[[{“value”:”More importantly, Honduras is not just locked in a dispute with Silicon Valley billionaires, as the authors would lead you to believe. Other claimants against Honduras at the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) include the Paiz family, one of the wealthiest in Guatemala, the U.S. bank JPMorgan Chase, and others from Honduras, Panama, Mexico,
The post Honduras and its disputes appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.”}]]
More importantly, Honduras is not just locked in a dispute with Silicon Valley billionaires, as the authors would lead you to believe. Other claimants against Honduras at the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) include the Paiz family, one of the wealthiest in Guatemala, the U.S. bank JPMorgan Chase, and others from Honduras, Panama, Mexico, Chile, Norway, and the Caymans. More claims were brought by private energy companies after Castro’s 2022 reforms pushed out private investment to expand the state’s role in electricity production. Predictably, there are no signs of progress for Honduras’ crippled energy grid. The state-run National Electric Energy Company loses over $30 million every month, with debts amounting to more than 10 percent of Honduran GDP.
This is to say that Honduras’ current feud with Próspera is part of a pattern of reneging on obligations to investors and expanding state influence, not a one-time rectification of a coup by Silicon Valley billionaires.
Equally absent the article is any mention that the supposedly “center-left” Castro is a self-proclaimed socialist strongly aligned with Venezuela and, in shirking foreign investors and the US, following in its footsteps quite neatly. Castro has indeed gone so far as to remove Honduras from the ICSID over the massive list of outstanding claims against it—a move familiar to Venezuela, which left in 2012. The Honduran government’s rationale—that the ICSID favors corporations instead of states—is the same that Venezuela used. The practical effects of this move are limited, but the symbolic ones are meaningful. Honduras is branding itself as a bad place to do business.
Here is more from Snowden Todd.
The post Honduras and its disputes appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Current Affairs, Law, Political Science
Leave a Reply