Officially launched on June 15th, 2001, with a joint declaration of the chiefs of State of the Mesoamerican Region, the Puebla Panama Plan represents, according to Mexican President Vicente Fox, a joint effort of Central American and Mexican governments towards economic development of the macro-region.

According to official documents, the PPP is an initiative whose objective is to contribute substantial benefits, that will allow the region to overcome its existing delay, and improve the quality of life of inhabitants, through more and better education, sustained and sustainable economic growth, creation of well-remunerated employment, harmonization of social and human development of the population with an efficient distribution of resources and the expansion of commercial integration.

The central tenets of the Puebla Panama Plan are:

§          Poverty will only be overcome by driving economic development, which is generated through productive investments;

§          Growth of productive investments in the Region will only occur when it is inserted in the global economy;

§          Only through an effort to create the endowment of basic infrastructure (transportation, logistics, telecommunications) can productive investments be promoted;

§          Development of South-Southeastern Mexico and of the Central American region can only be considered and achieved through the conjunction of synergies.

Today, three years after the inception of the project, we can affirm that the PPP is just a label.  It becomes evident, through detailed analysis of the “evolution” of the Puebla Panama Plan, that the PPP cannot be presented as an absolute plan (in which case it should delineate a strategy of local development and regional integration, common to all proposed projects), and moreover that many of the projects included in the PPP the electric line SIEPAC (System of Electric Integration for the Countries of Central America), the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, the Isthmus program, the Chiapas Bridge, among others, were in reality, thought up and designed at the beginning of the 1990s.

The Puebla Panama Plan has attempted to relaunch various old and new initiatives, presenting the grouping as a program (of human development), and attempted in this way to hide the evident geo-economic strategy at its center, thus guaranteeing coverage for the policies of liberalization and privatization promoted by the huge international financial organizations (like the Inter-American Development Bank, the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, the IMF and the World Bank), who are only defending the interests of the economic “champion” of the American hemisphere, the United States.

In this article we will show that the PPP, together with the bilateral free trade agreements, one of many strategies that the United States government is promoting to “initiate” the Central American region towards the “century of the FTAA”.

Not with withstanding “expert” affirmations of the PPP, which they already say is dead (1), the Plan advances.  In Managua, Nicaragua, the VI Meeting of Presidents of countries that participate in the Tuxtla Mechanism took place between March 22nd and 25th, 2004.

The meeting, following the celebrated one more than a year and a half ago in Merida, Yucatan, was the occasion to take important steps towards rethinking the Plan’s strategies, in light of the strong opposition movement against the PPP, especially the strategy of community and the ICP program (Information, Consultation and Participation), needs indicated as priorities in the previous meeting in June, 2002 (3).

Besides signing the Memorandum related to the Tourism Initiative, in Managua there were presentations relating to the Human Development Initiative and a new strategy of Plan “diffusion,” elaborated based on the results of an investigation commissioned in 2003 to the U.S. public relations agency Fleishman-Hillard, and titled “Analysis of the Climate of Regional Opinion and Recommendations” (4).  At the same time, the Mexican delegation to the PPP has presented its own annual agenda which would concern activities of consultation to indigenous populations in the South-Southeast Region (5).

The prolonged slowness with which these initiatives are activating, as much in Mexico as Central America, financed, programmed and directly being carried out by IADB personnel, allows us to understand the motives of a strong opposition to the economic development model designed by the PPP.  (It is important to note that the Mexican government receives advice from the IADB for the PPP, but not financing).

The resistance in large part has to do with the imposition of the PPP plans.  Mexican civil society asks in a shouted voice for true participation, both in the planning and implementation phases of regional development plans.  The only choice?  Construct de facto alternatives, before the threatening sky of the political class and government functionaries, charged with the Puebla Panama Plan projects.

An analysis of the projects that are developing shows that the creation of road infrastructure responds in first place to the demands of the U.S. market, in order to lower the costs of final products and goods, more than the needs of the region’s inhabitants.  The principal objective is to conquer the approval (and the investments) of the transnational corporations (principally the maquiladoras), attracted by the presence in the region of cheap manual labor, more than facilitating the entrance to the market of products from the agricultural sector.

The initiative of regional energy integration (construction of the SIEPAC line) accompanies in all Central American countries the privatization of national electric companies, and also foreshadows the construction of dams and hydroelectric centers.  Said projects respond in first place to the interest and profitability of private companies, the majority of them transnationals.  Due to that, it would be difficult to respect national sovereignty and the demands of those who live and work on the lands that will be inundated by the dams.

