From July 18th to the 24th, 2003, the confluence of social processes of great importance to Mesoamerica took place.  The Third Week for Biological and Cultural Diversity and the Second Mesoamerican Forum against Repression took place in La Esperanza, Intibucá, Honduras, with the participation of more than 800 people from all countries in the region, representing more than 150 organizations of civil society, peasants, indigenous people, urban people, people descended from Africa, etc.  With the coordinating participation of many of the Mesoamerican organizations, workshops took place where participants shared experiences, analysis, diagnostics, and plans of action.  Among some of the topics covered were: repression, transgenics, food security, communications, legal aspects, marine ecosystems, youth, women, forests, water, biodiversity, traditional medicines, bio-piratry, land, rights of indigenous communities, the Puebla-Panama Plan, and free trade agreements.

Alter the multitudinous marches in Tegucigalpa, the Fourth Mesoamerican Forum “For the Self-Determination and Community Resistance” took place with the participation of more than 1,600 representatives of social organizations of 15 countries of Mesoamerica, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe.  This meeting concluded with another march to the Government House and then to the World Bank headquarters.  Debates, discussions and diagnostics took place for the first time in the history of Honduras and the Mesoamerican region.  At the same time, action plans were developed. 

This Meeting of the Mesoamerican Struggle has created a wave of movements, actions, raised consciousness, new relationships and alliances between organizations from the South-Southeast of Mexico to Panama.  Its results left a profound imprint on the consciousness of the Mesoamerican community.  The next meeting will be in 2004 in El Salvador.  Due to its importance, we reproduce here the final Declarations of these three encounters.

DECLARATION OF THE SECOND MESOAMERICAN FORUM AGAINST REPRESSION: “FOR THE WATER AND LIFE OF OUR COMMUNITIES”

Preoccupied by the rising invasion of repressive construction projects that huge transnational corporations and multilateral organisms in alliance with the corrupt governments of the Mesoamerican region impose, approximately 150 of us come together: displaced, widowed, orphaned, we are survivors of the repression.

We meet with the objective of sharing and analyzing our experiences to strengthen the fight in defense of our natural resources, our culture, our lands, and our own lives, which are being threatened by the imposition of economic and military plans against the self-determination of our communities.

To continue with the agreements made during the First Mesoamerican Forum Against Repression in Petén, Guatemala, in March 2001, following up with the accords made during the First Mesoamerican Forum Against Repression in Petén, Guatemala, in March of 2001, We Consider:

1. That the proliferation of hydroelectric projects in our countries are not for the energy needs of our communities, but rather respond to the requirement to create the necessary infrastructure to develop the neoliberal economic model through the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the different free trade agreements at the continental level, the Puebla-Panama Plan, and the Plan Colombia, among others.

2. That repressive construction projects exist in all Mesoamerican territory, and that they are located in indigenous and peasant communities characterized by their great natural and cultural richness.  These projects work against the survival of our communities and for the disappearance of our territories.

3. That the economic, social, environmental, and cultural impacts of the hydroelectric projects have caused irreparable losses in all the Mesoamerican territory.  This is evidence of the enormous contradiction of the supposed development promoted by the government and the disastrous consequences that we are living in the flesh.

Therefore, in exercising the right of free determination of our communities, WE AGREE:

1. We energetically condemn and repudiate the cowardly and brutal assassination of our partner Carlos Arturo Reyes, member of the Environmental Movement of Olancho, Honduras, who was riddled with bullets on Friday, July 18th of this year.  Reyes was prominent for his constant fighting spirit in defense of the forests and against the Hydroelectric Project Babylon, which is being constructed in Olancho, for which he received numerous death threats.

2. We demand the cease of the persecution, taking of hostages, repression, jailing and assassinations against the leaders who fight in defense of the dignity of the communities affected by these kinds of projects as well as repression.

3. We demand that the governments respect the sovereignty and self-determination of our communities and that they comply with international agreements on human rights, economics, and social and cultural policies.

4. We demand political plans from our governments that respond to the needs of our communities and not to the policies of transnational corporations and international financial organisms.

