Greenland’s Shift

President Trump has repeatedly called for acquiring Greenland to be part of USA. As US pressure mounts Danish rule in Greenland that dates 200 years could be coming to an end. Greenlanders are not happy with their Danish government after a policy of forced sterilization of girls without their or their parents consent has come to light. Greenland has the highest suicide rate in the world, surpassing that of the runner up Guyana by almost a factor of three. If US managed to acquire the world’s biggest island it would jump from being the fourth largest country in the world with 9.8 million square kilometers to being the second largest with 12 million square kilometers. US with Greenland would surpass China and Canada and place just behind Russia with 16.4 million square kilometres.

Solar Disaster

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, located in California’s Mojave Desert, is set to close after just 11 years of operation and a cost of $2.2 billion. The facility is the world’s largest thermal solar power plant with 173,000 heliostats that focuses sunrays onto a 459 foot tower. The 4,000 acre folly is proving not only an energy failure by not delivering nearly enough GWh projected, but also as an ecological disaster on a massive scale. The “eco” solar plant had killed turtles by the thousands and insects by the millions. Ivanpah also became world’s biggest animal incinerator as the facility created a death trap for birds with its heliostat mirrors burning to death tens of thousands of falcon, owls and warblers as the flew by its mirrors.

Honduras Elections

On Sunday March 9, Honduras held its every four years primary elections. While Liberal party’s Salvador Nasralla beat Jorge Cálix, the ruling Libre party’s Rixi Moncada, who is currently Secretary of National Defense and Secretary of Finance, easily beat Rasel Tome. National’s party Tegucigalpa Mayor Nasry Asfura beat Ana García de Hernández, the wife of US jailed ex-president Juan Orlando Hernández. General elections are scheduled for November 30 to determine the next president and 128 deputies.

El Salvador’s Prisons

El Salvador’s prison experiment with its gang members has made a left turn. On February 4, after a one day visit from US’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, El Salvador’s president Bukele agreed to house violent criminals currently held in US jails regardless of their held nationality. This agreement has little precedent around the world. Some of these criminals will be Salvadorians that are MS-13 gang members, others would be the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang members, and also U.S. citizens and legal residents with no US nationality. They are planed to be housed in El Salvador’s CECOT maximum security mega-prison that houses 15,000 currently, but has a capacity for 40,000.

Panama Drama

Upon taking office in January 2025 president Trump criticized Panama for allowing China a growing influence over its strategic waterway canal. According to sources Trump has ordered the military to draw up a plan how it could seize the canal. US acquired the rights to build and operate the canal, but in 1974 sold it to Panama for $1 and its control ceased in 1999. US and Panama agreed however to defend the canal against any threat to its neutrality allowing for a unilateral action to be taken to reestablish it. In March the Hong Kong-based conglomerate CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd. allowed a US based Black Rock-led consortium to purchase Panama Canal ports Port of Cristobal and Port of Balboa for $22 billion.

An Affordable Community that Runs Itself

In 2004, Santamaría was studying at the Pedagogical University in La Ceiba and already teaching on Roatan. While renting an apartment on the island, he asked himself if it would be possible to build an affordable home there. He contacted FUNDEVI, an NGO that focuses on assisting Honduran families without any homes, or land to build homes. The FUNDEVIS initial answer was that the land was too expensive; Santamaría persisted and obliged himself to find land, and coordinated all the construction for the future homes.

He persisted, and in 2006 the 10 acre development of 138 homes broke ground. Its residents decided to name the colonia after Elmer’s last name. “Santa María is a blessed place,” said Elmer Santamaría. “Thanks God and FUNDEVI we could have purchased the land [lots] for Lps. 50,000.” That was around $3,000 back then, and now those 10×12 meter lots with houses sell for Lps. 700,000 and more.

When the project broke ground, Dixon Cove was a place few people knew about. Santamaría seemed far away, not only as far as location on the main road, it was also two hundred meters up a dirt road in then typical island bush. “There was nothing around our homes, just forests,” remembers Santamaría. In those times there was no Mahogany Bay, no Galaxy Wave, and no Dixon Cove Municipal Building. These all came in the years following the establishment of the housing development.

Everyone paid off their homes. They are free.

