Part 1: The Witness

a proposed hydro electric dam in western Honduras. Foreign investors, the Honduran government, and some of the wealthiest business leaders in the country have backed the project. Barta has worked with a native community known as the Linka to oppose it. They've filed legal complaints arguing the damn will destroy aid

their way of life. They've stacked logs and stones on roads, blocking construction equipment from reaching the work site, and Berta has been credited with driving the world's largest hydro electric contractor, China's Sino Hydro Corporation, to pull out of the project. It's been a grizzly battle. Protesters and security guards have clashed. A couple of people have been killed. A few more have been wounded and scarred. Bart To herself says she's

been constantly harassed. Threatening text messages have popped up on her phone. Strangers have followed her, mysterious vehicles have tried to drive her off the road. But on this night, as she walks onto the opera house stage, none of that seems to rattle her. She unfolds her speech at the podium and adjust the mic when I'm familiar on her closest friends have never seen her like this. The

bear To, they know, wears jeans and T shirts. Tonight she's wearing a sparkling, pale rose gown, but her smiles the same. And that smile is something her friends and colleagues have always talked about, how the smile has a way of making people feel comfortable, and how as soon as that happens, there to switch his things up tries to make those same people feel a little uncomfortable. Agitation, disruption, provocation, that's what she's going for, despertemos temple. It's a call

to action, she says. The world needs to wake up. It's running out of time, she says. Greed, racism, and old patriarchal systems are destroying us. Racis theatre art has been delivering that message in different ways for decades. As a kid, she tag along with her mom to protests. She co founded her own human rights organization when she was just twenty two. Now, at forty four years old, she's reached the pinnacle of her career, the request Premio

al Puelo linca Ario Lenco alcop. She closes the speech by dedicating the award to all the rebels out there, to her mother, to the Linka indigenous community, and lastly to all the martyrs who have lost their lives defending natural resources. In a lot of stories, this would be the end a grassroot environmental activists achieves international acclaim after years of struggling for her cause. But this isn't one of those stories. Tonight's award puts a spotlight on Barton.

The anger and resentment she's inspired over the years, intensified under its glare. Barton will go back to Honduras after this. She'll continue to speak out against the dawn, but in less than a year she'll be silenced. A prominent environmental rights activists was shot dead in Honduras on Thursday. She was killed like well the one hundred other activists. It's two thousand and ten and what's become the deadliest country in the world for environmental defenders. My name is Monte Real,

an investigative journalist for Bloomberg Green. This is Blood River. It's the story of a murder, a murder her in a place where murderers thrive. We're about of all killings are left unsolved and unpunished, where environmental activists have become irresistible targets. The homicide investigation was full of surprises from day one. Now, more than four years on, it keeps revealing new twists. We think it's quite possible that there's more to this crime then has been exposed so far.

I always felt like the government wouldn't dare to touch her. I always felt that she would be threatened and she would be famed, and they try and sender to prison. But I never actually thought that the government would dare kill her. We'll dive into those accusations, will follow strands of evidence on a zig zagging path that will lead

towards some of the most powerful institutions in Honduras. Before long, foreign governments and international investors will have to confront the same question, who in the end is really responsible for the death of Bear to Cassarus, And as more people get drawn into that mystery, more blood will be shed. It's not a good situation when people can literally get away with murder. Convicting people previously thought to be untouchable of serious crimes and having them pay the consequences can

send a very very important message. This is a test case. Yeah, this is so important. This. I'm walking up to the house where Berta was killed. It's early, almost four years after her murder. She had bought this place with some of the one and seventy dollars she was awarded for winning the Goldman Prize. At the time of her murder, she hadn't fully moved in yet, She was only staying here a couple of days a week. The subdivision sits at the far south end of the city of La Speranza.

It's a new development, flat, treeless, with plenty of lots that remain empty. Her house is small and simple, a green stucco exterior, white trim red metal roof. A six ft high chain link fence surrounds it. From the front door, you look across a dirt road and over a Aaron Fields. It's a subdivision that's very isolated and abandoned, with very few houses. That was Gustavo Castro's first impression of the place.