5. We demand that the governments of our countries immediately cease the construction of all hydroelectric projects that are in the process of construction and that they do not grant more concessions of any body of water to private entities.  At the same time, we demand that they guarantee and respect the use of water as a collective community benefit.

THIRD WEEK FOR CULTURAL AND BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY: FINAL DECLARATION

In the presence of the capitalist forms against our Mesoamerican communities, the participating organizations in the Third Week of the Biological and Cultural Diversity in Intibucá, Honduras, we declare that we will resist to the end to defend our mother earth as the part of us she is.

WE DECLARE:

The communal forms of our indigenous communities are the only possibility for the management and conservation of the resources on our lands.

That our forests are a source of life and cultural, ecological and economic richness.  Our forests produce oxygen, water, nourishment; they protect river basins and form part of ecosystems of great importance for the sustenance of our communities.

Fresh water, oceans, minerals, and the diverse ecosystems are the heritage of our communities, the only and the last that remain; for this, we urge their defense.

That our work as doctors, midwives, and with herbs, bones and prayers is that which has cared for and conserved our traditional medicine.

That the seeds, plants and animals are the heritage of our communities; no person nor corporation has the right to appropriate them or use them to make a profit.

That transgenics are an affront to our cultures, our forms of nourishment, and our farming models because they cause dependence and irreparable damage to our health and our environment.

That the forms of exclusion and social, political and economic exploitation against our communities negate our collective rights, our diversity and, specifically, the rights of women who historically have been vulnerable.

That the transculturation promoted by transnational corporations affects and undermines our culture and the way of life directed by our ancestral wisdom and sacred places.

THEREFORE, WE DENOUNCE AND DEMAND THAT:

The capitalist globalization is an affront to our historical memory, the biological and cultural diversity of our communities by imposing a homogenous, consumerist, and individualistic culture as expressed in the free trade agreements, the FTAA, the Puebla-Panama Plan, the Plan Columbia and its principal institutions such as the World Bank, Interamerican Development Bank, IMF, and the Central American Bank of Economic Integration.

We reject the invasion of the transnationals and other sectors of economic power that are privatizing, destroying and contaminating the water, the oceans, and the unique ecosystems of our region.

We demand that our governments respect the communal methods that our communities apply for the use, management and protection of the forest.

We demand from our governments sufficient and opportune information about every plan, project or program that will affect our lands, such as the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor and other collateral projects.

We demand the recognition and respect for our natural and traditional medicine as our right to health and life.

We will defend the inalienable right of our communities to freely determine our own models of supply and production on the basis of our needs, at the same time guaranteeing that any surplus can be used in an interchange of solidarity, by means of the use of technologies that promote native biodiversity, as well as respect for our cultures.

We reject food aid that contains transgenic products and foments dependence.

We demand that our governments declare a moratorium on the entrance of transgenic products.

We reject agro-toxins and transgenics as the industry that annihilates our communities through the destruction of our food sovereignty.

We demand that our governments ratify and assume as policies of the State the real and integral implementation of Agreement 169 of the ILO together with our communities.

We demand integral agrarian reform that guarantees the use, ownership, and holdings of the land according to the vision of our communities.

The youth demand respect, attention, and solutions to our specific demands, and we energetically condemn the policies that would privatize our education and increase militarization and repression.

We reject the feminization of work, the pinning of poverty on women, and the privatization and control of our bodies.

We demand recognition of the contribution of women in the national economy and their participation in public spaces.

We demand that the State implement just and equitable public policies that guarantee that women have access to land ownership and credit.

We condemn and reject the WTO and its policies of free trade for transnational corporations. This new and perverse form of subjection of local economies of poor countries with commercial laws closes the options for self-determination of communities and violates international agreements of human rights, as well as rights of biological and cultural diversity.

We call for the derailing of the negotiation of the Fifth Ministerial Summit in Cancún this September!

We hold responsible those governments that adopt the measures imposed by the WTO for the consequences of these acts on our communities!

We will not forget that the obligation of the State is to provide services and attention to its citizens.

We oppose labor reforms that annihilate the memory of the struggles of the workers and the rights we have acquired that are recognized by international agreements.

