran island of Roatán, is the physical manifestation of this new order. It is a “special economic zone” (SEZ) or “start-up city”—a semi-autonomous territory operating under its own business-friendly legal framework, separate from Honduran national law. Backed by Hernández and Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, Prospera offers corporations incredibly low taxes, lax environmental regulations, and weak labor standards. It is a neocolonial enclave where transnational capital can operate with minimal accountability to the host nation or its people.

The model is not new, but its application as a tool for private sovereignty is. As the article notes, SEZs were pioneered in places like Puerto Rico in the 1990s, where they funneled public money into private infrastructure while driving out native populations through unemployment. Today, over 5,400 such zones exist globally. The vision, evangelized in tech circles by figures like Balaji Srinivasan in his book The Network State, is of a world where corporate jurisdictions compete with nation-states, effectively allowing the ultra-wealthy to opt out of societal obligations like taxation and regulation.

For the people of Honduras, Prospera was an affront. The democratically elected progressive president, Xiomara Castro, the first woman to lead the nation, opposed it as a violation of national sovereignty. Her government repealed the law that enabled such start-up cities. This act of reclaiming national authority was, in the words of Roger Stone, unacceptable. The “pillaging class” needed its laboratory back. The political operation to install Asfura—with Trump’s threats and the implied menace of MS-13—was the means to that end. As Stone wrote, “May the Prospera experiment prevail… by the benevolent hand of President Trump!”

The Transnational Playbook: From Honduras to “Freedom Cities”

The Honduran experiment is not an isolated foreign policy adventure. It is a pilot for a model its architects wish to bring to the United States itself. The same Silicon Valley figures and think tanks whispering in Trump’s ear about Prospera have long advocated for “charter cities” or “freedom cities” on American soil. These would be deregulated, corporate-run zones marketed as havens of innovation and liberty, but functioning as legal vacuums for the wealthy.

This reveals Trump’s true allegiance. For all his “America First” nationalism, his actions demonstrate he is not a nationalist but a servant of transnational elites—a class of billionaires, tech moguls, and oligarchs whose loyalty is to capital, not country. Their goal is to dismantle the regulatory and democratic structures of all nations that impede absolute profit. Honduras, with its vulnerable institutions and history of U.S. manipulation, was a convenient first test.

The playbook is coherent:

1. Destabilize Democratic Governance: Undermine or overthrow governments (through elections, coups, or lawfare) that assert national sovereignty over corporate projects.

2. Install Client Regimes: Back pliable leaders who will grant extraordinary concessions to capital, often those already compromised by corruption or criminality.

3. Create Legal Parallels: Establish SEZs or autonomous zones that exist outside the national legal and social contract.

4. Criminalize Dissent & Labor: Use state and para-state violence (gangs, militarized police) to crush opposition and create a pliable, vulnerable workforce.

The Importation of “Third World” Violence and the Creation of a Permanent Underclass

There is a profound irony that MAGA rhetoric often warns the U.S. is turning into a “third world” country due to immigration. The article posits that Trump is, in fact, deliberately remaking America in the image of the Latin America that U.S. foreign policy helped create: a region of stark inequality where the state and organized crime merge, dissent is crushed, and oligarchs operate with impunity.

We see the precursors: the use of unmarked federal agents to snatch protesters; rhetoric endorsing the murder of cartel leaders and the bombing of Mexico; the threat to arrest foreign heads of state on dubious charges; the normalization of political violence. These are not innovations but imports—tactics long deployed by U.S.-backed regimes in Latin America to maintain control.

The ultimate goal is the entrenchment of a permanent, criminalized underclass across the Americas. Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies are a smokescreen. By stripping legal status from millions, he does not reduce immigration; he expands the pool of vulnerable, exploitable labor. Undocumented workers, living in fear of deportation, cannot demand fair wages or safe conditions. They depress labor standards for all workers, creating a race to the bottom that benefits the corporate class. The displaced migrant fleeing the narco-state in Honduras and the American worker seeing their wages stagnate are victims of the same system, pitted against each other while the oligarchs profit.

This is not an accident but the design. It creates a flexible, disposable workforce for the Prosperas and “freedom cities” of the world—people with no rights, no recourse, and no country to protect them.