The cay in constructing Santamaría was keeping costs to the minimum. The workers for the project came from Yoro, the house’s doors also came from Yoro, and cement came from La Ceiba. “We were buying sand from the mainland. We were buying from hardware store in Colón to save money,” remembers the construction phase Elmer Santamaría.

The home owners had 10 years to pay off their loans. “FUNDEVI gave us the keys to our homes and we started paying. Now everyone paid off their homes. They are free,” said Elmer.

As time went on and their families grew, many Santamaría residents took out additional loans to fund the expansion of their homes. Especially popular with the small lenders were lending institutions such as IMPREMA and Banco de los Trabajadores.

The homeowners created a patronato, and set a system at keeping their community safe and attractive. The community focused on sobriety and family values in order to assure safety. There are four pulpería stores at Santa María, and every one of them signed a pledge not to sell alcoholic beverages. “We don’t allow sell of alcoholic drinks here, we don’t permit billiard halls,” says Elmer.

As Elmer Santamaría is the founder of the community, everyone knows him here and says hello as he walks by. Elmer is currently the treasurer of the Santa María patronato and in the afternoons he works at José Santos Guardiola High School. He has a large farm near La Ceiba that produces rambutan fruit plantains, citrus, and cacao. He exports rambutan to USA via El Salvador.

According to Elmer Santamaría, 2,500 people now live in the Dixon Cove area. Directly to the north of Santa María there is Colonia Dulce María, and the future public hospital is a walk away to the west.

Santa María is home to an eclectic mixture of mainlanders.

Today, Santa María is home to an eclectic mixture of mainlanders who came to the island in the last 20 years. Prof. Miguel Angel Mathias, 76, who has lived across the street from the Colonia say it is a safe place. Prof Mathis lives next door to the Catholic Church and has the keys to the buildings. The Colonia has also two evangelical prayer halls and a Seventh Day Adventist Church.

The community has eight streets running east to west. Several of them are soon to be paved. Santa María has a football field, a children’s playground, and a two-story school building. The school is named after Graciela Ofelia Ramos and it houses a kindergarten, a grade school, and a high school. Some colonia projects are built with funds from water fees, as every house in the Colonia pays Lps. 250 for water access.

It is still very difficult to organize and construct a low income housing community on Roatan. Almost twenty years no other FUNDEVI project has been done on the island. Elmer believes it could be done, but it needs someone who will be the driving force behind the entire effort.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the quality evolved still and became more about clean air, clean water, and a nice reef. Starting in the 2010s and 20s, the economy and island population has exploded. There are hundreds of well-stocked stores, strangers, and foreign languages all around. All in all, however, life on the island is still fun, healthy, and exciting. There are several things that contribute to a quality of life on Roatan, and I list them below:

The Basics

Good, year-round climate is the reason why many foreigners come to move to or retire on Roatan. They escape the cold, wet winters of Maine, Minnesota, and Manitoba.

Roatan is blessed with good, clean air, far away from polluted urban centers. Island residents should feel blessed, as there are billions of people living in places filled with dirty, obscure, and toxic air. Except for a few weeks of Central American June grass burning season, the island’s air is clean.

The island’s water comes from a subterranean aquifer that while diminishing, still provides us with quality H2O. The drinking water companies like Sun Water and Ramirez pump the water and purify it through reverse osmosis filters. To the benefit of us all, they do not add fluoride or chlorine.

Culinary Delights

Honduras is also a serious quality food exporter, and this good food is quite affordable on Roatan. The supermarket shelves are filled with great Honduran, shade-grown coffee of various kinds – Honduran beans, seafood, and meats. Eldon’s Supermarket is the best-stocked supermarket in Honduras, if not Central America.

Over the last 20 years, the island exploded with quality and diverse restaurants. For example, in 2003, Atlantic Chinese restaurant in Los Fuertes was the only place on the island to serve oriental cuisine. When Atlantic closed its doors, there was nothing for several years. Now, there are three Chinese restaurants, four to five places that serve sushi, a Thai restaurant, and even an Indian restaurant.

Education

Private primary education on the island began in the 19th century with Royal Readers textbooks being taught to children in private homes. Private secondary education started with ESBIR in 1983, and continued with Roatan Alternative School in Sandy Bay in 2003. Now there are seven private schools: ESBIR, several Christian schools, and a Montessori. There are even two universities, and one of them, UTH, is finishing a campus in French Cay.