Also what is defined as sustainable development is – in reality – a conjunction of actions to legalize and foment the exploitation of the region’s biological riches (which has been occurring for years) and the forced displacement of the indigenous populations of the zones that are richest in natural resources.  In this design, the citizens and indigenous population are seen as only a possible cause of social instability and the lack of established international capital.

To finish, tourism, presented as “ecological” and “sustainable,” is just another face on the road that leads to the privatization of the land and natural resources of the region.

This brings us to affirm, with J.M. Sandoval (6), that “the PPP is a strategy of the Fox regimen to integrate [even more] the South-Southeast region of Mexico and the Central American isthmus in the neoliberal dynamic, in order to take advantage of the natural and energy resources, as well as the cheap cost of labor in the region, and construct a bridge between North America and South America to facilitate the creation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)” (7).

It is evident that the Puebla Panama Plan does not have any other motive than to give the Mesoamerican region the necessary infrastructure for an effective deployment in the region of the “advantages” of free trade.

Said infrastructure is essential to guaranteeing the “efficacy” of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which they have been hoping to create beginning in 2005.  So much so that the same World Bank, in an evaluation document created for the 10 year anniversary of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) declared that, if free trade had not been able to change the condition of sub-development and marginality of the states of Southern Mexico, this is due to the lack of structural (and social) conditions that would make effective and advantageous the opening to foreign capital investments.

Some analysts (Sandoval, Fazio) see the PPP as a true Trojan Horse, utilized on the part of the United States to economically penetrate the Mesoamerican region, also taking advantage of the effect of “the advantages of subordinate integration (8) achieved by Mexico with regard to the Central American countries with which our country has established, beginning in 1995, free trade agreements” (9).

The real intentions behind the PPP make themselves evident once more with the recent declarations of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, who asks for “a total integration of Columbia into the Puebla Panama Plan” (10).  The abbreviation PPP would then mean Puebla Putumayo Plan, for the name of the southern department of Colombia.  This integration would begin with a line of electric interconnection between Colombia and Panama, whose feasibility studies will conclude in the month of April 2004, to then continue with the second project of a gas pipeline construction, which is the projects of the Colombian government will united this country not only with Panama, but also with Venezuela.  According to the President’s assertion, “this is necessary to unite the continent, from the United States to Patagonia” (11).

The noted relationship between the FTAA and the PPP can also be verified by analyzing two more aspects that would finish off the United States’ hegemony over the American continent, whose consolidation always becomes more necessary when faced with strong competition from the European Union and Japan for world economic control (12).

We are talking about military control and control of migrant flows.

In the Santa Fe II document, the programmatic text of the United States’ strategy on the American continent in the 1990’s (13), we note the urgency of the United States to contain the flow of migrants who illegally cross the northern border of Mexico to seek work.  The maquiladora variant is also used as a mechanism of “retention” for the potential migrants (14).

The majority of the migrants are citizens of Central American countries (but also Latin American and Asian countries) that normally enter Mexico through the southern border, passing through Guatemala or Belize, and travel through the country in order to arrive in the United States.

Already before September 11th, 2001, the migratory problems represented for the United States a question of national security and the Mexican government (“the good neighbor!”) have threatened to open a little more the borders to Mexican migrants, granting more work visas, creating a provisional program of “guest workers,” and regularizing the situation of many Mexicans who currently live without documents in the United States.

The Plan Sur (“South Plan”) started on July 1st, 2001, with the objective of eliminating the existing “porousness” (corruption of functionaries of the National Institute of Migration in primis) that would allow illegal migrants to travel through the border between Mexico and Guatemala.  This plan has caused a rising militarization of the entire southern region of the country (due to the presence of the army and police forces trained by the United States) through the Tehuantepec Isthmus, the bottleneck that no migrant could pass.  An agreement with the government of Guatemala also foresees returning the “undocumented” people that are found on Guatemalan national territory back to their country of origin.

The militarization of the entire American continent, officially related to the migratory problems and the fight against drug trafficking is, in reality, an instrument of control for energy resources and to shore up the fictitious political and social stability created over many years, through blood and fire (strengthening armed forces or imposing friendly dictators) or debilitating movements for national liberation that have arisen in many countries in the region (15).

We cannot forget that Mexico has traditionally been a nation that emanates migrants (16): every year, hundreds of thousands of peasants and indigenous people have to leave their countries as a result of neoliberal policies and, incapable of finding work in the maquiladoras, see the offer of work beyond the border as the only possible solution to unemployment.

It is estimated today that approximately 8-10 million Mexicans born in Mexico are residents of the other side of the Río Bravo, whose remittances sent to their families were calculated to be more than $15 billion dollars in 2004, only surpassed in income to the country by petroleum exportation ($18.6 billion in 2003).  The value of these remittances surpasses, by far, the external investments ($9.4 billion) and tourism ($4.1 billion) and sustains a national economy in crisis, whose growth in the years 2001, 2002 and 2003 is about 0%.

