 Welcome to what the F is going on in Latin America and the Caribbean. A popular resistance broadcast of hot news out of the region. In partnership with Black Alliance for Peace, Haiti America's team, Code Pink, Common Frontiers, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Friends of Latin America, Interreligious Task Force on Central America, Massachusetts Peace Action, and Task Force on the Americas, we broadcast Thursdays at 4.30 PM Pacific, 7.30 PM Eastern right here on YouTube Live, including channels for the Convo Couch, Popular Resistance, and Code Pink. Post-broadcast recordings can be found at Apple Podcasts Spotify, Telegram, radindymedia.com, and now under podcasts at popularresistance.org. Today's episode, the country is not for sale. Economic Development and Employment Zones, known as ZEDES versus National Sovereignty. I'm really pleased for all of you to meet two very, very knowledgeable guests participating in today's episode. Extremely knowledgeable, super-activists, and I think you'll really appreciate what we're going to share with you today. I have Beth Giglia joining us. She's an Anthropology PhD and Melinda St. Lewis, who is Director of Public Citizens Global Trade Watch. Before I have a starter conversation, I want to give all of you just a brief background as what has been the impetus of today's conversation. You're going to find it fascinating and possibly horrifying at the same time. Let me just share with you something that has recently happened on the Hill in Washington DC. On May 3rd, Democratic U.S. lawmakers urged U.S. trade representative and state department officials to eliminate investor-state dispute settlement provisions from current and future trade deals and to intervene on behalf of Honduras against a U.S. company's nearly $11 billion claim against the country. In a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and trade representative Katrina Thai, 33 lawmakers said that investor-state dispute settlement systems, known as ISDS, excuse me, in trade deals constitute, quote, a problematic corporate handout, unquote, that violates country's sovereignty and democratic rights. Today, we will specifically discuss investor-state dispute settlement systems within the specific focus of Honduras, but I think it's also important for all of us to keep in mind that this language is used in trade agreements, U.S. trade agreements with many other global South nations, including, I believe, Argentina and Colombia here in Latin America and the Caribbean. So with that, I would like all of you to meet Beth and Melinda and maybe, ladies, we should start with this letter and what the impetus of the letter was and what the 33 members of Congress are hoping to achieve. And then let's give the audience some background as to what led to the need for this letter. So who wants to start? Oh, well, I can jump in. So it's great to be with you all. Thanks for the opportunity, Terri, to raise awareness about this really important letter and important issue. So Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Lloyd Doggett, who are senior members of the U.S. Congress, have been concerned for a number of years about how trade agreements have been used by corporations to challenge, as you mentioned, democratic policymaking and public interest policies seeking billions sometimes of dollars of taxpayer money from four countries like Honduras and others when they believe that a law or a government action is a violation of very extreme rights that were granted under these trade agreements. And so when the case that we're going to talk about today in Honduras came to light, Senator Warren and Representative Doggett were appalled. And it was just kind of the latest example of many of cases where corporations are using these extreme rights that have been included in the trade agreements that were snuck in without us understanding what they were to bully governments and or to basically ransack their treasuries. And so that was the impetus of this letter. They wanted to raise awareness about the case that we'll talk about today. And but importantly, that to use it as another example of why it's so critically important for the U.S. government to align our trade policy with our climate change goals, with our goals to promote anti-corruption in other countries, with our goals to promote development, and that right now there is this cross-purposes of our trade agreements with what those other goals are. And we can talk about how this is actually part of a long series of advocacy from Congress to subsequent administrations to change the perspective of the U.S. government and to not just be pushing U.S. corporate interests, but to actually think about how our policies abroad affect human rights, democracy, rule of law, and so forth. It seems to me that these trade agreements have basically created a corporate structure that supersedes democratically elected governments. The people's will. It's superseding national sovereignty and natural resource sovereignty. And that is right. So I mean, the thing that's, I think, hard for folks to grasp is this crazy system that was created under these trade agreements that elevates a private corporation to the level of a nation state to be able to sue that government. That didn't exist previously. Governments are sovereign nations, as you mentioned. But under this system, the corporations are able to have a private right of action. They don't have to convince. This U.S. company does not have to convince the U.S. government to engage in this. They can sue Honduras directly. And they can seek, as you mentioned, $11 billion, which is 2 thirds of Honduras' national budget for 2022. So