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The Rocky Road from Puebla to Panama |
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By Diego Cevallos*
Civil society organizations and guerrilla groups threaten to boycott the road construction uniting Meso-America, roads which are to lead to U.S. highways.
MEXICO CITY - The governments of Central American and of Mexico are resolved to establish a 9,000-km road network within three or four years that will link up to highways in the United States. However, civil society groups and two guerrilla organizations have pledged to stop it.
The network is to comprise two transport corridors following the coasts of the Pacific and Atlantic/Caribbean coasts to unite the seven countries of Central America and nine southern and southeastern Mexican states. All told, the region is home to 64 million people, nearly 10 percent of the Earth's biodiversity and Latin America's highest poverty levels.
In addition to the region's electrical integration process -- which is in full swing -- the road network is one of the few projects of the Puebla-Panama Plan (PPP) with clear timeframes and financing. Meanwhile, the initiative's social side has made only marginal progress.
"There is consensus within the social movement to halt the PPP and all its projects because it was imposed by the governments and made to fit the demands of transnational corporations, which was evident since the beginning," said Martín Velásquez, spokesman for the non-governmental Mexican Alliance for the People's Self-Determination, consisting of at least 30 groups.
"The construction of the highways will be stopped because they will hurt the communities," he said in an interview with Tierramérica.
Most of the 8,977 km of roadways are already in place that will formally unite Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama, though 70 percent are in poor shape and need to be re-paved.
But to complete the network, all that is needed is to build the interconnecting roads and, according to official data, almost none is slated to pass through socially conflictive or environmentally fragile areas.
The cost of the roadwork rehabilitation reaches 3.55 billion dollars, of which 1.88 billion is to be obtained through loans. The region's governments and the private sector will finance the rest.
The purpose of the highway network is to facilitate internal trade throughout the region, attract investment, and to improve competition and access to markets. And connecting the road network to that of the United States -- through Mexico -- would encourage trade between the PPP region and the northern giant, say the government officials promoting the project.
The PPP road network also entails modernizing border crossings and customs, and standardizing the technical transport rules among the nations involved.
The network's advocates assure that there is no hidden agenda, that the political will exists to listen to and work with the local population, as PPP overall seeks to pull millions of people in Meso-America out of poverty.
Central America and southern Mexico suffer enormous social problems. Of every 1,000 live births, 20 to 40 children die before reaching age five, and 25 percent of the child population is malnourished.
According to José Antonio Ocampo, executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC, a United Nations regional agency), the criticisms lack foundations. The PPP is a long-term initiative that will take into account all angles and will become the basis for the development of Meso-America, he has said.
But as the PPP advances, however slowly, opposition grows.
Many groups of indigenous peoples, peasant farmers, labor unionists, academics and politicians in the region are holding periodic meetings under the slogan "No to the PPP". And they are preparing their arsenal, which includes mobilizations in several countries and filing complaints with the International Labor Organization (ILO) against the governments, with the argument that the PPP was drawn up without conducting a prior consultation process with the communities involved.
Indigenous leaders say that for the 14 million Indians living in Meso-America, the PPP recipe, which includes setting up maquiladoras (tax-free, for export manufacturing zones) and building hydroelectric dams, will lead to an abandonment of their culture, integration into the dynamic of transnational business, with miserable wages and labor exploitation.
Adding more fuel to the fire, two Mexican guerrilla groups also criticize the endeavor: the largely Indian Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), based in the southern state of Chiapas, and the leftist People's Revolutionary Army (EPR), with marginal presence in several states.
"No to the Puebla-Panama Plan, no to the trans-isthmus mega-project, no to anything that means the sale or destruction of the house of the Indians," wrote 'subcomandante' Marcos, the EZLN leader, from his base in Chiapas, where in July thousands of indigenous peoples blocked the main roads in protest against PPP, among other things.
Meanwhile, Alvaro Trejos, PPP delegate for Costa Rica and secretary pro tem of the plan, as well as head of coordinating the road network, told Tierramérica, "The highways won't hurt anyone and there is no reason they should cause conflict, because the only thing they are doing is providing greater opportunities to the small farmers and ensuring trade integration."
Presented in 2000 by Mexico's President Vicente Fox just before he took office, the PPP includes projects bearing labels such as human and productive development, sustainable tourism, education and health, among others.
The road network has the backing of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), World Bank, Andean Development Corporation and other credit organizations and of United Nations agencies.
Due to the "broad discontent with the PPP," the IDB is organizing forums with civil society representatives. However, "there are groups that do not want dialogue," Diego Belmonte, an IDB expert in infrastructure and environment, told Tierramérica.
The IDB will only grant loans under strict environmental and social parameters. "Some even complain that we are too demanding, said Belmonte.
In the dialogues held at mid-year, organized by the IDB to promote the Puebla-Panama Plan throughout the region's civil society movements, the bank's officials heard harsh criticisms of the plan.
"The IDB does not have the moral authority to speak, because it is married to the Puebla-Panama Plan, it is the project's promoter, which is why we won't speak with them," said the Mexican Alliance's spokesman Velásquez.
The region's governments insist that the PPP is steadfastly moving forward. Some observers, however, are not so sure, and wonder if the burgeoning dispute might erupt in violence.
There is a latent conflict because the proposal to establish a "corridor of maquiladoras" prompted some organizations of the anti-PPP movement to launch a counter-proposal of a "corridor of resistance," said Gerco Castro, an anthropologist with Mexico's National Indigenist Institute.
* Diego Cevallos is an IPS correspondent.
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