For all those people in comments recently who just couldn’t possibly see the Hugo Chavez’s accusations of drone fly over to be true–because why on *earth* would the U.S. do something like that??–I highly recommend watching the following segment.

Pacific Rim applied for mining permits, and they were denied on the basis of their environmental impact study that didn’t pass muster in El Salvador. And that was in 2005, 2006. But just this past year, Pacific Rim filed a lawsuit through CAFTA, the US Central American Free Trade Agreement, suing the Salvadoran government for, at the minimum, $77 million, claiming that this is money that they have lost in their investment or money, potential profits, that they could have made, had they been granted the permits.

And they are going through CAFTA, which was the—is the US Central America Free Trade Agreement, and the only way that they are able to do this, because Pacific Rim is located in Vancouver, is that they acquired a subsidiary in Nevada in 2007. And through that US subsidiary, they are taking advantage of the very generous and expansive corporate rights that are built into CAFTA.

CAFTA has a Chapter 11, which is—Chapter 10, which is very similar to NAFTA’s Chapter 11, around, quote-unquote, “investment rights,” which really is a chapter that gives transnational corporations tremendous legal access to the natural resources of the countries in Central America and in Mexico and defines investors with more rights, literally, to land and to water than even local or national governments have.

And so, the basis of Pacific Rim’s lawsuit is that they didn’t get these permits, even though the Salvadoran government has every right to give or not give mining permits based on what the impact will be—and in this case, you know, because Pacific Rim is going to use, or proposing to use, cyanide extraction, presents a tremendous health and environmental danger to the community. So the really central issue here is about sovereignty. Does El Salvador, do the other countries in Central America, have the right to enforce their own environmental laws, or do transnational corporations get to rule?