Island is still fun, healthy and exciting.

Fast Internet

In 2003, many customers still used telephone dial up for their internet needs. The island connectivity – along with the rest of the planet – has come a long way since then. There are now several companies competing for internet customers, and a fiber optic internet cable connected the island to the mainland and beyond in 2020. Internet speeds, reliability, and costs are now matching what is available in the USA or Canada.

Government Offices

In 1980, there were just a few government agencies on Roatan: customs officer, a port captain, and a police chief. Even in 2000s, if you needed something, you had to go to Tegucigalpa, or at least to La Ceiba to have it done. There is the immigration office and a tax office. In the 2020s, Roatan is booming, and a central government helping you to hand over your money.

Small Community, For Now

Life in cities or big towns can be hectic, stressful, and unsafe. The Greeks said life in a city of over 100,000 becomes unlivable and filled with crime.

Island life keeps one more connected to people that you see over and over again. People are friendly here. Your neighbors are ready to help in an emergency, and those emergencies do keep coming. Life in a big city, on the other hand, gives you a certain level of anonymity and insulation from people you don’t want to see. In a big enough city, you can cut someone off on the road, show him the finger, and expect to never to see them again. These type of actions have consequences on Roatan, so you see them rarely.

If you offend someone on the island, you are likely to see them the next day at a store, or stuck in traffic in Coxen Hole. You cannot count on anonymity on an island that is only 54 kilometers long and 4 kilometers wide. Actions have consequences here, and that is a chief reason that Roatanians behave nicely to each other still.

Nature Above and Below Water

Today, the island is still green and relatively undeveloped. Out of 20,000 acres of Roatan’s surface, about 75% is still undeveloped forest or grassland. That number, however, was 90% just 25 years ago, and it is no doubt the island’s urban centers and gated communities that are growing in leaps and bounds.

As a warning to those who care, there are examples of many other Caribbean islands which were once just as beautiful as Roatan. These islands have overdeveloped, their resources were exploited, their trees were cut down, and their landscape became a jungle of concrete. Roatan is not that way yet, and hopefully never will.

Energy of Ideas

Roatan attracts energetic, entrepreneurial people with ideas. Some individuals arrive with novel ideas like charter cities and Bitcoin. Others come here with classical ideas that have been around for millennia, but need to be periodically rediscovered. Those people are about hard work, healthy food, dependability, and appreciation for small, tight communities that support one another.

Roatan has plenty of the free stuff.

Healthcare

Foreign expats retired on Roatan in their 60s, and as their health gets worse, a few years or decades later and in their 70 and 80s, they move back to the USA. They are typically in need of specialized health care and ease of care. These days they are on their way out, and a few people are even talking of an assisted living home being built on the island.
There are now small and large private health clinics all over the island that make life for the elderly much easier. There are dozens of medical specialists living on the island, and their services cost a fraction of what they would in USA or Canada.

Ease of Travel

Maritime travel to and from the island has gotten easier, quicker, and more affordable. You can head off the island on a fast catamaran five times a day. A weekend gateway to Utila or Guanaja is super easy to arrange. Dream Ferries has done a run connecting Roatan with Puerto Cortés via Utila.

That ease of travel wasn’t always the case. Back in the 1970s and 80s, the only way to travel to Roatan was via a dory, or a rickety airplane from La Ceiba. Things have changed greatly, and the island is not only accessible, it is also a hub for hopping to nearby Utila and Guanaja. There are regular flights to El Salvador, Belize, Cayman Islands, and Guatemala. Once a second airport terminal opens, that should get better still.

That is the great advantage of living 20 minutes from an international airport, which Roatan has. The island is separated by two flights from thousands of places around the globe. Islanders are just one flight away from Miami, Dallas, or Houston, and after a change of terminals, you could be on your way to Timbuktu.

Music Scene

Roatan has been alive with the sounds of music since the Garifuna arrived here in 1797. Today, there are a couple dozen bands and musicians that play and perform all around the island. The island musical scale ranges from Garifuna dancers to Country and Western music, with Bobbie Rieman, Muddy, The Happy Boys, and Londoners, to name a few.

