Having experienced the joy of Honduras' "cruft" firsthand, I can assure you that it serves no noble purpose.

Try importing a piece of equipment through customs. The process is truly Kafka-esque. It's like the government is actively working to prevent its citizens from acquiring the tools to, you know, lift themselves out of poverty.

That is true - I was thinking of places with a functional government where the people have participated in its building. ;-)

Just to be clear, until 2009 Honduras had one of the most stable governments in Central America. My experience was in 2008. I found that while Hondurans are generally warm, anyone I interacted with in an official capacity was officious and unpleasant. It's like an entire country run by the DMV.

My closing comments when I left Honduras are here: http://www.advrider.com/forums/showpost.php?p=8366876&po...

(you can browse a few posts earlier for more pics - sadly I didn't take a lot during my customs experience)

I guess what I'm saying is that it's not clear you can separate "the people" from "the government" here. The cruft that is the Honduran civil system just accumulated over decades - it wasn't imposed by a dictator or anything like that.

"Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up." — G. K. Chesterton

But once you understand the reason you may realize it's a bad one. Many countries seem to be getting crushed by cultural and political path dependence.

I don't like that advice at all. So many fences have been installed for lousy reasons. And the results might be hard to predict so better to actually experience them. If you make a mistake, you can always re-install.