obviously, this is just an outrageous sum, an absolutely impossible sum. And therefore, they can use that as leverage to bully the government to hopefully do what they want. And that's how companies have been using the system to force countries to settle with them, often, to change their laws or to allow them to continue practices that are harmful, or, again, to be compensated by the taxpayers of those countries. So it's a huge affront to sovereignty. And that's why, actually, it has become very unpopular even in the United States among those who are paying attention. And it's not just Democrats, but Republicans also. Because this is something, the United States actually is also vulnerable to these types of cases. And in fact, we're facing one right now after President Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, we now face a $15 billion case from the Canadian company that was going to build that pipeline. And I think as the United States started to see, wait, oh, this isn't just our corporations going after poorer countries. But actually we could potentially be vulnerable. Now it's no longer popular. But so now that's why we need to translate that ire to say, wait, the US government, it should not be taken before an international tribunal for a corporation. Well, our corporations should not be taking other countries toward international tribunals like what we're seeing with Honduras. So do these, am I correct in understanding that the companies can sue a sovereign nation, a democratically elected government for loss profit and loss of investment like the infrastructure investments they made, that they're suing for that? Yeah, so the idea behind it is that a company when you invest in a foreign country, there is a chance that potentially that country could nationalize your assets. And if they do that, if they expropriate your investment, you have the right to compensation. Now that in other, you can make an argument that that could make sense. But what's happened is that in the context of these agreements, they define what these violations are very broadly. So it's not just if I seize your factory, I have to compensate you. It's if I pass a law that reduces the value of your investment. So that can be environmental protections if you are a fossil fuel company that wants to abuse the environment or a mining company or it could be a public health protection if your investment was actually going to be damaging health. And so it's been interpreted in this very broad way that you get compensated not just for your investment, but that's what you mentioned which is the crazy part is that you can sue for what your expected future profits may have been if that law had not taken been. And so then they inflate out of thin air. We know this company and we'll talk, Beth can talk about what's happened with the company, but they haven't invested even a tiny fraction of what they're suing for. But they claim that if they were able to function as they wanted, at some point in the future, they would make $11 billion. But that's why they are. So, and that's why this has fallen out of favor too because it's not even, we're not even talking about like a leftist idea. When you think about, if you're an investor and you're going to invest someplace, you may make a lot of money, especially if it's a risky investment or you might lose some money. You don't have a right to be compensated because you lost money. And that is kind of the idea now behind these investor states students that they are completely protected from any change in the regulatory environment where they have invested. And that's just simply not the way our national courts work. That's not a standard that in our courts that would be accepted. But because it's this pro-corporate international tribunal that is set up outside of our courts, they've created these whole new rules that are very pro-corporate in terms of their rights. So, Beth, in terms of Honduras specifically, this transnational corporate system, these Zetas, which you know so much about, these were accepted in Honduras during the Juan Orlando Hernandez administration. And over, I don't say overrule, where we're negated or augmented under the current president, GMR Castro, who was democratically elected in November of 2021 by a super majority of the citizens and put an end to 12 years of narco dictatorship in Honduras. So you've got one government that's totally pro-US pro. And I think when the right after the coup was the Lobo government that said, Honduras is open for business. And so this is a byproduct of that philosophy, correct? I mean, it's a byproduct on steroids. Yes, you're absolutely correct. So the Zete law or the Zete project very much starts with the military coup in 2009. So it's after that coup that you, the portfolio Lobo administration launches this campaign that says Honduras is open for business. Honduras sort of goes through a neoliberal shock treatment of sorts, passes a lot of neoliberal reforms to open up the country to foreign resource extraction and foreign direct investment and this kind of thing. And it's at that point when you also see what is kind of a global network of largely libertarian organizations, think tanks, investor capitalists and so forth really start to see Honduras as a place where they can finally experiment with something that they've been dreaming about for a while, which is creating these kinds of micro nations, these kinds of autonomous or quite sovereign territories where they can experiment with very extreme sort of free market systems with systems of private governance and so forth. So it's in 2011 actually when the post coup regimes in Honduras reform the Honduran