Value

In the end, it all comes down to the bang for the buck. In 2025, things on Roatan are still affordable, and land and many homes can be purchased for a reasonable price. While you might have to fork over a hefty $9 million for a three bedroom villa in Saint Barts, you can own a mansion for 5% of that, or $400,000, on Roatan’s east end.

As many of us tend to forget: the best things in life are free, and Roatan has plenty of the free stuff. So let us
appreciate and enjoy the things we have.

Germany’s ruling SPD party is ready talk reparations with Poland. The Polish government is demanding 6.6 trillion zlotys, or 1.6 trillion US dollars, in reparations from Germany for material and humanitarian losses during the World War II. The Polish government states that a 1953 Stalinist era agreement of relinquishing all reparations claims were made under duress from pressures of the Soviet Union and are therefore are null and void. Polish side claims it never received fair compensation for the 1939-1945 war that left the country in ruins. If the compensation is paid, it would amount to $41,000 per Polish citizen, or 230% of the country’s GDP. That amount surpasses the restitution paid out to Holocaust victims and their heirs that Germany paid out in the amount of $87 billion.

Gangs in Honduran Prisons

On June 20, 46 female inmates were massacred at a Tamara women’s prison outside of Tegucigalpa. The Barrio 16 street members smuggled in guns, grenades, machetes, and flammable liquid before subduing prison guards. The female gang members then attacked a cellblock where a rival gang was housed; victims were shot, hacked with machetes, and set on fire. Honduras, with a network of 21 prisons, is making efforts at replicating neighboring El Salvador’s crackdown against gangs and gang members. El Salvador recently moved 4,000 of its 70,000 jailed gang members to Terrorism Confinement Center, a specially built maximum security prison that can hold 40,000 prisoners.

Nicaragua Distances US for Iran

In mid June, Iranian president Ebrahim Rainsis visited Latin America’s Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. “During all these (years?), you resisted against the conspiracies of imperialism and triumphed,” said president Rainsi to the Nicaraguan parliament. “The United States wanted to paralyze our people with threats and sanctions, but it hasn’t been able to do it,” he told Nicaragua’s president Daniel Ortega. Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Nicaragua in 2007 and this visit is yet another sign of multi polarization of the region and Central America. While the Iranian president visited the most established leftist regimes in the Western Hemisphere, he was not yet invited by the new left governments that took power in Brazil, Colombia, and Chile.

From Volcanoes to Bitcoins

El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele has presented a plan of constructing several volcano powered energy plants devoted primarily to bitcoin mining. This is a fast track project. The state owned geothermic company La Geo estimates that the country generates around 200MW, or 22%, of its energy through geothermal power. The estimates also show the capacity of increasing that to 644MW, where around 70% of El Salvador’s energy would come from volcano power. That would make the country one of the biggest bitcoin miners in the Americas. Volcano generated and geothermal energy bitcoin mining operations have been in operation since October 2021. That was just weeks after El Salvador declared bitcoin, alongside the US dollar, to be its legal tender. El Salvador abandoned its Colones for the US dollar in 2001.

War is good for Business

The Ukraine-Russia war is providing a great boom to international military manufacturing complex Black Rock and other global players. Many new types of armaments are being manufactured, and development in munitions manufacturing should maintain the war for the next decade or two as the wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. The British government is supplying depleted Uranium ammunition to Ukraine. The Biden administration is considering providing Ukraine cluster bombs that are banned by the UK, France and Germany for being too dangerous to civilians. Ukraine is deploying scatter mines that the country itself has banned. Russia has developed intercontinental nuclear “vanguard” missiles that can travel at 27 times the speed of sound, and has stationed them near the Finnish border and other locations. Iran is finishing construction of low cost Shahed kamikaze drones outside of Moscow. Iran’s drone technology comes in significant part from a captured US stealth drone, RQ-170 Sentinel.

Bukele is a37-year-old man who doesn’t like neck ties, tweets his presidential orders and is cleaning up his country. Crime is way down as he has implemented a no communications policy for prisons and forced the cell companies to block signal to the penitentiaries.He is now talking about self-sustaining prisons where the inmates would produce their own food.

These could be exciting times for our neighbor. He’s reinforcing the country’s military and police in an effort to eradicate gangs. To be honest I wasn’t sure what to expect of him given his family background and previous party.

