MESOAMERICA: Puebla-Panama Plan Resurfaces

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Mar 26 2004 (IPS) - Impoverished Mesoamerica will be recognised as competitive, integrated and with a healthy, educated and diversity-respecting population by 2015, promise the governments behind the Puebla-Panama Plan (PPP).

But civil society groups consider the initiative a serious threat, saying it will deepen poverty and destroy the environment and indigenous cultures.

What its critics describe as the “neocolonialist” PPP returned to the arena with a meeting this week in Nicaragua of the Central American and Mexican presidents after a long period of silence that led many to believe the integration initiative was dead.

“The plan is a reality and no one can deny its important advances,” said Mexican President Vicente Fox, who first proposed the Mesoamerican initiative to his Central American counterparts in late 2000.

According to Fox, there is a five-billion-dollar credit line in place to promote it, authorised by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) and the Central American Development Bank. Of that sum, two billion dollars are already earmarked for highway, seaport and electrical interconnection projects.

PPP proposes coordinated management of natural resources, productive supports and electrical systems, and the construction of highways between the eight Mesoamerican countries: the seven Central American nations and Mexico.

“Although PPP is a project advanced by transnationals and major economic interests, it will not come to pass, because organised civil society is fighting it,” Héctor de la Cueva, spokesman for the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade, told IPS.

The governments involved argue that the initiative will benefit the 64 million people living in Mesoamerica, one million square kilometres that cover nine states of southeast Mexico and Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama.

The region is marked by poverty. Of every 1,000 live births, between 20 and 40 die before reaching age five, and 25 percent of the child population is undernourished.

Twenty percent of the Mesoamerican people are illiterate, and around 14 percent of children five and younger are below the average for weight and height due to the lack of adequate nutrition.

“The promises of the PPP are the same as all of the free trade projects being negotiated in the Americas. The only thing it seeks, like the others, is to facilitate cheap and reliable labour to the detriment of culture, the environment, and people’s liberties,” said De la Cueva.

In the Managua Declaration, signed this week, the Mesoamerican presidents pledged to “continue promoting the region’s integrated development through the PPP, with a view towards long-term sustainability.”

During an earlier stop in Guatemala, the Mexican president was received by protesting peasant farmers and other groups demanding that the PPP be abandoned, and replaced by an “autochthonous” project that is defined by citizens in a transparent and democratic process.

Civil society groups in the Mesoamerican countries plan to keep up their protests, stressing that the PPP – which also has the backing of the World Bank and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) – was designed without consulting the populations involved.

Indigenous leaders say that for the 14 million Mesoamerican Indians, the PPP recipe means harm to their cultures, misery wages and exploitation.

Adding their voices to the anti-PPP movement are the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), in the largely indigenous Mexican state of Chiapas, and the leftist People’s Revolutionary Army, which has a marginal presence in several Mexican states.

“The critics should listen before they condemn, and should participate before marginalizing themselves, because the PPP will benefit everyone,” a PPP spokesman told IPS in Mexico, where otherwise very little has been said about the initiative in the past two years.

Rodrigo Fierro, a Mexican expert on trade integration, told IPS that in 2002 and 2003, public activity related to the PPP was practically nonexistent, to the point that many believed it had been cancelled.

“It won’t be easy to achieve the PPP goals, because even if (the governments) try to maintain a low profile, the civil society groups have proven very disposed to exposing them and putting on the brakes,” he said.

IPS learned that resources obtained for PPP are being used to improve roads, modernise border and customs infrastructure and expand electrical service, but the social development plans have been delayed.

According to PPP documents, by 2015 this sub-region will have increased its productive and competitive capacities, will be interconnected and will have established agility and security for its land, sea and air communication channels.

It will also have standardised its trade rules, will be represented on the global market with a series of specific products and services, and most of its population will have access to basic health services.

The region will have reduced the number of people suffering hunger by half, will respect the cultural diversity of its indigenous communities and will set a global example for sustainable management of natural resources, say the texts.

“All that is a fallacy. Given the way that the PPP is designed, the only things it will cause are poverty, loss of cultural identity, destruction of the environment and abandonment of communities,” said activist De la Cueva.