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ABSTRACT
Following Hurricane Mitch in 1998, the Honduran government introduced legislative reforms designed to generate investment opportunities in energy, mining and tourism and to expedite the post-disaster recovery. This experiment in “disaster capitalism” provided a blueprint for the recovery strategy implemented by the government of Porfirio Lobo after the 2009 coup against Manuel Zelaya. The similarities between these two historical conjunctures necessitate a deeper engagement with the meaning of extractivism in post-disaster contexts, particularly in relation to so-called sustainable tourism development. While multilateral aid institutions have claimed tourism as a sustainable alternative to more exploitative forms of economic development, this paper draws on ethnographic research in a coastal Garifuna community to argue that tourism is analogous with extractivism. By analyzing the collective action and resistance of black and Indigenous organizations for territorial autonomy, this paper elucidates the connections between traditional extractive industries and tourism, both of which rely on state-orchestrated natural resource expropriation, enclosure and dispossession, resulting in widespread environmental degradation and ecological insecurity for coastal Indigenous communities. The paper highlights how neoliberal tourism policies are advanced under the guise of ecotourism and sustainable development, while creating the conditions for extractivism to take hold within black and Indigenous territories.
Acknowledgments
I am thankful to my colleagues and friends in Honduras who have offered continuous support and guidance for my research. I am also thankful to Jim Igoe, Lourdes Gutierrez-Najera, Sharlene Mollet and Megan Ybarra for their thoughtful feedback and insights on earlier versions of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Garifuna are the descendants of Africans, Carib and Arawak Indians.
2. Zelaya's ouster was widely condemned as a coup, but the US government was reluctant to follow suit, due to the close ties between the Honduran business elite and US corporations with investments in Honduras, which were likely to benefit from the sudden regime change. I will explain these dynamics in more detail in the section titled, Disaster capitalism, Phase Two.
3. Büscher and Davidov (Citation2014) analyze the significance of ecotourism developments that emerge in zones of extraction. They demonstrate how these two logics of development complement one another and argue, as I do here, that local people experience tourism and extraction in similar ways (Davidov & Büscher, Citation2014, p. 2).
4. I will expand on these points in the section on “Extractivist Tourism in Honduras”.
5. The recently inaugurated Indura Beach and Golf Resort in Tela Bay was financed through a public–private partnership between the government of Honduras and private investors and with the backing of a multi-million dollar loan from the Inter-American Development Bank (see Viehweider, Citation2007).
6. Svampa (Citation2015) uses this term to refer to the renaissance of the primary sector of Latin American economies. This is evidenced by the vast expansion of mining and resource extraction throughout the region, leading Bebbington and Bury (Citation2013) to underscore the increasing analytical and political significance of the subsoil.
7. The “pink tide” refers to the twenty-first-century resurgence of leftist political ideologies throughout South America, including in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Uruguay.
8. In 1988, the Government of Honduras implemented an extensive structural adjustment program backed by the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which negatively impacted small and medium industrialists, reduced protectionist import taxes and led to a drastic drop in salaries, more than 4% in real terms (Revista Envío, Citation1990).
9. On 12 October 1999, a protest convened by the Front for the Defense of National Sovereignty was violently repressed by police forces, leading to the death of two protesters and injuring several others (see Anderson, Citation2000, pp.131–133). Following this manifestation of state violence, the National Congress agreed not to reform Article 107. Nonetheless, the National Congress had previously passed Decree 90/90, permitting foreign investors to purchase coastal property in urban areas for the purpose of tourism development.
10. See “Opportunities for Investment in Tourism”, Honduras is Open for Business Investment Guide (2011).
11. The government also faced internal pressure from social movement actors and from the international human rights community, which voiced strong concern about the targeted killing of environmental activists, such as Blanca Jeannette Kawas who was killed for her efforts to conserve natural resources in Tela Bay.
12. See Estudio Sobre Turismo Rural en Honduras, 2009.
13. Moore (Citation2012) employs the concept of disaster capitalism to analyze Honduran mining legislation in the post-Mitch and post-coup periods. In her account, the administration of Porfirio Lobo pushed through pro-mining reforms, which benefitted Canadian mining corporations while offering very little protections for mining-affected communities.
