This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Years later, Luisa Connor and Vanessa Cárdenas would look back ruefully on the day foreigners visited their beachfront village with plans for a development next door. They had no idea the effort was backed by Silicon Valley billionaires who wanted to build a “startup city” or that a relatively new Honduran law would allow them to establish this semiautonomous enclave. They could not foresee they would lead a fight against it that would launch their village into national politics and prompt an international legal dispute, threatening to bankrupt the country. They thought it was