He's an environmental activist from Mexico. Barta invited him to Las Baranza in March to speak at a conference she organized. She told me, no, don't worry because anyway, I don't sleep here all the time. It's not like it's my permanent fixed address lexio Ica Tempo. That didn't put him at ease, especially when Berta started telling him how nasty her fight against the Awazarka Damn Project had gotten at one protest. Security guards for the Damn shot and killed

a demonstrator. They claimed self defense. Bear To herself had recently been getting threats, cryptic messages saying she should watch her back, that sort of thing. She filed a complaint to the Organization of American States. It's sort of like the United Nations for the Americans. That organization declared that the Honduran government had a responsibility to provide security for

bart To. She chatted a lot about the attention she was getting the threats, about the complaint she had filed and how about how sometimes the police officers that were supposed to be protectively weren't protecting. During that conference in La Esperanza, Gustavo had planned to stay at the house of another activist, one who lived in the center of the city, but when he saw Barta's place and how

vulnerable she seemed there, his plans changed. Barta said he'd be well come to stay with her, so Gustavo lugged his suitcase into the house and settled into the spare bedroom. The next evening, they grabbed dinner in a restaurant in town. It was about ten o'clock when bear To drove them back to the house. She passed a little security booth in front of the subdivision. A guard watched them pull up an older man in his seventies. Maybe he raised

the crossbar that blocked the entrance road. The man nodded at Barta as she passed. After that, upon arriving at the house, we grabbed chairs and sat out on the front porch to talk. I had a drink and smoked a cigarette, and we stayed out there talking until maybe eleven o'clock or so. Mostly it was small talk. Mostly it had been a long day, and she was very hired, and she said, okay, let's get some rest. I'll show you to your room, and so we went in for the night. I did a little work on my room

in the computer. You. Yes, I don't know if she was already asleep, but I heard some noises coming from around the house or inside the house, and I thought maybe she was doing something like Yeah. By now, it must have been a little past eleven thirty. That's when he heard a much louder noise, good a bag, very loud. I thought maybe Bait had dropped something in the kitchen, and I was getting ready to get up to go

help because it sounded very loud. But immediately the door of my room was kicked open, and at the same time, bit yells from her room, who's out there? Everything happened at once. Gustavo her gunshots coming from bear To's room, and when he looked up, a man was standing in his room, no more than six or seven feet away. He looked young, nineteen twenty years old, a thin guy, dark complexion, black hair, wide eyes, and he was holding

a gun. Nquist told Mann, I threw myself towards the side of the bed, in my room to protect myself, and the gunman shot me in the head side. I think it was a miracle because when I saw his eyes and saw his decision to shoot me, I instinctively moved, and the gunman evidently thought that the shot had caused that scar. Gustavo had thrown his hand up in front of his face a protective reflex. The bullet tore through the skin of his hand, then it buzzed the side

of his head, clipping a piece of his ear. Gustavo fell to the floor, stunned, bleeding and still betoas okay. He evidently thought that I was already dead. Gustavo sprawled on the floor, heard footsteps retreat down the hallway, then silence. No more than a minute passed, maybe as I was down on the floor and be yelled for me. So I realized that she was alive and got up to go to the room to help her. She was there on the ground bleeding. I couldn't tell where the gunshots were,

only a lot of blood. Little by little, she was drowning over the thing. Gustavo was kneeling over bear to in shock. Somehow, just before beart to faded out. She managed to mouth the final message to him, call Salvador. She said that was her ex husband. They'd split years before, but he's the father of her four children and he remained a major presence in their lives. Gustavo was searched

for bear to cell phone and found it on a table. Yeah, I also had a lot of It was a very modern phone, one that I didn't know how to use very well. And with all the nerves and and and the tension, I was trying to search for familiar telephone numbers, but nobody was answering. Gustavo look back at Barton. She was gone. Now he was alone, terrified that the killers might come back. He grabbed his own phone to make the calls. Sometimes he left voicemail messages, and sometimes he

didn't wait. He just punched in another number from his room. He also sent emails to friends and colleagues in Mexico, begging them to contact anyone in Honduras who might be able to come to the house and help him out. I was lying in my bed at one in the morning on March three, and I was into Goosey Galpa, and I received a phone call from Ann number. Karen Spring is a Canadian human rights activist who lives into Goosey Galpa, the Honduran capital. It's about a four hour

drive from Las Beranza. So I was alone in the house and I received this phone call and then I was like, okay, well that's weird. I wonder who's calling me. And then somebody else called me again, and so I was like, okay, that's weird. I'm gonna listen to the voicemail. That first call had been Gustavo. He didn't leave a voicemail. The second caller was an activist in Mexico who had received a panicked message from Gustavo. The activist called Karen to see if Karen might be able to help him.

