Jorge Colindres

Jorge Colindres is the Technical Secretary of Próspera, the ZEDE on the Honduran island of Roatán, a role comparable to the mayor of a traditional municipality. A Honduran lawyer, he oversees the zone’s administration and advocates for Honduras’ Zones of Employment and Economic Development (ZEDEs) as a response to political instability and an advanced model of decentralized governance. As the jurisdiction’s highest-ranking public official he presides over the Próspera Council, its rulemaking body, and chairs the oversight committee of the Roatán Financial Services Authority.

He was appointed by the State of Honduras in January 2022, and the detail is worth stating precisely: Technical Secretary is a public office created by Honduran law, not a company position, and the zone’s authority derives from the statute rather than from its developer.

A Honduran attorney with a background in constitutional law and economic reform, he has spent his tenure administering the zone and defending its legal position after the ZEDE statute was repealed. Próspera has grown from 58 acres to more than a thousand under him, and he led the development of the Roatán International Financial Centre, now a regional hub for fiduciary services, wealth management, digital payments and financial technology. His argument is that the framework binds Honduras through international agreements, including its trade treaty with the United States, and that the guarantees therefore survive a change in domestic legislation.

His broader case is constitutional rather than commercial: that sovereignty rests with the people and is distributed across institutions, and that a ZEDE is one more level of that distribution alongside the municipalities rather than an exception to it.