constitution, they reformed three main articles of the constitution to allow for at the time these zones were called special development regions or reds. It wasn't until later that the ZEVE name comes into play, but they reformed the constitution to basically say, okay, so Honduras has previously had departments and municipal governments. These are the governance divisions of the country and now we're gonna create a separate division which is called the special development region or now the ZEVE. And these are jurisdictions that are gonna be outside of the jurisdiction of municipal governments. So they take land from democratically elected local governments and place it in this new jurisdiction which is now gonna be governed by groups of private investors essentially. And those constitutional reforms also said that these jurisdictions could have their own, their independent judicial systems, sort of independent of the national Honduran judicial system. So this was widely seen in Honduras as neocolonialism as a violation of national sovereignty. And it's actually in 2012 that the Supreme Court of Honduras rules that these jurisdictions are unconstitutional. So there's that initial ruling of unconstitutionality and what happens at that point. So the law was actually passed under the Port Fredio Lobo administration, the special development region's law. And then what happens after this ruling of unconstitutionality is the Congress which is at the time under the leadership of Juan Orlando Hernandez who's president of Congress at the time essentially grants itself the power to remove these justices from the Supreme Court. And it's done under the general auspices of the Supreme Court supposedly creating obstacles for the administration in other realms as well. But then so they use that power then to remove these justices essentially overnight and replace them with their own people on the Supreme Court. So then Congress goes back and passes what is now the 2013 ZEVE law. So that context is really, I think important to have that this is not just a regular kind of investment in Honduras, but that it's really come about through these sort of illegal processes. And what the ZEVE law essentially does is it grants investors the ability to purchase land in Honduras and then create their own governance systems on that land. So to have their own independent courts, their own monetary policies, Prospera for example, which was the first ZEVE in Honduras has made Bitcoin legal tender. They're very much at sort of advancing the expansion of crypto and blockchain economies and ecosystems to create, have their own police and security forces to have their own regulatory regimes, which is something that's also interesting to talk about in the context of Prospera and to essentially create their own models of governance. And so that can, one of the things that makes this so different from a regular special economic zone is you don't have sort of one set of policies that says these are the fiscal incentives or these are the regulatory incentives that we're giving to corporations in order to attract investment. It says that every group of investors can create their own system. And with- So you could potentially have like 20 different investors and 20 different independent sovereign systems within. Well, I guess they're not within Honduras at that point. They're locked cutouts because they don't have to answer to the elected government, to the constitutional institutions of Honduras. They have their own. So they're all like basically like city states or like cutouts, right? They're just like taken extracted part of- Oh my God. I mean, it's almost impossible to believe listening to, you know, when I hear it, you read about it, but like hearing the conversation, it's almost impossible to believe. I find it fascinating that, I mean, I'm listening to this thinking, you know, it actually took a coup to get this to happen too, which has been the model throughout the Americas for like 500 years. That it really took a coup in 2009 to make this happen or to get a government receptive to the idea, I guess, is maybe a more diplomatic way to say it. So what happens? So Prospera was the first, the first setting. And so, and it is that cooperation that is suing. That's- Correct, yeah. So the charter for the Prospera jurisdiction, which is on the island of Roatan in Honduras, was actually signed, it was signed behind closed doors at the embassy in Washington, DC, with a body that's called the Committee for the Adoption of Best Practices. And we can go more into that as well. This is basically what the Zede Law does, is it says that it's not even the Honduran Congress that really has the power to, you know, declare these private jurisdictions or to approve them. There's this separate group of people. It's an international committee. It was, you know, first, it was comprised of mostly a majority of US citizens, a lot of sort of familiar faces from the Reagan administration that worked on, you know, Reagan's policy of supporting counterinsurgency efforts in Central America, you know, were operating originally on this committee. And this committee is the group that approves these private jurisdictions with groups of investors. So Prospera Charter was signed in 2018, but it wasn't until 2020 that Hondurans even knew that this jurisdiction existed. So, you know, the investors on the island of Roatan talked to local communities about this being just a regular tourism development. And that's how it was perceived. And it wasn't until 2020 that Hondurans realized what was actually happening with this project. And this was much bigger than a tourism investment that this was