And so when I listened to the voicemail, my friend, who is very active in the you know, mining networks in Mexico, was just saying Berto is dead and Gustavo is in her house and he shot and he really needs help. And I was like, holy shit. I listened to the voicemail and I was like, oh my god, Oh my god. And I just picked up the phone and called Bert to phone number, not even you know, thinking thinking twice about it and and I was just Gustavo like like, are you okay? It is Bertha dead? Yeah,

she's dead. I'm like, are you sure? You know? Are you are you sure? And he's like, yeah, she's she's dead. Karen was the first person to speak directly with Gustavo that night. She could hear that he was crying, and I asked him if he was okay, and he said, that is dead, and um, she's and and I'm I'm okay, but I'm bleeding and can you please find help. I've been calling people and nobody's been picking up, and you know, can you send people to the house. I don't know

what to do. And then he asked me if he should call the police, and I said, don't call the police. Um, you know, because calling the police and Honduras is like calling the mafia to a crime scene and you can't trust them. It might sound kind of crazy you witness a murder, you're alone with the body, and then you go out of your way to avoid calling the police

for help, But in Honduras it's not that crazy. A few months before Berta was killed, a survey funded by the US government suggested that a solid majority of Hondurans simply assumed the police officers were on the payrolls of assassins and other bad guys. Almost no one trusted the cops. These institutions were not at the service of the people. They were at the service of some other interest, uh

financial or criminal. James Neilon was appointed US Ambassador to Honduras in his priorities had been clearly outlined for him well.

I arrived in Honduras in August of two thousand and fourteen, and if you'll recall, that was the height of the of the first so called unaccompanied miners crisis, when there were New York Times headlines and and cable news reports of huge numbers of Central Americans unaccompanied children streaming across our Southwest order and my marching orders as I headed down to Honduras or to or to do something about that. He believed the driving force behind the migration was violence.

In Honduras set a world record. This was the deadliest place ever if you didn't count countries at war for several years in a row. The country's murder rate was about sixteen times higher than in the United States. Honduras wasn't only the murder capital of the world at that time. But I guess you could also label at the impunity capital of the world at that time, because very few

murders were actually successfully investigated to a conclusion. In other words, it was very rare for someone to actually go to jail for committing murder. In Honduras, everyone knew the Honduran National Police had a corruption problem. Local newspapers were full of stories about uniformed officers getting tangled up in drug deals, or stealing cars, or even committing murders. Calls for reform

were gathering steam both inside and outside of Honduras. Just before Berta was killed in twenty sixteen, the U. S Embassy threw its weight behind an effort to purge the Honduran Police of its dirty cops. The Honduran government called it the Special Commission for the Purge and Transformation of the Honduran National Police. The Commission met for the first time after Berta's murder. Over the next two years, from twenty sixteen to twenty eighteen, the Honduran government ended up

firing almost half of its national force. More than five thousand officers out of about thirteen thousand were expelled. Most were accused of corruption or ties to criminal groups. It wasn't just the rank and file. Of the nine top officers in the National Police, six were pushed out. Forty seven active police commissioners, about half were fired. Today there's still a lot of controversy over that purge, but it's not that the commission went too far. It's that they

might have been too easy on the police. Each of the three top ranking police commanders appointed after the purge would later be accused of meeting with drug traffickers who paid the officers to protect their shipping routes. However you interpret the end result of that purge, remember it hadn't even really begun when Barta was killed. All of those thousands of corrupt cops that would soon lose their jobs,

they were still on the force. So Karen Spring wasn't being paranoid when she told Gustavo Castro not to call the police for help. She was using common sense. When Karen hung up on that first call with Gustavo, she could tell he was terrified. He was alone with a murdered friend inside a house that now felt more isolated

and vulnerable than it ever had. I was repeatedly calling Gustavo to make sure he was okay, because you know, he was really scared that the assassins were going to come back and finished the job, and that they if they knew that he was alive. And so I also told him that we need to be very careful about who knew that he was still alive at that time until he was, you know, in a safe place. Karen started calling members of Copeine Barrett's organization in La Speranza.

