Rebels with a Cause

A few years ago, when the political attacks had begun in earnest and my name was appearing in places I had not expected it to appear, one of my cousins came to ask me a question. He is a practical man — a Zamorano graduate, trained to think in inputs, outputs, and timelines. He had watched what was happening with a mixture of concern and genuine bewilderment at my work. His question was simple: how long before any of this actually changes anything?

I told him years. Probably decades.

He laughed. Then he asked why anyone would do it if they weren't going to see the results.

I told him I did it for the same reason you plant trees. You may not get to eat the fruit. I assumed I would not benefit from it. But our future grandchildren might.

He stopped laughing.

There is something rebellious about being a reformer. Not in a romantic sense. We do not storm barricades or write manifestos — this blog is as close to one as you will get from me. The rebellion is quieter and in some ways more demanding. It is the refusal to accept that a broken system must stay broken because that is how it has always been. It is the choice to keep working when the rational calculation says stop. It is the particular stubbornness of someone who has seen what good governance actually looks like, who understands the distance between what exists and what is possible, and who finds that distance intolerable. And who keeps going anyway, because he believes it is the right thing to do, when every outside voice is telling him to stop.

This is not a comfortable disposition to have. It is especially uncomfortable in places like Honduras, where the system's preference for its own continuation is not merely inertia but active defence. Broken systems do not stay broken by accident. They stay broken because someone benefits from the breakage. Because the dysfunction is, for some, not a problem to be solved but an arrangement to be protected. When you try to fix what others profit from, the response is not always polite disagreement.

I have been called a traitor. A pirate. A criminal. I lost friends who were convinced by the public discourse against my chosen line of work and chose to believe what was being said. I am fortunate that the personal attacks against me never moved beyond insults and not so veiled threats, unlike some dear friends who are currently in exile, their careers and reputations destroyed through false prosecutions and character assassination. My being able to sit and write this while sipping a cup of coffee is evidence of that, and I do not take it lightly.

The personal cost of reform is rarely discussed honestly. The literature on institutional change is full of frameworks and models and case studies. It is considerably shorter on what it actually feels like to be the person inside the case study — to watch a coalition you spent years building dissolve under pressure, to hear your work described in terms that bear no relationship to what you actually built, to calculate, every so often, whether continuing is worth what it is costing the people around you.

I have made that calculation more than once. I have not always been certain of the answer.

Antoni Gaudí began work on the Sagrada Família in Barcelona in 1883. He understood from the beginning that he would not live to see it completed. The cathedral was too vast, the design too intricate, the ambition too long for a single lifetime. He worked on it anyway, with full seriousness, for forty-three years, until a tram struck him in the street and he died three days later — mistaken at first for a beggar because his clothes were worn and he carried almost nothing.

In 1936, anarchists burned his workshop and destroyed his original plans. The construction continued from reconstructed drawings, from models, from the memory of people who had worked alongside him. The building is still not finished. It is expected to be completed sometime in the 2030s — more than a century and a half after the first stone was laid.

What Gaudí understood, I think, is that the alternative — not building, or building carelessly, or stopping when the plans are burned — is its own kind of failure. That the work is not rendered meaningless by the fact that someone else will complete it, or that it may be damaged before it is done, or that the people who benefit most will be unable to share your vision until they are reaping the benefits, and even then, they may never know your name.

The reformer's consolation is often that his grandchildren may live in a better country, in a better world, even if they only learn of their grandparent's contribution through family stories. It is not a small one.

I spent years helping to build an institutional framework in Honduras that I still believe can change what was possible for the people who live there. It was attacked, politicised, and eventually repealed by the same Congress that had created it. It is currently being contested in international arbitration — defended by the legal mechanisms we embedded in it precisely because we understood that domestic political will is an unreliable foundation for lasting change. Whether it ultimately prevails is a question still being answered.

The full story of how it was built, why, and what happened to it is the subject of my forthcoming book, The Fortress Builders. What I can say here is that I would do it again. Not because I am certain it will succeed. Not because the personal cost was negligible — it was not. But because the alternative, for someone who has seen what good governance can do and who has the knowledge to try to build it, is its own kind of impossible.

My cousin asked me why you would plant a tree you would never see bear fruit.

The question contains its own answer. You plant it because the fruit matters. Because someone will eventually eat it. Because the world you leave behind is shaped, in part, by what you chose to build in it — and what you chose not to.

That is the only kind of rebellion worth undertaking. And it is, in the end, the only kind that lasts.