Latin America and the Caribbean constitute a privileged area for the critical analysis of Lex Mercatoria and transnational corporate power. The region is not simply another case study, but a historical laboratory where the legal forms of globalized capitalism have been tested, consolidated, and resisted. From the structural adjustments of the 1980s to the proliferation of trade and investment treaties in the 1990s, and through the current geopolitical reconfiguration marked by the inter-imperial dispute between the United States and China, Latin America has been at the center of the processes of capital's disciplining of peripheral states.

This situated perspective begins by recognizing that the international legal architecture governing investment and trade is neither neutral nor purely technical: it is a historical construct that responds to the needs of capital accumulation in its transnational phase and reproduces the structural asymmetries of the international division of labor. Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs), investment chapters in Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), and Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms constitute what various authors have characterized as a "new Lex Mercatoria": a supranational legal order that grants exorbitant rights to transnational capital while severely limiting the regulatory capacity of states, especially those in the Global South.

Latin America presents crucial specificities within this framework. First, it is one of the regions with the highest number of investment treaties in force worldwide, having pioneered the mass signing of BITs in the 1990s under the Washington Consensus paradigm. This proliferation was not accidental: it responded to a deliberate strategy of subordinate integration into neoliberal globalization, driven by both multilateral lending institutions and governments that saw "legal security" for foreign capital as the promise of development. Second, the region has been the subject of approximately one-third of all ISDS claims globally, with devastating economic and political costs for states and their populations. Emblematic cases such as the lawsuits against Argentina after the 2001 crisis, the arbitrations of Canadian mining companies against Colombia and Ecuador for water protection, or the recent case of Prospera against Honduras linked to the Special Economic Development Zones, illustrate how these mechanisms operate as instruments of discipline over any attempt at regulation that prioritizes social, environmental rights or sovereignty over common goods.

However, the region has also been the scene of significant struggles and resistance against this regime. The defeat of the FTAA in 2005, driven by a continental alliance of social movements, unions, and peasant and indigenous organizations, marked a milestone in the grassroots resistance to free trade. The comprehensive audits of BITs carried out in Ecuador, which resulted in the denunciation of all its investment treaties, constitute a unique global experience of sovereign assessment of the impacts of this legal framework. Likewise, national court rulings in defense of water and the environment against extractive megaprojects, as in the case of the Santurbán páramo in Colombia, demonstrate the tension between national law and the extension of jurisdiction implied by international arbitration.

From a critical political economy perspective, the Lex Mercatoria must be understood as a constitutive part of the internationalization process of the capitalist state. It is not merely an external imposition, but rather a reconfiguration of state forms that responds to the needs of capital reproduction in its transnational phase. Latin American states are not passive victims: sectors of their local ruling classes, linked to transnational capital and extractive-exporting factions, have been active promoters of these treaties. At the same time, the Lex Mercatoria operates as a legal lock that seeks to prevent cycles of popular mobilization from translating into structural transformations of production models.

Latin American specificity is best understood through categories inherent to regional critical thought: dependency theory, the debate on imperialism in Our America, analyses of extractivism, and critiques of the coloniality of power. The Lex Mercatoria reinforces patterns of productive specialization that keep the region in a subordinate position within global value chains, deepening the primary commodity export market and the re-primarization of economies. These treaties not only protect investments but also guarantee a civilizational model based on territorial dispossession, the overexploitation of labor and nature, and the transfer of surplus to the centers of global capitalism.

In the current context, marked by the climate crisis, geopolitical disputes, and the reconfiguration of supply chains around the energy transition, Latin America faces new challenges. The growing Chinese presence in the region, through investments in infrastructure, mining, and energy, is accompanied by a new generation of BITs that reproduce—and in some cases deepen—the mechanisms for protecting capital. Far from representing an alternative to the neoliberal order, the treaties with China are embedded in the same logic of Lex Mercatoria, albeit with particularities derived from the hybrid nature of Chinese state capitalism.

Thinking critically about Lex Mercatoria from a Latin American perspective also involves connecting this analysis with contemporary territorial struggles. Conflicts surrounding extractivism, popular consultations against megamining, the defense of Indigenous territories against infrastructure projects, and peasant resistance to agribusiness cannot be understood separately from the international legal framework that protects and enables these forms of accumulation by dispossession. Investment treaties operate as the legal infrastructure of extractivism, guaranteeing profitability for transnational capital while criminalizing and prosecuting social protest.

From the Global South, our challenge is to produce situated knowledge that not only describes these processes but also contributes to strengthening transformation strategies. This implies articulating academic work with social organizations, unions, Indigenous and peasant movements, strategic advocacy, and institutional actors committed to defending sovereignty and human rights. It also implies challenging the hegemonic meanings of "development," "investment," and "economic growth" that legitimize this legal order, highlighting its social, environmental, and democratic costs. And it requires building concrete alternatives: from proposals to reform the arbitration system that incorporate accountability mechanisms and obligations for corporations, to exit strategies and comprehensive audits of existing treaties, and the development of alternative regulatory frameworks that prioritize human rights and the sustainability of life over guarantees for capital.

The working group on Lex Mercatoria, corporate power and human rights is part of this Latin American critical tradition, taking on the challenge of producing rigorous analyses that feed both academic debate and concrete struggles for economic, environmental and social justice in the region

The relevance of the critical study of Lex Mercatoria, corporate power, and human rights in the contemporary Latin American context is grounded in the intersection of three systemic crises that define our era: the climate and environmental crisis, the crisis of legitimacy of representative liberal democracy, and the reconfiguration of the world order under a renewed inter-imperial dispute. These processes are not autonomous but are intimately linked through the legal form adopted by globalized capitalism, of which Lex Mercatoria constitutes a privileged expression.