One was a man named Thomas Gomez. He agreed to drive to Berta's and get Gustavo to safety in case the killers returned. Yes, Emilia, it's something like two thirty in the morning when Tomas from Gulping arrives to get me. I heard the horn from the Gulping pickup truck and I told myself, that's Tomas coming from me. This is Gustavo stepped out of the bedroom to meet him. The back door of the house connected to the kitchen was open. The killers had busted through it. That must have been

the first loud noise he'd heard. I went out through the front door. The gate to the fence was locked, so I decided to jump the fence and I left with Domas. It was around this time when Tomas called the police to tell them about the murder. Then he and Gustavo drove to the guard station at the entrance of the subdivision. Gustavo recognized the old man from earlier when he and Bartsa had passed him. Tomas asked the guard if he'd seen anything out of the ordinary. He

said he hadn't. Tomas drove towards the center of town. On the side of the road, they spotted a cluster of people walking. They were members of Berta's indigenous rights organization Copeine. They'd heard about what happened. They didn't have cars, but they wanted to help somehow, so Moss told them to hop in the truck and he gave them a lift back to Berta's house. He told them to guard the place to make sure it wasn't disrupted before the police got there. We dropped the people off and we

took off to leave again. The crossbar was now raised and the old man, we don't know what happened to him. So Mass and Gustavo found two more groups of Copeine members walking along the road and offered them rides. When they returned to the house with the last group, they saw that the police had now arrived inspecting the house. Many of the Copine members were also inside with them. Gustavo couldn't believe it. People were walking through the blood,

leaving fingerprints everywhere agreement. Obviously the whole scene of the crime had been altered. That's when Berta's lawyer arrived. He told Gustavo that a prosecutor wanted to speak to him and that he should just wait in the truck. Gustava's ear in hand were still bleeding and throbbing with pain. More police and army soldiers were now streaming into the

crime scene. The media soon arrived. They too were walking into the house, but no one could see Gustavo behind the tinted windows of the trucks matros a few meters away. I could hear them giving the news reports, saying there was one Gustavo Castro and he's wounded because there was a lot of blood in my room. But I wasn't there. I just I couldn't be okay. They must have found his suitcase in the spare room. His name was printed on the luggage tack back into Gooseagalpa. Karen Spring was

racing to get to the crime scene. I put out a communicate that Berta had been killed, and I got in my car at I think like three o'clock in the morning, and I drove to Lesperanza. And when I got there, her body had been taken from the crime scene, and it was in the back of a pickup truck outside of the public Prosecutor's office in Lesperansa. It was about eight o'clock in the morning. Now crowds were gathering around that truck, people trying to get a glimpse of

Berta's body. Berta was probably less Speranza's most well known citizen. People were mourning. They carried pictures of her. They spray painted her name on walls and sidewalks, and their sadness was edged with anger. It had been more than seven hours since the murder, and her body was right there in the back of a truck in the middle of a public square, covered only with a dingy gray blanket. To Karen, this was an insult heaped on top of

a tragedy. She started looking for Gustavo. Someone said he'd been taken to a local priest's house where the police were guarding him, and I insisted with the police that they let me in to see him. They wouldn't let me right away, and then they finally allowed me in, and Gustavo was in a room. He was bleeding from his ear, and he was sitting with Berta's oldest daughter, telling her what had happened. Gustavo's nerves were shot as he told the story to bears his family, Karen recorded

everything on her cell phone. He said he didn't know where to begin, but he went on to give them a detailed account of the evening, where he and Berta had gone out to eat, how they returned to the house, sat on the porch, went to their rooms. As he spoke, he kept his voice low, sometimes dipping into a whisper. He didn't trust the government types hovering around him, the ones who had been questioning him for hours. People kept

coming in and out of the room, interrupting. After about twenty minutes, Gustavo got into the details of the murder itself, how he had heard a very loud bang which he thought might have come from the kitchen, and how seconds later he heard three gunshots you. He then talked about how Berta called his name after the gunman left, how he found her on the floor, how he pleaded with her note bias, don't go and okay, that they called me go stay with me, and how she told him

to call Salvador, her ex husband. Can shows you how you say that. Finally, he described how he struggled to use her phone and find her contact list, and then how he realized she was gone joy see that she

wanted to see. In the middle of all of this, the police were still pressing Gustavo for more information, and so in that the couple of hours that I was with him, a person that was sent from the Public Prosecutor's office who was like going to sketch the face of the person that he could remember had shot him,