We oppose national and international monopolies of the means of communication that only seek economic and private interest, as well as limiting development, access and participation of our communities by ignoring our rich history, world vision, forms of life, and knowledge.

We also oppose the repression and the use of force to intimidate our leaders, to hide the information and the voices of our people, which threatens our cultural identity, our right to information and our right to free expression.

We are committed to continue looking for encounters that offer respect and dialogue amongst the indigenous, black and mestizo communities, and to continue constructing and strengthening the alternatives that have permitted our existence in this region.

We will work for the recuperation of just commerce for all, an internal commerce that communicates with our communities and revives local economies, to produce and exchange, not for an imperialist market system, but rather for our own necessities.

We will not back down in the creation of independent, communal means of communication and the formation of popular communicators that respond to our interests, problems, needs and perspectives.

We are for a just globalization of communities that values the rights of each community.

To permit free trade and the privatization of our biodiversity is to die.

Mesoamerica is and will always be the collective corridor of Hope.

Finally, we express our special solidarity with the Cuban community against the great threat of the United States and the European Union in clear violation of the self-determination of that community.

FOR THE BIOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY OF OUR COMMUNITIES!

For the water, life and land of our communities!
For a more just and human world!
Another Mesoamerica is Possible!
No to Free Trade, No to Privatization of Life, No to the New Invasion!

FOURTH MESOAMERICAN FORUM “FOR SELF-DETERMINATION AND COMMUNITY RESISTANCE”

FINAL DECLARATION

Delegates from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica Panama and other countries united in the National University Francisco Morazán at the Fourth Mesoamerican Forum under the motto “The Self-Determination and Community Resistance” and with the firm conviction that “Another Mesoamerica is Possible,” we analyzed the current situation in our region with the goal of defining strategies to confront and halt the onslaught of neoliberalism.

We have proven through the reflection of the results of more than 20 years of programs of structural adjustment, deregulation of economies, privatizations and external indebtedness that these things have brought more poverty, concentrated profits, created more unemployment and made labor conditions precarious, increased migration, destroyed our ecosystems and natural resources, created food insecurity, limited access to basic public services, and systematically violated our cultural, social and economic rights, with special emphasis on children, youth, women, indigenous and African-descended communities.

We see how the strategies of imperialist domination have experienced in the 1990’s a qualitative jump with the definition and implementation of the packages of structural adjustment imposed by multilateral banks (World Bank, IMF, Interamerican Development Bank) and imposed through the setting of paralyzing conditions on loans granted to national governments; to the point where a set of defined norms by the WTO that modified State frameworks of justice and converted the privileges of transnational corporations into rights, in a clear force against world Constitutions in favor of “capital rights.”

It is through bilateral trade agreements (NAFTA), regional agreements (FTAA and CAFTA), mega-projects (Puebla-Panama Plan), that they subordinate our legislation to the logic of profit, as well as create conditions of infrastructure—financed by debt and public resources—that guarantee the optimal functioning of transnational capital in the region, which also makes our communities more dependent and vulnerable to these economic policies and transnational corporations.

There is no doubt that the bet of the US government to impose “free trade” agreements constitutes a fundamental piece of the new US strategy of national security, which is based in a unilateral vision that justifies the repression of any dissent that represents opposition to the projects of transnational domination.  Moreover, the US government utilizes the issue of illegal immigrants as a weapon to obtain its military and commercial strategic objectives.

The rules of the WTO go way beyond strictly commercial issues; they include aspects of investment, policies of competition, public services and rights of intellectual property, among others.  These norms are injurious to our communities and affect the existence of those same people, because of which we have posed the necessity of capital regulations and not ceding any more power to transnationals.  We seek to impede the new negotiations that would multilateralize investments in the Meeting of the WTO in Cancun; we propose that the WTO leaves agriculture, investments, aspects of intellectual property, public services and those rules that limit the roles of the State and its responsibilities to its communities out of its negotiations.

