Jean Guerrero had a fascinating piece in the New York Times the other day about Trump's recent bizarre (and no doubt, to many, inexplicable) interference in Honduran politics.
Of course, there are any number of reasons why Trump would suddenly decide to pardon the former Honduran strongman Juan Orlando Hernandez—after he was convicted of a conspiracy to smuggle cocaine to the United States—and back the same candidate in the country's recent elections as the MS-13 criminal syndicate. Maybe it's just that he identifies with all would-be authoritarians and crooks; maybe it's just his innate love of gangsterism and corruption showing through.
But Guererro draws attention to another, overlooked aspect of Trump's sudden involvement in the region: namely, his interest in a neoliberal economic experiment that foreign advisors have been running in Honduras for decades, called the "special economic zones."
Trump cronies like Roger Stone have apparently been lobbying publicly for a change in government in Honduras, in the hopes that the return to power of the country's conservative political forces would save these experimental zones—where environmental and labor regulations are held in abeyance—from the social policies of the current center-left leadership.
It sounds, then, like we're witnessing a classic case of U.S. interference in Central America on behalf of foreign business interests, regardless of the wellbeing or consent of the local population—of much the sort that Gore Vidal described all the way back in 1950, in his novel Dark Green, Bright Red (which foreshadowed with eerie prescience the U.S.-backed Guatemalan coup a few years later).
In the book, it is the American banana company that ultimately calls the shots in Central American politics—just as today, it appears that the same role is played by the companies investing in the "special economic zones."
The irony is that this neoliberal policy experiment was marketed and defended years ago—by figures like the Manhattan Institute's Reihan Salam—as a solution for displacement and mass migration in Honduras. If the country could develop along "free market" lines—so the argument went—it would create enough economic opportunities for people to stay at home. Salam therefore framed these zones as a kind of humanitarian intervention in Honduras that would stem the flow of refugees.
As Guerrero shows in the piece, however—the "special economic zones" are actually achieving the opposite. Like most forms of no-holds-barred neoliberal capitalist "development" in the Global South, they are actually enormous engines for displacement—gobbling up local industries and pauperizing the peasantry, in order to transform them—in classical style—into an army of surplus labor.
In order to achieve capitalist industrial development, after all, you first have to create a proletariat: you need to spawn the demoralized and immiserated "Wanderratten" of which Heine wrote. And from the first generation of the industrial revolution on, the way to accomplish this generally has been to drive people's traditional industries out of business—so that they have no choice but to leave their homes and seek factory jobs in the urban slums.
Far from ending displacement, therefore, the "special economic zones" necessarily spawned it—creating a vast population of "footloose labour"—to borrow the sociologist Jan Bremen's phrase—who are rendered migratory by design. That's the whole point of capitalist development and proletarianization, after all—to uproot people so that they seek work in the new industries.
But then—having torn people from their homes in this way—the Trump administration blames the victims for migrating. They erect walls and a hideous system of internment camps to cage, punish, torture, and expel people who cross borders—even though crossing borders is the name of the game; it's the inevitable consequence of the neoliberal development path that Trump is meanwhile—at his cronies' bidding—going out of his way to promote in Honduras!
This is the central irony that Guerrero calls attention to: namely, that Trump is helping to create what she calls "a permanent underclass across the Americas" that is migratory and "footloose" by design—a proletariat; a surplus army of labor; an efflux of "Wanderraten." His rhetoric demonizing and scapegoating immigrants is not actually about ending displacement—but, quite to the contrary—about criminalizing the victims of this displacement, so that they will be more readily exploitable across the hemisphere.
"The victims are the displaced migrants forced to leave their homelands and the American workers who have to compete with their criminalized labor," Guerrero writes. "[...]Mr. Trump claims that his goal is to remove immigrants from this country, but in fact he is expanding the pool of vulnerable labor for transnational elites."
It is that footloose band of proletarianized and pauperized Central American peasants—that deliberately-engineered "permanent underclass" of which Guerrero speaks—the wander-rats—"los eternos indocumentados"—the eternal illegals—as the poet Roque Dalton once called them—whom Trump's policies in Central America are forcing onto the global labor market with one hand—while simultaneously smiting them with the other for daring to try to survive on that same market!
The goal, as Guerrero explains, is not actually to eliminate their competition from the U.S. labor market, but to depress wages for everyone—U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike—by ensuring that these displaced victims of neoliberal development cannot defend their legal rights in the workplace—or that they have no legal rights to defend.
It's the old, old story of capitalism—from its first centuries on. It first creates the proletariat by displacing and pauperizing the peasantry through enclosures, etc. Then, when they have been uprooted and forced to go wandering across the countryside in search of work—it punishes them for their migration and "vagabondage" by imposing its Bloody Codes.
These brutal laws—the ancestors of today's ICE raids and detention camps—never succeed in eliminating the proletariat or making them more stationary—since capitalism cannot function without their continual migration. All these laws do is to render the working population more vulnerable—and therefore more easily exploited.
It's the same old process of displacement that Oliver Goldsmith chronicled all the way back in the 18th century, in the "Deserted Village": "trade's unfeeling train / Usurp the land and dispossess the swain."
And so this process of dispossession continues, and will continue, until we finally dare to prioritize some social values over neoliberal growth—to preserve some of what makes life worth living for the human majority, over unleashing the most ferocious and unmitigated forms of "creative destruction" (sometimes merely destruction) that unmixed capitalism allows.
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