Erick Brimen is the founder and CEO of Próspera, the privately governed special economic zone (ZEDE) on the island of Roatán, Honduras, run through Próspera International. He founded NeWay Capital in 2013, and it is the firm the project grew out of. A Venezuelan-born former investment banker, he has led Próspera’s development as a charter-city project with its own legal, regulatory and tax framework.
He grew up in Venezuela and left at fourteen for school in the United States, and traces the project to what he watched happen at home: not a shortage of resources or talent, but the steady destruction of the rules that let people build anything. He studied at Babson College, then worked in private banking at Brown Brothers Harriman, in mergers and acquisitions at AG Edwards and in the London practice of Ernst and Young, developed real estate across Latin America, and co-founded ComparaMejor.com, an online insurance brokerage in Colombia, before founding NeWay Capital. He is a member of the Society for International Development in Washington.
He has led Próspera’s development since 2017, and the zone began operating in 2020 under the Honduran ZEDE framework with its own regulatory system, courts and taxes, and the claim that a business can be established there faster and more cheaply than anywhere else in the hemisphere. Brimen has spent as much time defending it as building it, first against opposition on Roatán and later against the Honduran government. Congress repealed the organic law in 2022 and the Supreme Court declared the ZEDEs unconstitutional in 2024, with retroactive effect; the zones have gone on operating. The dispute went to arbitration at ICSID and reached the merits stage in late 2025, and in July 2026 he testified about it before a subcommittee of the United States House Foreign Affairs Committee.