The Trumpists Agitating To Coup Honduras

Prospera, a Peter Thiel-backed crypto ‘city’ running unregulated medical experiments on a Honduran island may very well be the spark for a US coup against Honduras this November.

Prospera, if you haven’t come across it before, is a libertarian mini-state which is funded by crypto investors and tech oligarchs including Thiel and DOGE recruiter Marc Andreessen. Operating outside of Honduran law and run by a small council of venture capitalists and crypto libertarians who set their own laws and regulations, Prospera is under threat from the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, who wants to strip it of its special legal status.

Castro says that Prospera is an affront to Honduran sovereignty and should never have been given the go-ahead in the first place, a go-ahead granted by a right-wing businessman who became president after Castro’s husband was ousted in a military coup backed by the US. After Castro won power back from the right in 2021, she made it a priority to rein in what William Gibson might call an outlaw city.

The tech oligarchs behind Prospera fought back at Castro’s attempts to shut them down and are suing Honduras for billions of dollars. The fight has made headlines in recent months, not least because the damages Prospera is seeking could conceivably bankrupt the country. Almost no attention, however, has been paid to how this fight is turning Prospera into a cause célèbre for influential Trumpists who have begun calling on this American outpost to be defended against Castro’s socialist government.

One prominent Trumpist to latch onto Prospera as a symbol of everything right about American capitalism and adventurism and everything wrong about Latin American socialism is Roger Stone, a 50-year confidante of Trump and his political hitman.

In a blog post titled ‘How President Trump Can Crush Socialism and Save a Freedom City in Honduras’ and written with all the fluency of a neurolinked gibbon, Stone says that the future of Prospera has ‘major implications for US policy and the future of freedom throughout the world.’ He goes on to say that
‘Trump has quite a bit of leverage at his disposal to upend Castro’s fledgling regime’ and that ‘Honduras could be liberated and Castro’s regime upended without firing a single shot or deploying a single troop.’ To achieve this he says Trump should pardon the disgraced former president, Juan Orlando Hernández, colloquially known as JOH, who is in prison in the US indicted on drug trafficking charges, and back him in the November elections.

Another high profile Trump ally to position the fight for Prospera as being in America’s interests, is Erik Prince, the former CIA assassin and founder of US state department mercenary contractor Blackwater. In a November tweet Prince said that the threats faced by Prospera should be ‘intolerable for the Trump administration’ because of the strategic importance of Honduras and the fact Prospera is trying to ‘bring civilisation’ to Honduras. (Charter/network/free cities as an effort to reclaim an imaginary of western civilisation is a common theme among tech-crypto libertarians).

If Erik Prince, a man with a history or robbing and looting impoverished states, has you, an impoverished state in his sights, that’s an ominous sign.

Prince’s post was retweeted by the great and good of Prospera including Niklas Anzinger. Anzinger runs Infinita City, the arm of Prospera focused on extending the human lifespan and running unregulated medical experiments to this end. (If you’ve watched the Netflix documentary about Bryan Johnson, the tech billionaire who wants to live forever, and who I wrote about here following his rough brush with covid, you might remember he visited Prospera to get injected with a novel gene therapy not available anywhere else in the world).

Anyway Anzinger has tweeted a couple of times about the upcoming elections in Honduras. He responded to Stone’s January blog post about ousting Castro by saying ‘we’re working on it!’ and just the other day tweeted ‘we expect the next elections in Nov 2025 to lead to a friendly administration that affirms our rights.’ Adding to the sense that something is being cooked up was the founder of Prospera, Erick Brimen, thanking Prince for his intervention and saying he was excited for some of Prince’s “magic” to come in 2025.

Weird.

Maybe these are just things you say.

But maybe not.

Another group to have visited Prospera in recent weeks are Republicans for National renewal, a MAGA-aligned group founded by Mark Ivanyo, a former staffer in Trump’s first term Department of Justice. They touted Prospera as ‘similar to President Trump’s proposed Freedom Cities’ and also took aim at Castro, saying Prospera was ‘a bastion of pro-Americanism, economic freedom & Bitcoin acceptance in socialist Honduras.’

Prospera was also visited last week by Cremieux, an anonymous twitter account regularly retweeted by Elon Musk (and likely run by more than one white crypto-libertarian type) that helps set the libertarian discourse.

Given these links it’s inconceivable that Trump hasn’t heard about Prospera and the threats to its existence. Marco Rubio, a man aggressively hostile to anything that looks or smells like socialism in Latin America, almost certainly has as well. It was telling that he didn’t bother visiting Honduras on his recent trip to Latin America, his first outside the US.

Prospera is just one of a number of crypto-based, parallel institution states-within-states that tech oligarchs are trying to establish around the world. With Trump having embraced crypto libertarians as his ticket back to power, we should expect him to defend and advance their interests, not least because of their potential, as in the case of Prospera, to be the tip of the imperial spear in the developing world.

The combination of Rubio as head of the state department and Prospera libertarians in the White House is extraordinarily dangerous for Honduras. The US has always had strategic incentives to see left-wing candidates defeated in Latin America, but now it has very personal incentives as well. Marc Andreessen, who has been hanging out with Trump and recruiting for DOGE, and his co-investor Thiel are both heavily invested not just financially in Prospera through their VC fund Promonos, but ideologically in the concept of parallel states-within-states.

For them to see Prospera fall would be a double hit.

For developing countries like Honduras, Prospera demonstrates the dangers of allowing libertarian American capital the freedom to establish shadow legal entities within your territory. They might provide a few low-paid service industry jobs, but if they turn on you, they’ll threaten to bankrupt you. Or coup you. Or both.

Then there are the moral questions that arise from allowing billionaires to operate zones of exit outside regulatory oversight.

Biohacking and longevity experiments are a central component of Prospera, and regular articles on longevity research now pop up in traditional media, normalising the field. But longevity researchers often appear dangerously enamoured with eugenics. For example, a presentation this week at Prospera by a professor from George Mason university said that selecting embryos for IQ might soon be possible and could boost global innovation by hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is an outrageous, preposterous statement that rests on two fallacies: IQ exists as a measurable metric (it doesn’t) and creating economic growth (by optimising humans) should be the singular goal of humanity. This is essentially an argument for eugenics-powered capitalism.

These people are monsters and the dangers of allowing them ever-expanding control of our institutions is obvious.

There is also a massive irony at the heart of Prospera.

The network state ideal is motivated in large part by the bird-brained desire to exit the political and establish zones of pure apolitical capitalist freedom outside of neoliberal bureaucracies. Yet in Prospera, these crypto coiners have found themselves at the centre of political intrigue and have had to resort to suing Honduras through the investor-state dispute settlement, a little-known but central component of global capitalism’s neoliberal bureaucracy.

That feeling when you’re forced to turn to neoliberalism’s bureaucracy to save yourself from neoliberalism’s bureaucracy eh?

Which really tells us everything you need to know.

Crypto libertarians are the neoliberals they pretend to reject.

Plain old capitalists, modern-day colonisers trying, like every coloniser before them, to bend the world to their will.

The outcome in Honduras will go some way to determining whether they succeed.