Among the manifold complexities of the global supply chain, a simple principle holds: corporations will always go where their costs – and their responsibilities – can be kept to an absolute minimumt’s like a little Puerto Rico – we’re basically run by the US,” said Allan, as we drove around San Pedro Sula, the second largest city inand the country’s largest manufacturing centre one day. “Here there is more ‘freedom’,” he added, doing air quotes.
In scouring the globe for cheap labour, US clothing brands are not merely opportunistic, they are also sometimes actively parasitic. Honduras is a case study: one in which US corporations and the US state department have worked together for decades to bring cheap garments to American consumers, framing job creation as a blessing for the Honduran economy while simultaneously engaging in political interventions that keep Honduran citizens poor.
Reagan implemented SAP unilaterally and it went into effect in 1987. Under this programme, apparel exports to the US assembled in the Caribbean more than doubled in four years, from $1.1bn in 1987 to $2.4bn in 1991. “The Caribbean,” declared Forbes magazine in 1990, “is becoming America’s garment district.”he Special Access Program for apparel enticed investment by making export to the US easier, and supplied funding for the development of local infrastructure.
In some places, local garment manufacturers were thriving before the CBI ruined them. One of the first Caribbean leaders to enthusiastically embrace the logic and the opportunity of Reagan’s initiative was Jamaica’s prime minister Edward Seaga. Seaga undertook to transform his country into a garment exporter. In his first three years, US assistance amounted to $500m, compared to $56m in the last three years of the previous government.
Asian factories in Central America and the Caribbean were notorious for brutal labour practices and anti-union tactics. A cross-border campaign in 1995 against Mandarin International, a Taiwanese-owned plant in the San Marcos Free Trade Zone in El Salvador, uncovered stories of abuse involving the employment of minors, death threats, physical violence, forced overtime, starvation wages and mass firings of workers who joined unions.
When the river rises, which happens increasingly often as tropical storms grow in intensity, Allan said, the people living on its bank lose everything. The smell of burning plastic hung in the air. Allan pointed to the cable that the community uses to siphon electricity from the grid.The CBI didn’t create wealth for workers but, in Honduras, it did lead to the rise of a class of oligarchs who would exert a powerful right-leaning force on the nation’s politics.
If the desire to keep Soto Cano was one factor that motivated the Obama administration to protect the coup, the blandishments of the Honduran business community, its garment and textile industry in particular, was another. Weeks after Zelaya’s ousting, in July 2009, Lanny Davis was on Capitol Hill, testifying against Zelaya before the House foreign relations committee. Davis had been hired by those responsible for overthrowing Zelaya.
We chatted about the main imports – Texas cotton shipped from Houston, grain, fuel and textile machinery. The port is open 24 hours a day, he said. It’s three days by ship from here to Port Everglades, Florida, or to Houston or Miami.