In one of the scariest moments in modern history, we're doing our best at ScheerPost to pierce the fog of lies that conceal it but we need some help to pay our writers and staff. Please consider a tax-deductible donation.
n April 2025, Peter Thiel’s Palantir made headlines after documents were released detailing its partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to create ImmigrationOS, a massive database of information gathered from a variety of sources including the IRS, in order to surveil, detain, and deport immigrants. Thiel is not new to spearheading endeavors that aim to dehumanize and attack people of color. In fact, the tech mogul is one of the billionaires leading our modern-day version of tech neocolonialism, the new-yet-old imperial monster that colonizes land, extracts resources, exploits natives, and is happy to profit off of their suffering.
As a Honduran immigrant myself, I would know.
In 2009, Honduras found itself in turmoil after a military coup destabilized the country leading to unprecedented levels of violence and repression. Taking a page out of the “shock doctrine” playbook, the elite political actors behind the coup (including narco-dictator Juan Orlando Hernández, now pardoned by Donald Trump after being sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking and weapons charges) watered down environmental protections on Honduran land and approved illegal contracts to sell Indigenous and protected land to the highest bidder.
Among other corrupt dealings and land grabs, the government approved a law that enabled the creation of Peter Thiel’s Zones for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDEs). ZEDEs derive from the idea of “charter cities.” Proposed by former World Bank executive and economist Paul Romer, these proposed cities are enclaves within lower-income nations that “promote economic growth” through privatization and the disposal of national regulations, while gifting major tax incentives for foreign nations to invest in businesses. Special economic zones in Kenya, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia have faced criticism due to low wages, harsh working conditions, and threats to rights to free association and collective bargaining. Romer, one of the initial proponents of ZEDEs in Honduras, expressed criticism in 2015 regarding the Honduran ZEDEs and their lack of accountability to local laws, and anti-democratic governance.
These ZEDEs are a project of Praxis, a tech billionaire-funded start-up that aims to create libertarian city-states to “restore Western Civilization.” The ZEDEs are allowed to have their own government, police force, courts, laws, and any taxes collected would not be paid to the Honduran government but to the ZEDEs themselves. ZEDEs are a tech billionaire’s dream: unbridled power, tech fantasy, and resource hoarding, where the government is run by AI and cryptocurrency is the main currency.
Próspera (one of the three ZEDEs in Honduras) even has a Bitcoin center paired with tech companies that offer $25,000 gene therapy and “subdermal implantation services and a variety of cybernetic upgrades.” Próspera is located in Roatan, a Honduran island named one of the World’s Greatest Places in 2023 by TIME magazine. Roatan is a Caribbean tropical beauty surrounded by the second-largest coral reef in the world, and home to rich Afro-descendant culture, the Garifuna people who have been fighting threats to their sovereignty for centuries. A sought-after spot for foreign luxury tourism and investment, Roatan saw the foundation of Próspera in 2017 with funding from the likes of Peter Thiel and Pronomos Capital led by Patri Friedman, a grandson of Milton Friedman, seen by many as the father of neoliberalism, deregulation, and privatization.
There are endless reasons why ZEDEs are dangerous for the Honduran people. Human rights organizations have rung the alarm on how they have been displacing Indigenous communities who have ancestral ties to the land and expropriating their territory.
Greicy, an Indigenous Garífuna woman from Triunfo de la Cruz on the coast of Honduras, identifies similarities between the ZEDE in Próspera and other illegal land grabs and land dispossession in her ancestral hometown. Due to safety concerns, Greicy is only sharing her first name for this article.
“Even though they say otherwise, I see that only the rich are benefiting, knowing full well that we Garífuna people live off the beach, we live off tourism, we live off fishing, and we also live off growing our own food, cultivating our own food, harvesting and planting our own food. Right? But now we don’t have any land left,” she said.
Harassment, violence, and threats from the Honduran police force led Greicy to migrate North to New Orleans, standing as a living testimony of how neocolonialism has displaced millions of families in the Global South.
Greicy’s family was part of the 2015 Inter-American Court ruling that found the state of Honduras guilty of violating the rights of the Garifuna people in Triunfo de la Cruz and Punta Piedra, and ordered the state to pay restitution for their communal land rights. Despite the ruling, the Honduran state has not started any process of restitution, with threats and violence towards Garifuna leaders persisting. Greicy sees ZEDEs as the ultimate tool to dispossess the Garifuna people of their ancestral homeland.
“In Honduras, the ruling has not been carried out, the demands have not been met. And I imagine there would be even more land dispossession [with more ZEDES], dispossession not only of homes, but of people’s very means of survival. Yes, it would be worse because we know that all these special economic development zones benefit high-ranking officials, wealthy individuals with investments, and foreign investors who attend political meetings. And how does this benefit the people? Not at all. Exactly,” she explained.
Concerns regarding ZEDEs and neocolonialist dispossession of communities on the North coast of Honduras often involve drug-trafficking activity, including money laundering, says Greicy.
“Those who are going to invest there are Americans. One reason is to bring in their prohibited substances, because we know that’s also included in the deal. Money laundering is also involved, right? When they go to the beaches, supposedly for tourists, and all that, that’s also money laundering, because the beach is a free zone, merchandise is smuggled there, everything is sold there. And someone like me, living in the town, just stays quiet because of fear…. If I were in Honduras, I tell you, I wouldn’t be telling you this,” she said.
