The Beehive collective is currently undertaking a new poster project: Mesoamérica Resiste. This graphic will complete a series of three illustrations about corporate globalization in the Western Hemisphere: the first, the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas), and the second, Plan Colombia. The following is a basic description of the development plan focused on in the next graphic, Plan Puebla Panamá, and why it is an important story for us to illuminate. The poster design will be a participatory process based on conversations with those most affected by the PPP, beginning in February, 2004, with plans for its completion by mid-year 2005. The following explanation is based on our knowledge of the Plan Puebla Panamá prior to starting the first-hand investigation essential to informing the Beehive´s graphic education materials. Click on highlighted words for links to on-line articles, or check out the list of websites at the bottom of the page.

The Plan Puebla Panamá encompasses a wide range of projects designed to facilitate the exploitation of resources of Mesoamerica, and to transform areas of its land to create more ¨efficient¨ trade routes for global markets. Mesoamerica (Southern Mexico and Central America), is an isthmus linking North and South America, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, that is rich in resources, especially farmland, forests, fossil fuels, biodiversity, and human labor. Disguised as a ¨development¨ project by its funding institutions, such as the World Bank (WB) and the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB), the PPP offers these resources up to transnational corporations and builds the infrastructure needed to conduct business and export goods, including transportation infrastructure (e.g. roads, railroads and ports), energy infrastructure (e.g. hydro-electric dams, mines, oil and gas pipelines), maquiladoras (sweatshop factories), and the biotech-friendly Mesoamerican Biological Corridor.

But, this ¨development¨ project offers little to the people of the region. Throughout Mesoamerica, many communities face losing their land to private companies or governments as a result of projects included in the PPP. They will be forcibly removed from areas designated for super-highways, forestry plantations, and ecological ¨reserves.¨ Flooding from dams alone will destroy many peoples´ homes as well as fragile ecosystems. In addition, the transformation of the economy, from one based on subsistence agriculture into one based on resource exploitation, manufacturing, and exportation, will destroy the way of life of campesinos and indigenous people, who make up a majority of the population in many areas.

When faced with losing their land and culture, in exchange for low-paying jobs and unsustainable futures, many communities have begun to organize resistance and alternatives to the PPP. This resistance may threaten big potential profits for transnational companies, many of whom are based in the United States. Because of this, the U. S. government is steadily increasing its military presence in Mesoamerica so that it may better control popular opposition to its policies.

This model of economic and military dominance under the guise of ¨development¨ is nothing new. Militarily, the U.S. government has installed and supported brutal regimes throughout Latin America and across the globe, ignoring human rights abuses as long as these regimes have been friendly to U.S. business interests. Of course, for decades there has been widespread resistance to these policies throughout Central America, ranging from protests to civil wars. But the U.S. government has helped squash opposition by maintaining military bases in the area, supplying weapons and billions of dollars of military aid, and by training soldiers in counter-insurgency at the infamous School of the Americas in Georgia. This long history of brutal policies has lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives throughout the Americas.

Economically, the U.S. has controlled the region through the World Bank and its partner the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Today, every country in Latin America is struggling to pay off billions of dollars in debt to these institutions, as a result of loans made to U.S. friendly regimes. To ensure that their debts are repaid, and to allow more access for corporate profits, these international institutions often implement economic and social restructuring through structural adjustment programs (SAPs). This history of military and economic intervention has been justified throughout the years as fighting the ¨communist threat,¨ the war on drugs, or as ¨developing¨ the third world.

The people of Rio Negro, Guatemala, remember how their region was chosen for ¨development¨ in the 1970´s and 80´s when The WB and IDB loaned the Guatemalan military regime hundreds of millions of dollars to build the Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam. When villagers refused to comply with the forced displacement that resulted from the dam project, the military murdered over 400 people in a series of massacres. Today people in Rio Negro are seeking retributions from WB and the IDB. We can expect more tragedies like this one if similar projects are implemented under the PPP.

Plan Puebla Panamá is a new name in a long history of aggressive policies that favor short-term profits over people, the environment, and sustainable futures. To understand why it is being promoted, one must look at it in the context of corporate globalization and the current neo-liberal model. Neo-liberalism describes the trend over the last few decades of opening political and economic systems to the free market. Neo-liberal policies are promoted by ¨free¨ trade agreements that include increased deregulation of the market and privatization of many social programs and resources including water, electricity, and fuel. These agreements are negotiated and enforced on a global scale by The World Trade Organization (WTO), and regionally in the Western Hemisphere by agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreements (NAFTA), The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and the FTAA.