showed up. Gustavo would describe the gunmen, and the police sketch artist would turn his words into an image said, Okay, I don't know anything about these sort of things, but I agreed to collapse, right, And so a person comes in and everything was pre arranged, very well planned, and the person the expert comes in who's going to do the drawing, and they're trying to convince me that he's really good, that he's an expert in these sort of things,

you know, So they're trying to convince me that what he's going to draw was going to be good with Gustavo started describing the guy, the young face, the short dark hair that you know, the eyes, the lips. He registered all of it, and he started to make the drawing, and I told him, no, this isn't the person I saw. So he erases a little bit and then he re draws it more or less the same. That's why I say, no, no, no, no, no, that wasn't his hair, so he erased it, and then

he went back to drawing essentially the same things. Gustavo hadn't slept in two days, as someone finally bandaged his ear in hand, but they still hurt. He hadn't eaten. Hippo reality want to look at Getter, I mean, so I was like, draw whatever you want, and so they asked me, okay, well, what's the percentage of similarity between this drawing and the person you saw? Eighty? I don't know whatever, just put eighty. I don't remember what I said,

but obviously I approved it. I did not realize the importance of that piece of evidence, you know, quill prop. The police knew something that Gustavo didn't. A couple of hours before he sat down to do the sketch. They'd arrested someone in connection with the murder, but they withheld this news from Gustavo. The man they'd detained was Berta's ex boyfriend. His name was Aureliano Molina, but friends called

him by his nickname Lito. Gustavo had never met Lito, but Lito had been one of the people he'd spoken to on the phone after the murder when he was calling everyone in Berta's contacts. When Gustavo eventually saw a picture of Lito, it was a mug shot, and that

photo shocked him. That's because the police sketch he'd done, the one that didn't really look like the gunman he'd seen, well it looked a lot like Lito, So it was all a set up on during authorities have always denied any wrongdoing in the investigation, and police at the time said that they were following several leads, but that's not the way Gustavo saw it. To him, it seemed the investigators were convinced the killer was someone close to Berta.

Like her ex boyfriend. Lito had been one of the first people that Karen Spring had called after she spoke with Gustavo. She had reached him at his house in a town called San Francisco, Limpira, that's a three hour drive from Berta's house in La Speranza. I called our Liana Molina, you know, forty five minutes into my whole slew of phone calls that I made in response to the phone call I were received from Mexico, and I called our Liona Molina and I the first thing I

asked him was where are you? And he said, I'm in San Francisco. What happened? And Isa Berta was murdered? And so I had I knew that he wasn't even in La Speranza that night, so I knew too that he wasn't involved at all in the murder. Lito had called Gustavo at about two a on the night of the murder. He told Gustavo that he'd heard what happened from Karen. He said he'd drive to La Speranza to try to help him. Shortly after Lito arrived at about

five in the morning, police arrested him. Lito's relationship with Berta had ended just a few months before. Some members of Berta's inner circle, including her mother and her oldest daughter, didn't get along with him, But it wasn't anyone from Berta's family that pointed the finger at Lito. To them, the idea of him murdering Berta was absurd, But someone did place Lito at the scene of the crime. It was the old guard at the entrance to the subdivision.

He said he saw Lito flee the area before police first got there. The old man that guarded the entrance declared that Tomas, instead of driving me of the subdivision that morning, had actually taken Leto out, so his testimony didn't match those given by Tomas and me, but it

was absurd, Gustavo says. The old man's description of Leto included physical details that would be impossible to catch from a quick glimpse through tinted windows in the dark, So there were lots of ways in which it became evident that this old man had been threatened or tortured or something. But his testimony was false, so that it's squared with the version that said lethal was guilty of this murder. Protests erupted in the Honduran capital after Barth's murder. Students

demanding justice hurled rocks at riot police. Those police shot tear gas and rubber bullets back at them. Berta's murder instantly became international news, partly because of the attention she just received from the Goldman Prize. Senators were on the floor of the U S Capital urging Honduras to conduct a full, sincere investigation. Celebrities jumped in. Leonardo DiCaprio tweeted

about Berta. Susan Sarandon posted a video I'm calling on the Honduran government to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into the tragic murder Alberta Cassarez, and I demand that the perpetrators beheld accountable. Environmentalists all over the world were now talking about Ahwa Zarca, the name of the hydro

