Miami Herald (subscription), FL
When Danubia Rodriguez walked away from her rural Honduran village six years ago to accept a textile factory job, it demonstrated the implicit bargain Honduran officials struck in hopes of improving the lot of their country, one of the poorest in the hemisphere.
In the early 1990s, they scrapped inward-looking policies and turned the economy into the most open in Central America and the world, according to the World Bank. Generous tax treatment for foreign factories helped persuade companies such as Sara Lee Branded Apparel, owners of the Hanes line, to invest in places like El Progreso, a town of 97,000 in central Honduras.
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