really an issue of national sovereignty. And like, as you were saying earlier, that in terms of the different kinds of systems that can be enacted through this policy, Honduras approved three Zeve's before there was a transition in government. So it's also, you know, good to keep in mind that these were sort of kind of pushed through at the end of Juan Orlando and then this is last administration, knowing full well that, you know, a transition to democracy was likely to take place and that this would likely put an end to the Zeve project. So there are three Zeve's in Honduras, there's the Orquilla Zeve, there's the Francisco, there's the Morassan Zeve and there's the Prospera Zeve. And each one has its own system and each one has created its own government system. So, and there's a debate just to go back to what you were saying, there's a debate in Honduras, you know, about what exactly is sovereignty? So the Hondurans and the international investors that support the Zeve's will claim this is not a violation of national sovereignty, you know, the Honduran military still has jurisdiction on this land. And, you know, the articles of the constitution that, you know, apply to the issuing of passports and these kinds of things still apply in these territories. But what you're really doing is you're taking land and you're removing it from democratic, from democratic control. So you're really, you're putting it under another governance system where people don't have equal rights to vote. And so it's really a question about democracy in the end. Do people live inside these economic zones or simply work? What is physically inside? And then I guess the other question is can the Honduran military actually go in? Like to me, it would seem like you're crossing a border at that point, so to speak. Do they have jurisdiction inside those zones or, oh my God, I mean, it just doesn't even seem right. The military does and the Honduran police can be invited into the zones. Can be invited, okay. By the ZAE administrations. Okay, yeah. And do people live in there? Do people go in and work and then leave at the end of the day or do they go, or do they live in there or? So all of these zones are very initial stages of development. And this is also related to the ISDS case. Prospera claims that they've invested around a hundred million in the zone. And they're claiming that Honduras might be liable for up to 10.7 billion. So just to give a sense of. So these zones are in very initial stages of development. The case with Prospera is that the Prospera company which is based in Washington DC purchased an initial 58 acres of land in the community of Crawfish Rock on the island of Roatan. And this was mostly uninhabited land but of course it is part of Crawfish Rock. It is governed by the Pateronato which is the local governing council of Crawfish Rock was previously governed by the municipality, et cetera. And they're really, Prospera is really trying to attract sort of global digital nomads, people from other countries who are remote workers and might want to relocate and work remotely from a beautiful island and kind of this Caribbean paradise. And that's really sort of the demographic that they're trying to recruit. They're also recruiting people who are invested in the sort of the world of decentralized finance. So people who are interested in crypto investments and then other sort of entrepreneurs and investors. So they're really recruiting people from outside Honduras and they are also recruiting Hondurans for some jobs within the zone. But really up to this point, it's been, they've been constructing sort of like their initial buildings, their initial real estate projects and that kind of thing. So there are very few people living in these zones as of yet. When you say remote workers or nomad workers, it comes to mind and I don't know what the name is, but I've seen like ads, social media ads, and Melinda, you're shaking your head. Is this the same? I mean, really promoting nomadic work and take a year off and go do this. And that's, I don't know where I've seen those ads, but I've seen them quite frequently. I think like probably on Twitter and Facebook, I probably shouldn't use those two names, but social media, I don't know that I've seen them print ads, but is that the sort of thing that Prospera is attracting are those people? That sort of... Well, I think it remains to be seen. I mean, there's definitely been a broader kind of digital nomad movement and I wouldn't paint all of it as moving into this kind of said they framework. I think they are trying, but my sense is that they are trying to track that, but then the other kind of mind-blowing thing is that you can become an E resident of Prospera. You don't have to live there. If you pay them fees, you can be an E resident and then you can avail yourself of their deregulatory framework if you want to start a business. So you can incorporate your business in Prospera Zévé, even if you don't live there. And then they advertise the fact that it is, that there are way fewer steps to register a business that you can provide your own. You can choose a regulatory code from any OECD country or you can propose your own to the council. They say that the labor, the minimum wage is... Or labor laws, it's more flexible labor environment than in Honduras or in the United States. So I think it's both potentially the tourist element, but then it also is this idea of kind of a deregulatory business environment that seems to be a lot of what they're selling. So as an E resident, you could incorporate your business within the Prospera Zévé and run your business anywhere in the world? Is that, or do you have to