This is the New World Report. I'm John Batswitt, Professor

Evangelist of the U.S. Army War College, the new President of Honduras, President Castro

in Beijing for a conversation with Xi Jinping, a state visit, including honor guard, and

determinations afterwards of a free trade agreement possible. And Honduras asking to join

the BRICS, Professor, is this a significant development in Central America that Honduras

is now clearly in the China-Russia camp?

It is, John. And it is in the sense of just how quickly the Honduras, the Xiomarokastro

Libra Party regime is moving forward. More broadly, there have long been concerns with

Xiomarokastro and really the influence of of Melisolaya, her husband and former president,

as well as some more radical elements of Libra behind the relatively moderate face of

Castro herself, and what that means for the U.S. and an area very close to the United

States. But one of the perhaps dramatic illustrations has been, again, just how far, how fast

she's taken the Beijing relationship. And this has been particularly important because

Washington we've been talking about the alleged or actual now Cuban spy base operated

by China. But that's kind of overshadowed the fact that you've had this very large,

very long trip by Xiomarokastro. And yes, she met with Joe Maro-Zef, who was now the head

of the BRICS back there in China, and said that Honduras wants to get into the BRICS

back. He said that it wants with Chinese support to get into the Asian development bank.

But even beyond that, there is apparently 22 different agreements that were signed of

which you had something like a 14 different non-transparent MOUs, which is fairly standard.

A lot of them were trying to open up the China, the Honduran agricultural market, but there

are other fairly significant things. For example, the creation of a cooperative mechanism

...