In this system, transnational companies search the globe for the fastest and easiest way to make the most profit. Corporations prefer to invest in countries that have the resources, infrastructure, and laws that facilitate profits. Because many of these companies exert a powerful economic influence at a global level, they are often able to convince governments to provide the desired conditions for investment. Thus, essential resources are privatized, infrastructure is built, and laws are changed to pave the way for corporate profits.

In Mesoamerica, some of these business needs are already met or are now being negotiated. In preparation for NAFTA, the Mexican constitution was actually changed to allow indigenous land to be sold to foreign interests. Since its implementation in 1994, NAFTA´s Chapter 11 (designed to protect investors), has been used to override labor and environmental regulations in favor of corporate profit. For example, when residents of Mexico´s San Luis Potosí tried to protest the installation of a toxic waste dump in their community, Metalclad corporation sued under Chapter 11 for loss of potential profits. The community was forced to pay up, and allow Metalclad to go ahead with the project. Similar investor state provisions will be included in CAFTA and the FTAA.

Plan Puebla Panamá is designed to compliment the liberalization of trade policies by building infrastructure. But, the investors that will benefit from these plans are not going to pay for them. Instead, funding for the PPP will come from taxpayers in Mexico and Central America as well as from loans from the IDB and the WB. These loans, of course, are to be paid back later, with interest, by taxpayers, and can be used as leverage for international financial business to further control debtor countries´ economies. In addition, IDB and WB funds come in part from taxpayers in the United States and Europe, as these governments put money into the institutions with the understanding that their corporate interests will be given highest priority in making use of newly opened resources and infrastructure.

Much of the taxpayer-funded budget for the PPP will be for electricity, gas and oil pipelines, and transportation infrastructure. At least twenty-five hydro-electric dams are already planned for the area, eighteen in the Mexican state of Chiapas alone. In addition, gas and oil companies envision having pipelines run from Panamá to Texas. Harken Energy, of which U.S. President Bush formerly was a CEO, looks to profit from new energy producing infrastructure, while companies like Exxon-Mobil and Dow Chemical seek major roles in oil and gas exporting.

The isthmus of Central America is strategic commercially, both for North-South and East-West trade. The transportation infrastructure planned for the region serves to better connect North and South America, as well as open up trade routes to blossoming new markets in Asia, especially China. East-west transport across Central America will allow cheap goods to move more easily from sweatshops in Asia to the Eastern U.S. and Europe through ¨dry canals.¨ These dry canals, consisting of a deep-water ports connected by superhighways and railroads, are designed to provide an easier option than the Panamá Canal, now saturated by traffic, too small to handle large oil tankers, and since the year 2000, is no longer under the exclusive control of the U.S.

This new infrastructure is what PPP director, Florencio Salazar, claims will develop Southern Mexico, turning ¨a backward South, with a majority indigenous population¨ into a region more like the ¨North that looks towards the United States and Canada.¨ But little of what is being built is intended for the majority of the population. The principal demand for electricity comes from large factories and mines, not household use, and the new super-highways, whose tolls will cost as much as two days salary for some Mexicans, will only act as barriers for most people and wildlife in the area.

Hundreds of thousands of acres of genetically modified (GMO) agriculture, paper, and fruit tree plantations are also planned. Replacing subsistence farming on indigenous land will be large corporate agro-businesses, and mono-culture plantations, such as coconut palm, whose owners will exploit cheap labor from these newly displaced peasants, to produce cash-crops for the global market. Eucalyptus trees from Asia, that are genetically modified for faster growth and easier pulping, will replace farmland and natural forest while seriously depleting rivers and aquifers. Profits from this industry go to companies like International Paper and Mexico´s Grupo Pulsar, whose CEO and PPP advisor, Alfonso Romo, claims the land is, ¨above all for forestry and not agriculture or ranching.¨

Under the PPP, some of the most bio-diverse regions in the world will be used as germplasm banks for pharmaceutical companies looking to patent genes from rare species and indigenous medicines for their exclusive profits. The World Bank funded, Meosamerican Biological Corridor will enclose areas such as The Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas, the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, in Guatemala, and the largest rainforest north of the Amazon in Nicaragua. Under the guise of conservation, business fronts such as Conservation International, with an advisory board full of corporate CEO´s, encourage the forced removal of indigenous peoples from these areas to ensure that multi-nationals have exclusive access to "bio-reserves" for their biopiracy projects.

One of the greatest threats posed by the implementation of dam projects, conservation areas, and superhighway developments is the displacement of indigenous communities that have occupied these territories for centuries, continuing their traditional ways of life. The systematic displacement and destruction of these communities would result in a tragic loss of cultural diversity. In effect, the imposition of the PPP means the cultural domination and the annihilation of diverse cultural traditions.