like run it inside that Zévé or inside what we geographically, how we geographically define Honduras? Or is this just an instrument to set up? You know, wow. You can run your business anywhere once you're incorporated there or we don't know that yet. We're waiting to see if that's what happens. I think there's a lot that's yet to be seen in exactly how this is gonna work, but I think that it's maybe somewhat similar to how companies register in Delaware, for example. So register your company where there's favorable, like a favorable regulatory framework to then be able to operate. And a lot of this is also geared towards digital assets and the kind of business that is done virtually in general. So yeah, so as Melinda mentioned, the Prospera jurisdiction offers four different options for regulatory frameworks for investors. And one of them is to adopt regulatory framework of another OECD country. Another is to propose your own regulations to be approved by the Prospera government. And the other is to operate under what's basically a liability system where you have a certain kind of liability insurance and you are subject to being sued for causing harm to another party or to an individual, but largely free of regulations. Wow, it's a whole superstructure. Superceiving elected governments. I mean, it's really scary. It's really, so what else should we, what else should the audience know about Zed is? Are they, is this a, I guess my question would be, this isn't just occurring in Honduras. My understanding is there are now in Colombia, people that are petitioning the new government, the Petro government to do something about the mining concessions that are similarly managed and regulated in Colombia. Am I correct in that or? So I think there's a wide spectrum of sort of these extraterritorial jurisdictions, right? We have all sorts of different kinds of free trade zones, export processing zones, a lot of resource extraction takes place in the context of legal loopholes and these kinds of exemptions for corporations and that kind of thing. And I tend to think that these things kind of exist on a spectrum. And I think in Honduras, you see the most extreme form of this. And the global investors that are involved in the project talk about it this way. This is very much a Vanguard project. This is very much pushing the boundaries of corporate sovereignty in other countries, pushing the boundaries of what they claim is the nation state having a monopoly on sovereignty and how can we break that and how can we gain access to territory to form our own government? So I think Honduras is a very extreme example. You see similar kinds of enclaves popping up all over the world that I think are pursuing similar interests. So for example, you have Bitcoin City in El Salvador. And this is sort of very much along the same lines of groups of investors who are committed to expanding what they call the decentralized, what they call decentralized finance. Hoping that this decentralized system, what is essentially an unregulated financial system can eventually take over the global financial system. And so you see these kinds of like crypto and Bitcoin enclaves in the form of some kind of special jurisdiction or some kind of urban project popping up all over the world. And I think Honduras is where they have gotten the furthest in creating an actual legal system to get the kind of sovereignty that they're after. And I think that one thing that is particularly unique about the Zedé law in Honduras is that it creates a template for really, for making these jurisdictions very easy to set up. So it's like I said before, it's kind of removing the power to do that, which nation states all over the world create special jurisdictions, but sort of taking the power to do that and giving it to these unelected, secretive, completely non-transparent organizations that are given the power to create these jurisdictions. And then in the case of the Zedé law, once the jurisdiction is created, for example, Prospera, they're easily expandable. So Prospera can expand not by getting approval from the Honduran Congress or even the committee for the adoption of best practices, but they can expand by just having a contract with the private landowner. And it can be a private landowner actually anywhere in the country. So it doesn't have to be contiguous to the existing Prospera jurisdiction. And they did that with the case of, shortly after Prospera became the special jurisdiction, they incorporated the Satouye Port on mainland Honduras, which does not share a border with Prospera, but they did that just through a private agreement. So you really have created this system where these zones can just expand without any democratic oversight. And this is part of sort of the long-term vision of this model is to create hubs, for example, a hub in Roatan, potentially hubs in Southern Honduras and different parts of Honduras. And then as they can go about convincing other governments to enact the same kind of legislation, they can open hubs all over the world with using the same governance system, which they call an operating system, but essentially using the, for example, the Prospera government. And then also creating these virtual jurisdictions, as Melinda was talking about, so creating the option for e-citizenship and creating a jurisdiction that kind of exists virtually outside of the sort of material territory. And then if Honduras reforms their laws and closes the Zedes, for example, or for another country does the same, you have a group of residents that are sort of automatically citizens of these hubs everywhere else and can simply take their capital and take their businesses and