This whole thing makes me very happy for El Salvadorians as compared where I live. I would love to see these measures implemented in Honduras. Bukele’s new Motto is “El dinero alcanza cuando nadie roba,” roughly translated: Money reaches when nobody steals. That is a motto we could use here in Honduras.

He has also fired all government employees who were related to the previous president and he vows to end nepotism wich is endemic in El Salvador.

The transparency with which he is governing is impressive; it’s all on tweets that can be followed by his fellow countrymen and to those observers around the globe. He is charismatic and I’m looking forward to seeing how far he will go.

Decentralize government, make it smaller and more efficient.

It’s difficult not to make comparisons with our country. Our system is also broken and corrupt and we need a new leader, and perhaps a millennial. It could be said that San Pedro Sula is the industrial capital of Honduras, but the islands live from fishing and tourism and Tegucigalpa just produces politicians.

We absolutely need to decentralize government, make it smaller and more efficient. I remember under a previous Honduran president each municipality was independent and most government offices were also decentralized. Nowadays you can’t go to the bathroom without permission from bureaucrats.

The new cabinet members in the Salvadoran government spend their time in the field. These officials are out in the towns that need help and work with the people there no matter whether they voted for President Bukele or not.

The government is not there to offend them, to give them a handout, but to empower them. It is there to build needed infrastructure, repair schools and supply Hospitals with medications. If they can do it; so can we.

Campaigning will soon start in our beautiful country, I really hope we can find a candidate worthy of this country, who will love and respect its people. I hope that candidate will battle corruption and impunity to their final breath.

 I’m tired of watching my fellow Hondurans risk their lives in migrant caravans fleeing the crime and corruption in our country. Let’s make our country a better place to live.

President Maduro’s “One small country, three big worlds” slogan just wasn’t working. In 2008 on her visit on Roatan, Paola Bonilla, Honduran Minister of Tourism announced a new slogan and said that the slogan was the result of “years of work and studies aimed at choosing a phrase that summed up the national identity.” The result: “Todo Esta Aqui” or “It’s all here in Honduras.” This slogan lasted eight years. Then Honduras yet again went looking for its identity. The result was different, but arguably an improvement: “Somos para ti.” “We are Land and Sea; We are People; We are heart; We are for you.” The tax payer bill for this insight? I dare not speculate.

Honduras is not alone. Most countries now have ministries of tourism. At taxpayer expense, consultants and marketing firms spend countless hours at the behest of the government developing and implementing campaigns to communicate “the essence” of their county’s identity.

You don’t need a ministry of something or other to tell you about your identity

Panama invested millions to figure out it is “Where the World Meets,” and the phase has done Panama well. The most well branded country of the region: Costa Rica also has the best slogan. It works, it’s catchy and they have no plans of letting it go:“Costa Rica – no artificial ingredients.”

Nicaragua saved some money and research and called itself simply “Unique,” and it certainly is. El Salvador went simply with “Impressive.” Belize’s slogan is “Mother’s Nature best kept secret,” and in 2006 Guatemala launched its campaign “Soul of the Earth.”

Even the US, managing to function without a ministry of tourism, has come up with a slogan, although a weak one: “All within your reach,” a bit ironic for the many people getting their visa applications rejected at the US embassies.

Even Roatan felt it needed to define itself. Mayor Dorn Ebanks decided Old Roatan wasn’t good enough and gave us “New Roatan.” He only lasted one term and the future of the catchphrase doesn’t look good either. There is a theory about the wisdom of crowds. When asked to estimate number of jelly beans in a jar or a weight of a cow, the average of hundreds of people’s guesses comes amazingly close to the truth, much closer to truth than the estimate of a single jelly bean or cow expert. Recently Roatanians decided to create their own branding phase and pay for it themselves. Gigantic “ I ♡ Roatan,” “I ♡ Roa” signs seem be spontaneously popping up all over the island – at no cost to the taxpayer.

Indeed maybe you don’t need a ministry of something or other to tell you about your identity. Maybe you need an explorer like Columbus, or a crowd of business owners and locals to come up with a viable name, phrase and a look.

Also, perhaps the key part of any successful country branding strategy is constancy. So let me suggest: let’s stick to something and let’s go back to the roots. And if a new slogan for Honduras is needed I have one: “Honduras – really deep.”