Background
Across Latin America, zones for economic development are frequently lauded as innovative policy tools to attract investment and stimulate growth. Framed in the language of modernization and opportunity, initiatives such as Honduras’s Zonas de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico (ZEDEs) promise jobs, infrastructure, and prosperity. Yet experiences like that of PROSPERA (a functioning ZEDE) in Roatán, Honduras, reveal how such projects can reproduce rather than resolve existing inequalities. In this ZEDE, the juxtaposition of gated luxury enclaves beside ancestral fishing villages illustrates how these development zones are deeply implicated in processes of uneven development, both globally and within local communities. To truly understand these dynamics, ocean scholars must look beyond economic metrics and examine how policies that claim to promote growth reshape access, belonging, and governance. The case of Roatán underscores the need for analyses that are simultaneously social and spatial, attentive to how development enclaves transform landscapes, livelihoods, and relations of power. Only through such combined lenses can we grasp how economic zones extend colonial patterns of extraction and exclusion into the present, reconfiguring who benefits, and who bears the costs, of coastal development.
Crawfish Rock and PROSPERA
It was a humid, hot morning when I drove into Crawfish Rock, Roatán. The dirt road was carved with potholes; ten minutes of shaking along that path brings you to an intersection that tells the village’s story at a glance. To the right, a tall, gleaming building ringed by luxury homes, the Caribbean glittering behind it. To the left, small wooden houses side-by-side (Figure 1), children running, and boats pulled up on the sand. That contrast was jarring. Opulence and underdevelopment were stitched together by a single lane; this is how you know you’ve arrived.
Figure 1. Wooden houses in Crawfish Rock.
Crawfish Rock is an ancestral fishing community. The women here are traditional fisherwomen who catch crabs, lobster (which they call “crawfish”), and fish—fish that are sold cheaply to outsiders and kept for local tables. Men farm or fish seasonally. The community is Afro-descendant, English-speaking, and distinct in Honduras’s broader landscape. Crawfish Rock is a place where practice, language, and memory circle tightly around the sea.
I knocked on the door of the presidenta (Spanish word for female president) of the Patronato, the local community organization. As she opened the door, music blasted from inside. She welcomed me in with a broad, warm, unapologetic hospitality: “Please come in.” She’d made a coconut gumbo for me to try: shrimp, fish, coconut, and dumplings (Figure 2). She introduced her dogs and her grandchild, who settled on her lap.
Figure 2. Traditional seafood coconut gumbo.
Then the presidenta went quiet and looked out the window; The story she told next was the reason we were there.
She described PROSPERA, the ZEDE (which in its English translation stands for Zone for Employment and Economic development, a type of special economic zone created under Honduran law, marketed as a private city with its own rules, following the World Bank’s economic development projects, backed by the imposed government after the 2009 coup). “In 2019 they came to us,” she said, “They promised jobs. We thought it was another hotel project. We thought people would have work.” At first, some neighbors took the jobs offered, gardeners and cleaners, because the island’s tourism had collapsed due to the pandemic. The pay was low and the work was temporary. Some were told PROSPERA would fund small businesses, like bakeries. “But the funding came with strings,” she said. “PROSPERA would own the business.”
When the community finally learned what a ZEDE meant, that a private enclave might operate under separate rules and continue to expand into their ancestral lands as they wished, concern turned to alarm. Divisions also started to form in the community between those who saw immediate survival in the new jobs and those who feared long-term loss. Then, according to the presidenta, many workers were fired.
She handed me her phone and showed me a video from a public event where the CEO of PROSPERA, elevated above the assembled residents, read a statement about the benefits the development would bring, including paved roads and access to temporary jobs. The video enraged me; I could not believe what I was seeing.
After that day, the community mobilized, the presidenta told me. They appealed to authorities in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, where they met local officials and protested. The newly elected Honduran president promised to abolish the ZEDE law. At this moment, the ZEDE officials started to quickly build everything up inside the area. The president recalled, “Construction noises, drills and trucks, kept families awake for weeks. We could not sleep,” she remembered. “For at least two weeks, they were there all day and night.”