go elsewhere or continue operating through the virtual jurisdiction. So it really does create, I'm trying to sort of give the image of how it creates this sort of meta structure that again supersedes national sovereignty and really aims to eventually operate independently of nation states. That's kind of the long-term vision. I think Honduras, the law that was passed in Honduras is sort of the closest that investors have gotten to really creating a system that comes close to that. And in our last few minutes, Kim, let's talk about what Xiomara Castro has done in response to all of this. She was elected president, as we said earlier by a significant majority of Honduran citizens in November of 2021, her inauguration ended 12 years of narco dictatorship in the country. And one of the first things she did was outlaw, reverse, I'm not sure what the correct technical term is, this law and that reversal, her reversal of this is what triggered the Prospero lawsuit, correct? That's how, okay. So what exactly did she do? She was elected, this is one of the things she was elected to do. So, yeah, the ZEI issue was absolutely, it was a central point in the platform of the Opposition Coalition. And it was in April of 2022, it was actually the Honduran Congress that voted unanimously to repeal the ZEI law. And this was really seen as a victory for democracy, for the rule of law, for sort of taking the country back from 12 years of narco dictatorship, it's taking the institutions back under democratic control. I think it's also to note, you asked earlier what else should people know about the ZEI's, it's really important I think to mention the resistance that there has been to ZEI's inside Honduras. And so in 2020, there was a period of time when a lot of Hondurans thought that the ZEI was basically a dead project, that it wasn't going to come to fruition. The government was constantly saying that any month now, the first ZEI was going to be launched, they were largely talking about the Southern part of the country, they weren't talking about Baruatan. And it was in 2020 when this becomes front and center as a national issue again. And you start to see communities and people throughout Honduras really sort of reviving local democracy in the face of this kind of privatization project. So even though what the ZEI law does is it allows investors to take land from municipal governments, municipal governments don't have any say in whether or not this happens in their territory according to the law. As I mentioned before, in areas of low population density, ZEI's don't require any approval by the Congress of Honduras. So it's really done between the committee for the adoption of best practices and the investors. And the municipal governments are extremely disempowered in this process. And what Hondurans did was to really sort of revive local mechanisms of democracy and organized what they call cabillos abiertos, which is kind of like a municipal level referendum or vote. And they voted there, dozens of municipalities voted their municipalities to be free of ZEI. So this was a way of reclaiming democracy, reclaiming sovereignty over local jurisdictions. So I think it's important to note sort of the local resistance or the regional resistance to ZEI as well as what happened on a national level with the repeal of the ZEI law. And really that should be the end of the story. And I think that's why it's looking now at what the trade agreements, the layer that the trade agreements create, because this was a massive democratic action to try to reclaim democracy rule of law within Honduras. They won, they changed the law, they elected a government that was ready to do that. And now the company has these extra rights that have been granted to them under the Central America Free Trade Agreement with the United States that says they have these broad investor rights. And so they're using that to then challenge the fact that challenge the repeal of this law and saying that it shouldn't apply to them, that they had signed a legal stability agreement with the outgoing government, which of Juan Orlando Hernandez, which obviously is, you would think would be a pretty shaky legal territory. And yet they are using that to advance this claim for $11 billion. And it's going, this will now be happening outside of national courts in an arbitration, the arbitration tribunal, there will be three private sector lawyers who will be appointed to be the arbitrators for this. One appointed by the company, one appointed by the government and they will choose a third or it will be assigned by the tribunal, which is under the auspices of the World Bank. And those three private sector lawyers will decide, you know, this case. And in the meantime, the Honduran government must seek legal counsel. It's extremely expensive to defend yourself. You have to pay half of the arbitration costs, which are extremely high because they earn private sector lawyer rates. They are not judges. They're not salaried employees. They receive an incentive to have these cases go on very long and then to make this decision. So, and it's all done behind closed doors. We have not yet seen even the claim that Prospera has given against the Honduran government. That is currently confidential. It's potentially, they may be ordered to make it not confidential, but there's no rules under the system that provides an opportunity to see. There's no rules for them, period. Except their own, yeah. Yeah, so that's why, you know, it's important like what Senator Warren represented dogged in the 33 members of Congress said that we need to remove these extreme investor rights so that governments, when they are reclaiming