Imagine this: Congressional representatives scramble out of their seats, ignoring their leader’s exhortations to remain calm. They sprint out the back door of the building, trying to jump the fence that surrounds their meeting place. Out front, protesting farmers putter around on tractors, smear manure on the sidewalk, pelt the walls with rotting vegetables. A few pigs trot by, wearing tags with the names of the president and three cabinet members. Cowboys on horses shatter the building’s glass façade. One of the farmers tells the media: “This is just a little taste.”[1]
This all happened in Mexico City on December 10, 2002, Human Rights Day. It was one of the first demonstrations by a newly united movement of rural Mexican producers who are increasingly dissatisfied with Mexico’s insertion into the global economy. The scene offers a small window onto the growing desperation in the Mexican countryside, and a little taste of the gathering storm that is Mexico’s farmers’ movement. On January 1, 2003, a number of key protections for Mexican farmers were phased out under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In response, hundreds of thousands of farmers have united under the banner El Campo No Aguanta Mas—“The countryside can’t take any more!” The situation is dire: Already in 2001, Mexico had a two-billion-dollar agricultural trade deficit with the United States.[2]
Two years ago, newly elected Mexican President Vicente Fox announced his backing for a regional development plan, known as Plan Puebla-Panama (PPP), as the solution to underdevelopment in rural southern Mexico and Central America. The plan, it was argued, would provide farmers, campesinos, and other rural Mexicans with new economic possibilities. Now, however, it seems that promise has gone the way of his campaign pledge to end the conflict in Chiapas “in fifteen minutes.”
Fox emerged quickly after his election as the lead promoter of the PPP, an ambitious Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) proposal intended to build the physical infrastructure needed to plug southern Mexico and Central America into the NAFTA zone. However, when Fox and the IDB speak of PPP-built highways, a regional electrical grid and new industrial zones for maquiladora manufacturing, many of the region’s residents fear that the developed strategy that guides the PPP will mean the loss of their land and traditional livelihoods.
In Mexico, rural issues have risen to the top of the public agenda as NAFTA is fully implemented. Each year there are fewer protections for Mexican farmers. As a result, life grows more precarious for millions of campesinos in the countryside. As negotiations for the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the United States (CAFTA) proceed, Central American farmers anticipate similar problems. Because of this, many nongovernmental organizations concerned about the PPP have urged that rural issues be addressed by the Plan Puebla-Panama. This is unlikely to happen, however, as IDB officials have said that PPP planners can’t be concerned with agricultural issues or land tenure for peasants.
In 2000, the PPP was presented as a fait accompli. Today, however, largely as a result of citizen groups questioning the plan, the future of the PPP—or, at least, Mexico’s leadership in the project—is less certain.
The movement against the PPP surged to life more quickly than the program itself. By the end of 2002, just two years after Fox publicly announced the program, Mexicans and Central Americans had already held three international gatherings and dozens of regional meetings to discuss the PPP and plan their response. Thousands learned about the PPP and developed strategies for opposing it. On October 12, 2002, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, more than 60,000 people blocked roads, took over airports, rattled the gates at Mexican and U.S. embassies, shut down border crossings and spray-painted “No PPP!” on walls of foreign-owned factories.[3]
Citizen resistance, along with the economic impacts of the U.S. recession, have derailed several PPP initiatives. Melquiades Morales, governor of Puebla, Mexico, canceled the first phase of “Proyecto Milenium,” [sic] a planned highway and assembly-plant corridor designed to draw investment away from Mexico City and the northern border. Morales said publicly that the project was canceled “because of the peasants’ demands.”[4] Similarly, a planned superhighway in the neighboring state of Veracruz was re-routed after widespread public protest because it would have cut through a cloud forest. Farther south, the Salvadoran government cancelled a six-lane beltway planned for the national capital (a complement to the PPP) after communities in the proposed path of the roadway mobilized in opposition.[5]
Mexican leadership for the PPP initiative has also lost momentum. In the past eight months, three different individuals have filled the position of PPP director for Mexico.[6] Responsibility for the PPP program shifted last summer from the Office of the Presidency to the Foreign Affairs Secretary—a move considered by many to signal the plan’s slipping profile.[7] The 2003 Mexican federal budget shows a $37 million cut in that secretariat’s allocation, and a $491 million reduction in the overall PPP budget.[8] Officials at the IDB—a key funder and intellectual author of the PPP—have recently expressed regret over Vicente Fox’s lessened interest in the program, saying they aren’t optimistic about the Mexican government’s commitment to the PPP.
As the Mexican government increasingly refuses to discuss the PPP, Mexican communities who will be affected by PPP projects are left with only the IDB as a sounding board. The IDB long maintained it could not organize public consultations on the PPP, as that would infringe on national sovereignty. However, perhaps as a result of government inaction and growing public unrest, the IDB finally stepped in and organized a series of consultation meetings in Central America, which many NGO observers characterized as merely perfunctory. As an example of the meetings’ shortcomings, they point to the session held in Belize. It was conducted in Spanish—a language spoken by few in that country.
