Gabriel Delgado-Ayau

Gabriel Delgado-Ayau is a co-founder of Próspera, the ZEDE on Roatán, Honduras, where he has served as Chief Development Officer and a board member. A Guatemalan entrepreneur and a trustee of Universidad Francisco Marroquín, he speaks frequently on charter cities and economic development in Latin America.

A serial entrepreneur, he founded a long series of companies in Guatemala before Próspera, and came to the project through the intellectual tradition around Universidad Francisco Marroquín, where he is a trustee. He is also an Aspen Institute fellow and a member of the Central America Leadership Initiative.

As chief development officer he has handled much of what turns a legal framework into an actual place: bringing in the businesses and residents who make a zone worth living in, and running gatherings such as the zone’s legal-engineering summits, where the rules themselves are treated as something to be designed and tested rather than inherited.

He describes the point of the zone as raising human flourishing through entrepreneurship and technology rather than as an exercise in tax competition, an argument he makes in Spanish as often as in English, to a Latin American audience with its own long history of foreign-run enclaves.