Conclusion: The Fight for the Commons

The battle in Honduras is a microcosm of a global struggle between two visions of the future. One is a vision of democratic sovereignty, where nations—however imperfect—retain the right to govern their territory, tax capital, protect their environment, and uphold the rights of their citizens. The other is a neo-feudal vision of a “network state,” where citizenship is a paid subscription, law is a private service, and geography is merely real estate to be optimized for shareholder value.

The liberal silence on how criminalized labor depresses wages, noted at the article’s end, is a fatal blind spot. Celebrating immigration’s macroeconomic benefits while ignoring how its manipulation by elites harms the working class only fuels the populist anger that figures like Trump exploit.

The lesson from Honduras is that the defense of democracy can no longer be purely national. The threat is transnational. It requires a transnational solidarity that links the protests of Hondurans defending their sovereignty with the struggles of American workers for living wages and the efforts of activists everywhere to hold capital accountable. The “future” being piloted in Honduras—of gangster politics, corporate utopias, and a brutalized underclass—must be recognized not as a distant concern, but as a clear and present danger to the idea of a just society, wherever it may be. The fight is for the very concept of the commons, and it has already begun.

Q&A

Q1: What was the explicit connection between Donald Trump’s pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández and the Honduran election of Nasry Asfura?
A1: The pardon was a calculated political act to rehabilitate Honduras’s right-wing National Party, which was tainted by Hernández’s narco-conviction. Figures like Roger Stone and the Claremont Institute openly argued that pardoning Hernández would “re-empower” the party. Trump’s subsequent, overt support for the party’s candidate, Nasry Asfura—including his “hell to pay” threat—was the culmination of this strategy. The goal was to install a client regime that would restore the legal and political conditions favorable to transnational corporate projects like the start-up city Prospera, which Hernández had backed and which the progressive government had repealed.

Q2: What is Prospera, and why is it central to understanding the political intervention in Honduras?
A2: Prospera is a “special economic zone” or “start-up city” on the Honduran island of Roatán. It is a semi-autonomous corporate enclave operating under its own business-friendly laws, with minimal taxes, environmental regulations, and labor standards. Backed by Silicon Valley moguls (Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen) and former President Hernández, it represents the physical model of governance desired by transnational elites. The progressive President Xiomara Castro’s repeal of the law enabling Prospera triggered the political counter-offensive. The election of Asfura was essentially a corporate takeover bid to restore this privatized utopia, making Prospera the geopolitical prize at the heart of the intervention.

Q3: The article argues Trump is not a nationalist but serves “transnational elites.” What evidence does it provide for this?
A3: The evidence is in the consistent pattern of actions that subordinate national interests (of both the U.S. and other countries) to the interests of a borderless capitalist class: 1) Pardoning a foreign narcotics trafficker to revive a political party that protects a Silicon Valley investment (Prospera). 2) Advocating for “freedom cities”—the U.S. version of start-up cities—which would create deregulated corporate zones within America, eroding U.S. sovereignty. 3) Aligning with tech billionaires whose ideology (the “Network State”) explicitly seeks to replace nation-states with private, corporate jurisdictions. His “America First” rhetoric masks a project that dismantles democratic authority everywhere for the benefit of a stateless oligarchy.

Q4: How does the article explain the seeming contradiction between Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric and the actual economic effect of his policies?
A4: The article argues the contradiction is deliberate. The harsh rhetoric distracts voters and stokes cultural division. Meanwhile, policies that strip legal status from millions of people do not stop immigration but rather create a larger pool of undocumented, vulnerable labor. This “criminalized labor” is profoundly exploitable—unable to demand fair wages or safe working conditions for fear of deportation. This depresses wages and labor standards for all workers, creating a cheap, flexible workforce that benefits the corporate class Trump’s allies represent. The goal is not to remove immigrants but to manage migration in a way that entrenches a permanent, exploitable underclass.

Q5: What is the article’s chilling conclusion about the relationship between U.S. domestic politics and its historical foreign policy in Latin America?
A5: The article concludes that the tactics long deployed by the U.S. to enforce its will in Latin America—supporting corrupt client states, merging criminal and state power, using violence to crush dissent, creating conditions for mass displacement—are now being imported and applied within the United States itself. The “third world” conditions MAGA supporters fear are not coming from immigrants, but are being deliberately engineered by a political project that sees the Latin American model of oligarchic control, social violence, and worker disenfranchisement as desirable. The victims are not the elites but the working people across the Americas, who are pitted against each other in a race to the bottom orchestrated for transnational profit.