Despite setbacks, however, several PPP programs are moving forward. Construction crews are pouring asphalt across Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec to connect the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. The plan for this highway predates the PPP by five years, but was delayed until late 2002 by community opposition. Today, this inter-oceanic link is part of the PPP’s proposed highway network, which covers more than 5,500 miles. By 2008, PPP-built highways are planned to tie central Mexico to the Panama Canal, traversing eight nations and accounting for 85 percent of the $4.5 billion PPP budget.[9] These new highways will be large-scale, multi-lane constructions designed for international commerce, often coming with high tolls that will make them inaccessible to local users.
At the same time, a team of engineers coordinating construction on the Electrical Integration System for Central America (SIEPAC) have established their headquarters in San Salvador. A grid of power lines that will soon carry electricity from Panama to Mexico, SIEPAC was a narrow victory for PPP planners.[10] The Salvadoran national assembly nearly rejected the $40 million IDB loan for the Salvadoran portion of SIEPAC, because of public opposition spearheaded by Salvadoran unions and consumer organizations. Engineers planning the project nearly cut El Salvador out of the SIEPAC network last fall, after every other country in the region had accepted the plans. The Salvadoran national assembly finally approved the loan after DC-based IDB officials traveled to San Salvador to lobby for it.
While access to electricity is a critical issue in most of Central America, the $320 million SIEPAC project responds to the needs of big corporations, not residential users. SIEPAC adds millions of dollars to the public debt of each Central American nation and increases reliance on destructive hydroelectric dams for power generation, without providing any guarantees that the power it transmits will be affordable.
With Mexico as an early proponent of the PPP, many observers assumed that Central America would be a tougher sell, given the history of difficult internal relations in the isthmus. Today, however, Fox rarely mentions the PPP. The program’s headquarters have moved from Mexico City to Panama City, and will rotate twice a year. Several Mexican PPP projects have been cancelled while SIEPAC moves ahead.
Mexican politics and economic troubles are only part of the story. Even as the United States-Mexico agenda has stalled, Central America is attracting increased attention in Washington, as the Bush administration negotiates a free trade deal with the nations of Central America—a move widely regarded as an effort to advance FTAA talks.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wendy Call is a freelance writer who divides her time between Massachusetts and Oaxaca, Mexico. She is working on a book entitled No Word for Welcome: Mexican Villages Face the Future, about indigenous communities in Oaxaca and globalization. She can be reached at wendycall@world.oberlin.edu. This article was first published in Interhemispheric Resource Center’s Americas Policy.
http://www.americaspolicy.org
NOTES
Mexicans and Central Americans ‘Can’t Take Anymore’
1. “Irrumpen campesinos en San Lázaro,” La Jornada, December 11, 2002, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2002/dic02/021211/ 005n3pol.php?origen=index.html and “Campesinos Attack the Mexican Congress,” Héctor Carreón, La Voz de Aztlán, December 12, 2002.
2. “Mexico’s farmers: Floundering in a tariff-free landscape,” The Economist, November 28, 2002.
3. See, for example, the website of Action for Social and Ecological Justice: http://www.asej.org/ACERCA/ppp/ppp.html#oct
4. “Puebla-Tecamachalco highway put on hold,” Business News Americas, September 10, 2002 and “El PPP no se quebró: Melquiades Morales a ‘Marcos’,” Proceso, February 3, 2003.
5. Available in English at: http://www.ciepac.org/bulletins/ingles/ing329.htm
6. “En seis años esperan concluir conexión vial de México a Panamá,” EFE News, February 4, 2003.
7. “Desaparecen ‘superoficinas’,” El Universal, June 28, 2002, p. 1
8. For a review of PPP setbacks in the last year,“El gobierno mexicano frente al PPP: Se busca una nueva estrategia ante al rechazo popular,” Miguel Pickard, Boletín Chiapas al Dia #329, January 22, 2003, “La SRE, sin presupuesto para encargarse del Plan Puebla Panamá,” Proceso, December 19, 2002, and Summary of “Proposal and Decree of the Expense Budget of the Federation for the Fiscal Year 2002,” Prepared by José Alberto García Ponce, Social Policy Advisor PRD Parliamentary Group, House of Deputies, January 16, 2002.
9. “En seis años esperan concluir conexión vial de México a Panamá,” EFE News, February 4, 2003.
10. “En evento conjunto con Presidente de Honduras, Flores pide a la Asamblea avale crédito para energía,” El Salvador de Hoy, August 22, 2002, http://www.elsalvador.com/noticias/2002/8/22/nacional/nacio10.html