Perhaps the most abundant resource to be exploited by projects is cheap labor. Advocates for the PPP claim that international investment in the region will provide jobs for the impoverished people of the area. ¨Developing¨ the area means displacing millions of and forcing them into maquiladora cities. To make it clear, the area now has a population of about 65 million people, most of whom are farmers. But, in 25 years, PPP projections estimate a population of 95 million with only 2 million still farming. Maquiladoras offer little hope for the future of people living in poverty. With help from new ¨free¨ trade laws, bosses can impose harsh working conditions, offer dismal pay, and avoid labor and environmental regulations. If workers try to organize unions to secure their jobs and better working conditions, they will be fired. And since the PPP also includes a network of new toxic waste dumps, we can expect that these companies will expose workers and the surrounding environment to harmful chemicals without having to pay for any damages. And perhaps scariest of all, is that in this system of corporate-led-globalization, transnational companies are engaged in a race to the bottom, looking for countries where exploitation is the cheapest. In the last few years, many maquiladoras have been closed down in Mexico, some of which were just recently opened after the passage of NAFTA. If workers demand livable wages, or if companies find more profitable areas of the world to exploit, they will move their businesses, leaving Mesoamerica and the PPP a merely a strategic transportation corridor.

With all of these projects displacing local inhabitants, stealing land and resources, and looking to change communities and lifestyles that have been around for thousands of years, the PPP has already attracted immense opposition. In 2001, the communities near the city of Atenco, just northeast of Mexico City, won a big victory in their struggle to oppose the expropriation of their farmlands for the capital's new airport (not officially listed as a PPP project). After nine months of this machete-wielding uprising, the expropriation was cancelled. In February of the same year, members of the mostly indigenous Zapatistas, who, beginning in 1994 took up arms and declared themselves autonomous in the southern state of Chiapas, travelled to meet other indigenous groups at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in Oaxaca. At this rally, to oppose a major super-highway being build right through indigenous land, the crowd of two thousand cheered EZLN leader Subcommandante Marcos, as he ecoed their sentiments with the words, ¨…the isthmus is not for sale!¨ These struggles are emblematic of what is at stake with the PPP: indigenous and campesinos fighting to maintain control of land, resources, their sovereignty and their traditional way of life.

Local struggles have already expanded to form national and international coalitions. Over the last few years, grassroots activists have organized dozens of meetings, including the annual Mesoamerican Forum. The message of these groups is clear—the forum in Managua, Nicaragua in 2002, drafted this declaration:

We have agreed to a total rejection of the Plan Puebla Panamá, the FTAA and the free trade agreements, because we are convinced that they are contrary to the sustainable development of our people, ruin biodiversity, deepen poverty and increase the debt. Likewise [these plans and agreements] are an expression of the interests of the US government, which is intent on building a free trade zone at its service and that of the multinational corporations, to the detriment of our most fundamental rights.

Due to this strong resistance, Mexican President Vincente Fox has already begun to remove his advocacy of PPP from the spotlight, and in fact the name is hardly used in Mexico to describe the projects that were once listed under the PPP. However, the IDB still has billions of dollars designated for the PPP, and transnational companies have no intention of giving up on the exploitation of Mesoamerica.

Whether it is called PPP or not, the development of profit-driven infrastructure and policies in Mesoamerica is of utmost importance to transnational corporations and elites at a time when the neo-liberal agenda of ¨free¨ trade and corporate ¨development¨ is at a crossroads. Following recent failures to pass its agenda at WTO and FTAA meetings in Cancun and Miami, The Bush Administration plans to push even more forcefully for smaller projects such as CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) and the PPP, in
hopes of securing their agenda one region at a time. With strong opposition already in South America from people in countries like Brasil, Argentina, and Venezuela, if the people in Mexico, Central America, and the United States are able to defeat projects like the PPP, the entire corporate exploitation model in Latin America will be on the run.

While Colombians battle fumigations of their farmland and deadly attacks by paramilitaries, Bolivians fight privatization of their water and natural gas resources, and indigenous people in Southern Mexico struggle to keep their land and autonomy in spite of government and paramilitary brutality. As people of different areas fight their own regional battles, as well as looming hemisphere-wide threats like the FTAA, there is a growing understanding that all are fighting the same struggle for land, dignity, and a sustainable future.

Us Bees are getting ready to tackle the tremendous project of illstrating these complicated and deep-rooted issues, transforming the stories we collect in Mesoamerica into a visual tool for education. We hope to return from our trip with a more complete understanding of how these economic and political pressures are unfolding. It's an overwhelming, ongoing project of learning and unlearning... wish us luck !!!

Online PPP Resources