02/11/2026
OOPS!
Awe the island of Roatan. Home to a city started and funded by libertarian billionaires. People to which rules don’t apply, or so they think.
So, they created the city called Prosperea. It’s a place where the extremely rich, petulant, and deeply unethical created in the hope of establishing a true utopia exclusively for the rich and crazy.
But, the whole thing is crumbling down; to the surprise of absolutely no one.
This story begins with the Honduran president who allowed it all to happen. Juan Orlando Hernandez served as Honduras’s 38th president, serving from January 2014 to January 2022.
He is currently sitting in prison here in the United States after he was found guilty of drug trafficking and money laundering. He accepted millions of dollars in bribes from narco-traffickers, including from the infamous Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. In June 2024, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
So his buddy; Erick Brimen and championed by the likes of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer, created this idea of a city state.
Romer himself now thinks the whole idea isn’t working out too well, “It’s like a gated community,” he said. “They’re just trying to isolate themselves and do what’s best for them. They’re also somehow living in this libertarian fantasy that took root early in this project, that this will be a place they can be free of the government. That’s not gonna turn out well.” it’s “not even close to what anybody would recommend for a model of what to pursue if you are trying to help a country develop.” As Próspera’s undercurrent experiment is being met with resistance, it’s currently in active talks with nations to bring the concept to sub-Saharan Africa. What didn’t work for Roatan is sure not to work for Africa.