electric dam that Berta had been fighting. They talked about the violence that had surrounded the project, about the threats Berta had received, about the security protections she was supposed to have received. The day after the murder, the Minister of Security held a press conference. He said the government was willing to protect her whenever she asked for it. The minister suggested that the night she was killed, Berta

had not reached out to them. But we're not here to say whether the security failed, but the assassination occurred. The police were responsible for protecting her. Patrols were sent to her home to protect her at her request. We always tried to comply with her demands and protect her. Unfortunately this happened, and we're working to investigate it. Bear to his family interpreted statements like that as scapegoating, as if it were Bart's fault, as if she'd failed to

specifically ask for protection. The night of her murder, Vert's oldest daughter, Olivia, spoke at a candlelight vigil for her mother. It was a political crime. She had been threatened, She had declared many times, I'm being followed by hitman. It's a farce when they claimed she was murdered because she renounced the protective measures granted her. She never renounced those protective measures. The only people who seemed uninterested in the

threats she had received were the investigators. As far as the family could tell, it seemed that the police considered this an open and shut case. It was a crime of passion, a spat between Berta and an ex boyfriend. Any evidence that gotten the way of that theory was ignored. The day after the murder, a reporter cornered the security minister and asked about the other victim. The activist said

to have been in the house with Berta without my own. Yes, we do have knowledge of this person, but we don't want to divulge more details from that because this is an important person, one who cause us to step back and take a pause in the investigation. I don't think. After his encounter with his sketch artist, Gustavo became convinced that the evidence wasn't guiding the investigators. Instead, he believed the investigators must have been guiding the evidence because it

was a planned killing. They wanted a clean murder, one shall we say, where she was alone, a clean job, without any witnesses, and the story was going to be that it had been an assault. Nobody would be able to contradict that the problem would have ended there. But the second scenario is there was a witness who survived,

who saw one of the gunmen. I saw him from just a few meters away, so their Plan B was going to be blame someone from Coping and so Gustavo is sitting there alongside the police, and the puzzle pieces of an elaborate conspiracy seemed to be falling into place, then breaking apart, then recombining into new shapes. Plan A was to kill Baranta without any clues whatsoever, but they

hadn't counted on a witness. Plan B then was to blame someone who worked with Barrita and Copeine, like Lito the ex boyfriend, to frame it as a classic crime of passion. The problem was, the longer the police held Lito, the more people vouch for him. His alibi was sound. He hadn't been anywhere near Berta's house at the time of the murder. In the end, they had to let him go, and so the third scenario was, Okay, now we can't do that. So Plans C is blame Gustavo.

For three days, he answered their questions. He led investigators through Barton's house, recreating the events as he remembered them. Step by step. He sorted through countless police mug shots. Diplomats from the Mexican embassy and Honduras arrived to try to help. At the end of the third day, he'd given police all he could. Now it was time to go home. His embassy helped him reserve a ticket back

for early the next morning. The met To can ambassador send a message that night to the lead Honduran investigator with all the travel details. He never responded to that message. So when we were ready for the flight, we left for the airport, thinking, okay, they're not interested in us anymore. You know, it wasn't a big deal. When we got to the airport with the security people from the embassy

and the ambassador and well also the consul. At the time of departure, five in the morning, all the investigators and the police were hiding in the airport. They came out and they blocked the gate and they told me you cannot leave, no brave. He felt like he was trapped in a horror movie. But the script kept changing. First, he was cast as the lone witness, a victim, one who had been shot and whose blood was all over the crime scene. Now, in a twist, Gustavo couldn't quite

believe he somehow had become the prime suspect. Coming up on Blood River, we'll venture into a community that was torn apart by the battle over the dam, where neighbors bought neighbors. They told me, okay, woman, what we're going to do is kill you. And when they told me they were going to kill me, that's when I felt the first blow. The first strike of the machete hit me in the head, and after that another machete hit

me here in the chest. That violence, years later, would lead investigators to new clues into new suspects in Barts his murder. That's next time on Blood River. Blood River is written and reported by me Monte Reel Top Foreheads is our senior producer. May A Quava is our associate producer. Our theme was composed and performed by Senia Rubinos. Special thanks to Eduardo Thompson and Helen Navas and Carlos Rodriquez.

Francesca Levi is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Be sure to subscribe if you haven't already, and if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others find out about the show. Thanks for listening.