The Fourth Mesoamerican Forum “for Self-Determination and Community Resistance” proposes that:

-The privatizations of public services have shown—in general—a clear tendency in rising fees, the consolidation of private monopolies or oligopolies providing public services, greater corruption, and attempts against the sovereignty and culture of Mesoamerican communities.  Considering that public services constitute fundamental human rights, we categorically reject that these services be subject to the laws of the market.

-Free trade agreements, the PPP, and the FTAA promote a direct foreign investment scheme based on factory production, which has as its primary incentive labor flexibility and exploiting its workers, who are principally women.  Against this “maquiladora” model, we pronounce that the source of competition amongst corporations should cease to be the reduction of labor costs based on creating precarious work conditions, and we reassert that labor rights should be fulfilled and national employment policies should be defined to created dignified jobs.

-Mesoamerica is one of the richest regions on the planet in terms of biodiversity, which has created an enormous interest of transnational corporations dedicated to bioprospecting, which is protected under intellectual property rights, and threatens the plunder of plant and animal species in our countries.  This threat ascends to the level of robbing traditional knowledge of indigenous communities; and the deprecating manner of the investments of free trade agreements are allowed to violate our environmental legislation.  Because of this, we reject the profit of Intellectual Property Rights and the investments to legitimize the processes of bio-piratry in this region.

-We reject repression against indigenous and African-descended communities, which is the direct goal of the projects of the PPP and commercial agreements: to dispossess them of their ancestral homes, that today governments promote through privatizations, dam construction, and the layout of highways that generate major impacts on these sectors of the population.

-The neoliberal policies and reforms have provoked the destruction of peasant and indigenous agriculture in Mesoamerican and the extension of rural poverty; it has also permitted the re-concentration of land into few hands, through agrarian counter-reforms.  In regards to this, we reject the warping of agricultural economic policies, the abandonment of farming, the production of genetically modified food (transgenics), and the loss of food sovereignty by the communities in the region, situations that will become more grave with the implementation of CAFTA, in the maintenance of important tariff barriers to the entrance of Central American products, and to keep certain sectors subsidized, so that the economies of the region will convert into importers of US goods, with the loss of productive capacity in those countries.

-The free trade agreements strip the UN of its instruments of public policy that permit it to develop national strategies of development oriented to create competitive capacity, as well as establish regulations for foreign investment with the objective of fomenting of development.  In this sense, we pronounce the potential for a national project founded in democratic principles, of sustainability that would reduce the gaps of inequality (gender, ethnic, social and geographic).

-In the construction of alternatives for Mesoamerica, we recognize the importance of an economic system of solidarity that satisfies human needs, based in networks of production and commercialization of products and services that rest on community organization and the empowerment of the people.  We propose a national development project that generates opportunities for all the population, and that contributes to the containment of national and international migrations.

-We consider that the subscription of free trade agreements and the FTAA is not the only, much less the best route to guarantee adequate external economic investment for our countries.  We energetically reject the subscription of the free trade agreement between Central America and the US and the FTAA, which constitute instruments to benefit the process of capital accumulation of the transnational corporations, and whose logic violates elemental human rights.  We will push for an authentic process of integration of our communities, founded on agreements of energy, technical, cultural, environmental, social and economic cooperation.

-We protest for the de-militarization in our countries and for the immediate withdrawal of US military bases.  We demand no more installation of military training complexes in our region, the immediate elimination of military budgets, and that those budgets be transferred to areas of social development.

The complex reality of the region demands the consolidation and strengthening of a Mesoamerican movement that can plant in a unified manner an iron resistance against the projects of commerce and investments.  For us, it is key to understand social organization, as well as processes of literacy and diffusion of the themes of commerce/investment, to improve mechanisms for communication amongst networks, organizations and movements in at the local, national and regional level.  An immediate challenge is to advance in the conformation of an alternative project that is born from and for our communities.

ANOTHER MESOAMERICA IS POSSIBLE

FOR THE SELF-DETERMINATION AND THE RESISTANCE OF MESOAMERICAN COMMUNITIES

Here are the political Declarations of the meetings.  Later, we will share the plans of action and other proposals, such as the campaign to throw down the Interamerican Development Bank.  The powers that be will tremble, because Mesoamerica continues to rise up.

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