Greicy’s fear is not unfounded: Research on special economic zones such as the ones in China has documented “economic gray zones” inside the enclaves where drugs, money laundering, and human trafficking abound. Others are concerned about how ZEDEs have the power to create inhumane labor laws to exploit Hondurans, but let’s take a moment to look at the big picture.
ZEDEs are the tech billionaire representation of neocolonialism; taking hold of Honduran land, resources, and a workforce to build playground empires for tech billionaires to avoid constitutional protections, government accountability, or even human rights protections.
In 2022, the new government of Honduras repealed the ZEDEs law, which led to a $10.7 billion lawsuit from Thiel’s Próspera that could bankrupt an already struggling country. Unfortunately, the ZEDEs law has a loophole that has allowed the so-called “digital nations” like Próspera to continue.
In December 2025, Honduras concluded a presidential election completely tainted by U.S. intervention via Donald Trump’s public support for the right-wing Nationalist Party candidate Nasry Asfura, as well as Trump’s threats to cut U.S. aid to Honduras if another candidate won. The connection of special interests between Trump, his tech billionaire friends, and ZEDEs are clear, and Nasry stands as the champion that will do Trump’s and Thiel’s bidding at the expense of the lives and rights of the Honduran people.
Greicy explained the dire position of immigrants facing dispossession in their ancestral homeland — and detention, surveillance, and violence in the United States at the hand of the same powerful forces.
If the expansion of more ZEDEs in Honduras were to happen, “immigration is going to get worse, because we know that those of us who are here want to leave, and the people who are there are being forced out and will come here. They will come seeking political asylum, something that will be denied to them,” she said.
It is not the first time Thiel has used people of color in crisis as a laboratory for his monstrous oligarchic fantasies. Thiel’s Palantir is one of the main providers of advanced AI targeting software and hardware to Israeli forces; the technology is used to target, surveil, and murder Palestinians. As a genocide continues under a ceasefire that has not been respected by Israel, Palantir continues to, as its CEO Alex Karp said in an understatement, “occasionally kill people.” Palantir not only provides the technology to massacre Palestinians but also trained its AI models with secretly received National Security Agency raw data of emails and phone conversations between Palestinians in occupied territories and their family in the U.S.
In 2020, Karp admitted that Palantir “[finds] people in our country who are undocumented,” referring to contracts with the Department of Homeland Security to use Palantir to surveil undocumented immigrants. Thiel and his billionaire gang are building a new profit frontier off of the livelihoods of people of color. The theft of land and resources, the mass surveillance and endless data collection — Thiel’s pet projects regard immigrants and people of color as expendable. We are one more resource they will gladly extract, whether it is our land, labor, data, or our own lives. As data centers gobble up resources in the form of drinkable water and energy, the technology they house exploits people of color, whether it’s through biased facial recognition tech or predictive policing technology that tries to criminalize us.
Just like the Spanish colonized Latin America through forced labor, extraction of resources, and subjugation of the Indigenous peoples, Peter Thiel and his gang of tech billionaires are drafting up plans to re-colonize Latin America, occupying land, displacing native inhabitants, and then profiting from surveilling and incarcerating them after they are forced to flee to the United States. Thiel, conveniently, has lately been preaching the coming of an “antichrist” in the guise of environmentalism, guardrails on technology, and international agencies, even singling out Greta Thunberg as the possible antichrist. On the topic of the libertarian utopia of “charter cities” like Próspera, Thiel has said “the nature of government is about to change at a very fundamental level.”
Ultimately, Palantir’s ImmigrationOS is a weapon that ICE and other government agencies use to detain kidnapped immigrants under inhumane conditions and force them to perform manual labor in detention centers. A trans detainee in a Louisiana ICE jail denounced this forced manual labor in 2025 — in his case, he was force to carry cinder blocks — and then faced sexual harassment after speaking out against this unsanctioned practice. As Palantir facilitates forced labor schemes, Thiel amasses power through his investments in Facebook, Donald Trump, and ZEDEs.
From the U.S. to Honduras, tech billionaires are waging a war on people of color. These oligarchs are employing the old and overused re-packaging of neocolonialism and repression as “development” and “progress” — even labeling AI tech as “inevitable.” When feeling overwhelmed by the power and influence of tech billionaires who care not about our lives or the planet but only about endless profit, I remind myself that they are quite literally a 1 percent. We are an undeniable winning force if we come together.
Tech billionaires are not the future. They are just another colonizer looking for a scheme to grow power and wealth on our backs. To start, we can always hit them where they care the most, their money — boycott generative AI, fight against data centers, fight against and denounce Palantir contracts being paid with our tax money, and support Indigenous communities fighting against ZEDEs. Let’s ditch the glorification of billionaires like Thiel and Musk who care only about power and profit. Let’s call them what they are: colonizers that see us, people of color, as their new profit frontier.
Edith Romero is a Honduran community organizer, researcher, writer, and a Public Voices fellow of The OpEd Project, The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, and the Every Page Foundation.
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.