From a theoretical point of view, the critical analysis of the Lex Mercatoria allows us to address fundamental problems of contemporary social theory that remain unresolved or insufficiently conceptualized in the dominant academic literature. First, the study of investment treaties and ISDS mechanisms forces us to rethink the classic categories of state sovereignty and the relationship between the legal and the economic in contemporary capitalism. Contrary to readings that present these treaties as mere external restrictions on sovereign states, a critical perspective inspired by the work of Panitch and Gindin (2012) allows us to understand them as a constitutive part of the process of internationalization of the capitalist state. States are not passive victims of neoliberal globalization, but active builders of the legal and institutional conditions for the expanded reproduction of transnational capital (Poulantzas, 1978). The Lex Mercatoria thus reveals the class nature of the State and its role in the "administration of exploitation" on a global scale, refuting both naive instrumentalist views and liberal apologies for state neutrality. Secondly, the analysis situated from Latin America requires recovering and updating the categories of dependency theory and the debate on imperialism in a contemporary key. Ruy Mauro Marini (2015) and Jaime Osorio (2016) showed how the subordinate insertion of Latin America into the world market generates specific forms of accumulation based on the super-exploitation of labor and the transfer of value towards imperial centers. The Lex Mercatoria operates as a legal device that crystallizes and deepens these patterns of dependency: it guarantees the extraction and appropriation of extraordinary rents by transnational capital, protects primary production models oriented towards export, and disciplines any attempt at structural transformation that questions this subordinate insertion (Ghiotto and Echaide, 2020). Far from being a sectoral issue of international law, the protection of investments constitutes a central problem of international political economy and development theory. Third, the GT contributes to an emerging field that articulates the critique of political economy with critical legal theory and studies on social movements, overcoming disciplinary compartments that limit the understanding of complex phenomena. Following the contributions of Hernández Zubizarreta (2009) on the "architecture of impunity" and of Guamán (2021) on the new Lex Mercatoria, the GT produces analyses that are not limited to the exegesis of contractual clauses but place these legal forms in relation to processes of accumulation, distributive conflicts and struggles for hegemony. This perspective allows us to understand, for example, how the concept of "indirect expropriation" in BITs operates as a technology of governance that redefines the limits of what is politically possible for peripheral states (Suárez Rodríguez, 2024, in Ghiotto et al., 2024).

The social relevance of the study of Lex Mercatoria in Latin America is directly linked to its material impacts on the living conditions of the popular majorities and the sustainability of the territories. Investment treaties and ISDS mechanisms are not legal abstractions: they have concrete and measurable consequences. Latin America has faced more than 250 arbitration claims since 1990, with amounts claimed exceeding USD 200.000 billion (TNI, 2024). These lawsuits drain public resources that could be allocated to health, education, or infrastructure, generating what can be characterized as a form of "accumulation by litigation" where transnational capital appropriates state surpluses through arbitration rulings. The paradigmatic case of Argentina after the 2001 crisis, with more than 60 lawsuits and judgments for billions of dollars, illustrates how these mechanisms operate as disciplinary devices in the face of economic crises that require sovereign responses (Ghiotto and Laterra, 2020). Beyond the direct fiscal costs, the Lex Mercatoria has "regulatory chill" effects that impede or discourage public policies aimed at environmental protection, labor rights, or social justice. When a state knows that any regulation can trigger a multi-million dollar arbitration claim, self-censorship becomes a form of government. Cases of mining lawsuits against Colombia for the protection of the Santurbán moorland, or against Costa Rica for environmental policies, show how the threat of arbitration operates as a preventive veto on democratic decisions adopted even after popular consultation processes (Sarmiento Lobo, 2024, in Ghiotto et al., 2024). In the context of the climate crisis, this social relevance is dramatically heightened. Latin America faces the paradox of being simultaneously one of the regions most vulnerable to climate change and a key supplier of critical minerals (lithium, cobalt, copper, rare earths) required for the global energy transition. Investment treaties guarantee that this new extractive phase – “green extractivism” – reproduce the patterns of territorial dispossession, pollution and social conflict of traditional extractivism, but under narratives of "sustainable development" (Svampa, 2019). Critical analysis of Lex Mercatoria is essential to demystify the idea that there is no alternative to this model and to make visible the socio-environmental costs that capital attempts to externalize onto territories and bodies. Territorial struggles against extractive megaprojects, the resistance of indigenous peoples and peasant communities, and campaigns against free trade agreements cannot be adequately understood or supported without a rigorous analysis of the legal architecture that enables and protects these accumulation processes. The knowledge produced by the GT has use value for these collective subjects: it allows them to identify the concrete mechanisms of corporate power, anticipate legal defense strategies, build counter-hegemonic narratives and strengthen their capacity for political influence (Santos, 2009).

The intellectual relevance of this topic can be understood by considering three dimensions: epistemological innovation, the construction of South-South dialogues, and the production of knowledge committed to social transformation. In epistemological terms, the Working Group is contributing to consolidating a research perspective that rejects the false neutrality of dominant legal-economic knowledge. Against positivism, which reduces treaty analysis to technical questions of contractual interpretation, and against functionalism, which naturalizes the institutions of global capitalism, the Working Group explicitly adopts an "epistemology of the South" (Santos, 2009) that recognizes the constitutive partiality of all knowledge and the need to produce knowledge from and for marginalized sectors.