democracy, like a case like this, are not then being now subject to having to deal with this outrageous investor state claim when obviously the president Castro has a lot that she has to be dealing with within the country now to have to divert resources toward this case is just, it's an abomination. But it's almost like the lawsuit is intentional in doing that. Like it's preventing her from any sort of state investment and that would force privatization in a way or at least philosophically. It's, if this $11 billion that the Honduran government is being sued for is I think you said earlier, two thirds. Of their entire national budget. Of their entire 2022 national budget. I mean, it's almost like there's, the strategy is a specific intent to bankrupt the country. Or to scare them enough that then they decide to just back off and allow visiting to continue. And that was pretty clear in the notice of intent that was put forward. I mean, they said, we don't want to move forward with this case. We want the Honduran government to, to agree to this. Wow. Hey, it's really, it's really horrifying. It's like neoliberal capitalism on steroids. Just, yeah. Wow. Well, thank you, ladies. My gosh. There's so much more to talk about here. And I would love to have you come back and watch how we can maybe analyze how this letter is affecting decisions on the Hill, what ultimately comes. Because as you said, I mean, it could affect the United States too. And I agree that's the threat to the United States is really the impetus for changing the law. Unfortunately, that's what it takes. But if that's what it takes and this structure can be changed, then we should do it. And really, like I said, this is actually now, actually under the previous Trump administration when they renegotiated the North America free trade agreement, they actually removed a lot of this ISDS from it. And which would even under Republican administration. And now President Biden has said that he no long, he does not support investor state dispute settlement and any future trade agreements, which is a great victory. They are not seeking this and any future agreements. And so the ask of this letter is to align our past agreements with the current thinking and the current policy. So we are hopeful that we can really make some real strides. Governments in Europe have been withdrawing from a treaty called the Energy Charter Treaty, which also included investor state dispute settlement in it. And countries like Germany, France, they have been withdrawing from this because they say, well, if we're going to address climate change, we can't have these fossil fuel corporations or others suing our governments as we pass climate policies. And so the tide is really turning. And so we think that there's a real opportunity right now to push to end this kind of ridiculous system. So we as activists, what can we do? Should we be circulating this letter? Should we be advocating for more sign-ons? We should definitely go to Honduras and see for ourselves what's happening there. I would advocate for a visit anywhere to really understand a situation and how people are organizing and responding to it. But here in the States, what's the best thing for us to do now as activists? Well, so we actually, I think there will be more opportunities relatively soon. I think now that this letter from those members of Congress has come out, there are efforts to have a broad organizational sign-on letter to the administration in support of this, which we can share in the future. That's for organizations, activists. I think you could follow some of the organizations that are part of this effort and we can provide more information. So tradewatch.org is our website and we will be putting additional information on there soon. There's also the Center for Economic and Policy Research has been really active Institute for Policy Studies. The Latin America Working Group, a number of organizations have been raising awareness about this and I think there will be opportunities to weigh in with the administration very soon. Right. Thank you so much. Beth, is there anything you'd like to add in closing? No, I don't think so. I think Melinda pretty much summed it up. So for the audience, I'll be sure to put the links into all these organizations, tradewatch, Ceper, IPS, Log, I'll put links in the program notes. For the audience, I'll put the link in the home page. The Honduran Solidarity Network also. Oh, of course. I want you to give a huge shout out to the Honduran Solidarity Network. Karen Springs specifically, because she really facilitated today's conversation and I'm just so thankful that both of you are available to have this really, really important conversation and it's really necessary for those of us in the States to understand what's happening to our neighbors in the global South and what we can do to stop it and to help ourselves in the long run as well. So I will include all of the links to those organizations in the program notes. I'll also include the link to the Warren letter so that people can see that as well. So, okay. Thank you so much, Beth and Melinda. What a really informative and helpful conversation and just so nice to work with both of you. Really enjoyed it. So I want to remind the audience that you've been watching what the F is going on in Latin America and the Caribbean. We are a popular resistance broadcast. We air on Thursday evening, 7.30 p.m. Eastern on three YouTube channels, Popular Resistance Code Pink and the Convo Count and you can also find the audio recordings at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So thank you ladies and for the audience. We'll see you next week.