14. This conditional cash transfer program that was intended to increase school enrollment and retention among impoverished children.
15. For a detailed account of the Fourth Ballot Box and the push for constitutional reform, see Meza's recent account by the Centro de Documentación de Honduras (2012).
16. The OAS invoked Article 21 of the Charter which states, “The territory of a State is inviolable; it may not be the object, even temporarily, of military occupation or of other measures of force taken by another State, directly or indirectly, on any grounds whatever.”
17. Members of Honduran business elite and allies in the Latin American Business Council (CEAL) hired Lanny Davis, former legal counsel to Clinton and a strong supporter of her 2008 presidential campaign, to mediate the political fallout and to lobby on behalf of the coup government in Washington. Recently released Clinton emails provide a clearer picture of her support for the de-facto government, and her apprehension about Zelaya's larger political intentions (see Main, Citation2015).
18. These legislative measures included: Law for the Promotion of Public–Private Partnerships, Law for the Promotion and Protection of Investments. Model City Law, and the Part-Time Work Law.
19. At the time of the event over 70% of new FDI in Honduras came from the United States (see http://honduras.usembassy.gov/pr-051311-eng.html, accessed 20 August 2015).
20. HOB also included investment opportunities in agribusiness, energy, forestry, infrastructure, textiles and global services. Mining was not explicitly listed at the time, since in 2006 the Honduran Supreme Court declared 16 articles of the 1998 mining code unconstitutional (Moore, Citation2012).
21. Mainstream Honduran media outlets used the term “crisis” to refer to the coup and to downplay the extralegal activities of the de facto regime that took power following Zelaya's ousting.
22. A full discussion of Romer's ideas is beyond the scope of this article. Here, I focus on how the Lobo administration marketed the Charter City plan as a means of fast-tracking reforms that were designed to benefit private enterprise at the expense of poorer sectors of society.
23. Playa Escondida Beach Club at the western end of Triunfo de la Cruz is a resort apartment building with thirty units and an infinity pool.
24. The current administration of Juan Orlando Hernandez has opened regional airports in Tela, Copan (for tourists visiting Copan Ruinas) and will soon open one in Gracias, which is the gateway city for the Ruta Lenca, a tourist circuit that runs from Marcala to the colonial city of Santa Rosa de Copan, a region with a high concentration Lenca peoples.
25. By 2004, tourism accounted 35% of foreign exchange receipts for the countries of Central America (Robinson, Citation2012).
26. The announcement is available here: http://news.curiocollection.com/index.cfm/news/hilton-worldwide-adds-indura-beach-golf-resort-to-curio-a-collection-by-hilton-pipeline (accessed 2 July 2016).
27. Following tremendous pressure from Garifuna activists and the negative media attention surrounding negotiations for the creation of the resort, the Government of Honduras agreed to allocate 7% of its total shares to five Garifuna communities in Tela Bay.
28. Opposition to the Agua Zarca dam project has already resulted in the murder of numerous activists, including Berta Caceres, a recipient of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize.
29. In the 1994, the Honduran government officially extended collective land titles to coastal Garifuna communities. Although these titles did not encompass the entire land area claimed by Garifuna as their ancestral territory, they provided additional protections against pressures to privatize. In accordance with international conventions on the rights of indigenous peoples, land held in common is inalienable.
30. See Loperena's (Citation2012) discussion of the resort and the community resistance movement.
31. For example, the 18-hole golf course required the dredging and filling of protected wetlands within the buffer zone of the Jeannette Kawas National Park, which had direct consequences for the communities adjacent to the resort, including more frequent flooding and, based on my interviews, mosquito-borne illnesses.
32. Triunfo is the shortened version of Triunfo de la Cruz, and Triunfeños refers to residents of the community.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Christopher A. Loperena
Christopher Loperena is an assistant professor in the International Studies Department at the University of San Francisco. His research examines the socio-spatial politics of economic development in Latin America, race and racialization, and Indigenous and black struggles for territorial autonomy. He holds a PhD degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin.