Daily life and dignity were undermined in smaller, corrosive ways, too. The presidenta described PROSPERA taking control of the community water system, connecting their infrastructure to the project, and introducing a fee. “They started charging us more,” she said. “They said it would improve the system, but it was a way to control us.”
The stakes were personal and emotional. At this moment, a child came by her house asking for paper to make a birthday card; when I asked if she would have cake, the girl shook her head. “I don’t have money for that,” she said. Around the corner, a gated enclave catered to wealthy visitors with their own rules, while inside Crawfish Rock, families contended with precarious incomes and memories of broken promises. I could not believe what I was witnessing and experiencing.
The tension rose to a point where voices turned brave and defiant. “We would block the road and protest,” she said. “They intimidated us, men on motorcycles followed me into town. A man from PROSPERA once took photos of my house. We reported him to Tegucigalpa.”
This issue persists in their beaches and fishing areas as well (Figure 3), she told me, “Armed guards once told us to get out of the water where we were fishing.”
Figure 3. Fishing area of Crawfish Rock
I asked her, are you afraid? The presidenta told me, “We are not afraid and even if we were afraid we cannot show we are afraid because then that is giving them power.”
She told me the worst things people had said, hateful remarks from officials and rumors meant to frighten, and I felt rage and sorrow mixing with a guilty recognition. A guilty recognition coming from my ignorance of being Honduran and not knowing what was happening with the native people of my country, a feeling of guilt of knowing I have a privilege inside this country for being “mestizo” or mixed.
“I have not had peace since 2019…. Always fighting always thinking about this, one time a person from the police in Tegucigalpa came when we reported what was happening with PROSPERA, and he basically said that is why negros like us end up dead because we are always complaining about everything.”
Like many, she had once thought tourism development projects could help. But after years of broken promises, hotels built on ancestral lands once were “economic” benefits that were promised but ultimately were lies, the lessons were hard-earned.
As we ate gumbo and the house filled with family, anger gave way to resolve. For me, this meant commitment to share the voice of this community with the world, to support their youth, and to give back. For the presidenta, it meant “The fight just started then,” she said. “We would not accept it.” There was a solemnness in her voice that held both the weight of history and people who will not be erased.
That day in Crawfish Rock was a lesson in contrasts for me, sugar-white beaches framed by private estates, children making birthday cards without cake, a community’s foodways shared again and again around a table while developers rewrote the rules of access. It was also a lesson in resistance, the slow, determined work of people protecting land and livelihood when legal frameworks and powerful investments threaten to remake communities for other people’s gain. I always thought resistance meant physical fights, but that day I learned it meant any act that defies what more powerful groups want to impose; it means organizing; it means keep teaching how to fish to kids; it means not giving up on your traditions even when everyone with more power wants you to.
Before I left I asked the presidenta, what is the future for the community and PROSPERA, she told me, “It can end in a bloodshed because we fight as a community but in the end we are all family, and if they come and they do something to the women then the men will get involved and that can end up very bad.”
As I was driving back down that dirt road, leaving PROSPERA behind, I couldn’t stop thinking about how everything I had just witnessed connects to my own experiences working with Garifuna communities in Honduras, another native group facing similar pressures from powerful actors, both governmental and foreign. Like the people I had just met, the Garifuna have endured decades of dispossession and struggle, where resistance has often been met with violence and even death.
I kept reflecting on how being mestizo or mixed already grants tremendous privilege in this country, a privilege rooted in colonial hierarchies that equated “mixed” with “civilized” and “developed,” and “Black” or “Indigenous” with backwardness. These historical constructions continue to shape who holds power and who defines what counts as development. Today, the same powerful families who embody these colonial legacies are those driving so-called “development” projects, often removing native peoples from their ancestral lands in the process.
Such “development” efforts do not simply bring economic growth; they reproduce and extend colonial logics into the present and future. They transform the language of progress into a tool of displacement and exclusion, which is particularly important to grasp and comprehend at a moment when coastal and island territories are simultaneously romanticized as desirable for development and tourism while being affected by climate change, poverty, and food insecurity, among other systemic issues. While this story may focus on a single case, it mirrors broader patterns unfolding across the Caribbean and other parts of the world, where historical inequalities are being re-inscribed through modern visions of development and prosperity.