Militarization should guarantee, moreover, the stability in the region that seeks investors.  This is a subject that, together with the endowment of infrastructure foreseen in the framework of the PPP and the agrarian counter-reforms taking place, should attract foreign capital, since cheap manual labor does not represent an absolute economic advantage.

These investments, then, should transform themselves into millions of new jobs in the South-Southeastern region of Mexico; attractive jobs for peasants that would have to leave their communities (primarily due to the effects of agrarian counter-reforms), creating what we could call “the virtuous neoliberal circle,” which is to say the necessary employment to lower migratory pressure on the United States.

The picture presented here describes the “maquiladora fate” of the region.  A fate that reveals the motor behind the strategy of economic development that the government wants to promote in the Region.

It is also important to note, in the framework of this design, the importance of the Law of Constitutional Reform in indigenous matters approved by the Mexican Congress in 2001: representing an important part of the agrarian counter-reform process, and whose final objective is to “dispose of land that today is below ejidal or communal rules, and, once they are privatized, to earmark them for an agricultural plantation” (17).

According to Carlos Fazio’s comments, “with the carrots of development and the creation of jobs, the PPP intends to convert the indigenous peasants of the Southeast into super-exploited salaried workers of urban or semi-urban maquiladoras.  One of the primordial objectives of this policy is to displace indigenous peasants from the country to the city, with the objective of separating them from their land and natural resources that are on and below them” (18).

The implementation of this design is still not assured.

“Two years after the Puebla Panama Plan (PPP) took affect and despite the investments carried out, the efforts of state and federal authorities have not been able to combine forces with the governments of Central America to concrete their objectives.  Interviewed separately [in November 2004], the governors of Yucatan, Campeche, Tabasco, and Chiapas all noted that resources have been flowing very slowly and that the actions of the PPP are not advancing at the pace that the South-Southeastern region of the county demands, and that if it continues at this pace it would take another 15 years to consolidate” (19).

After two years of stagnation, in 2005 the government will again earmark a relatively important budget to investments within the framework of the PPP, in the South-Southeastern Region of the country.  As always, the majority of the budget includes construction of infrastructure; the Secretary of Communications and Transportation, charged with the implementation of these projects, will receive $2.6 billion dollars, 3.26 times more than in 2004.

The largest growth that the investments show is in the arena of health (with a budget 429 times larger than in 2004), although the bulk of this expenditure is destined for two specialty hospitals, in Yucatan and Oaxaca.  Some analysts question if these types of projects corresponds to the increasingly frequent demands of the people for healthcare.

Not withstanding the important increase in the 2005 budget for the PPP (which was granted in a pre-electoral year, after two years of stagnation), doubts persist about the possibilities that implementation of these new infrastructure projects can be the base of the economic growth that the region needs.  The difficulties of the United States’ economy (and Mexico’s as well, thanks to its economic dependence), after September 11th, 2001, have created unexpected problems for the financing of these projects.

The (political) doubts with respect to the PPP expressed by the region’s governors, which will not help to smooth out the path of the Plan’s development, although it remains clear that the President’s design would like to create the basis of infrastructure for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).  The PPP, headed up by Fox, will certainly fail together with the FTAA, which has not taken effect as of January 2005, as the government of the United States was hoping.

Moreover, the Mexican electorate has already acknowledged the grave risk in the current economic policies by the ruling class that is pushing the country to the brink.  The hoped-for “change” that some analysts, although not all, expected with the augur of the Fox administration after the 2002 election has disappeared.  We can see a response by the Mexican electorate faced with this situation by its (extraordinary) abstention of 60% noted on July 6th, 2003, when half the Mexican Congress was up for re-election.

Then, the municipal and state elections of October 2004 show in almost all entities the return to power of the “dinosaurs” (the most reactionary) of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Faced with this situation, today there are social, indigenous and peasant organizations, those that at one point were defined as “deep Mexico” (20), calling to fill the national political void, representing the only hope of a different future for the nation, in full respect of national identity and sovereignty.

Notes

(1) Among others we can mention Andrés Barreda, university researcher from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de la Ciudad de México (UNAM).

(2) The Tuxtla Mechanism was born in 1991 from the will of the executives of the countries of the region from the evidence of historical relationships and the common identity of Mesoamerican nations and “we consider the Mesoamerican forum the maximum in the periodic and systematic analysis of regional, hemispheric and world issues of common interest; to harmonize joint political decisions; to push free trade and regional integration; and to advance cooperation in all arenas, supporting sustainable development in the area.”

 (3) Mecanismo de Tuxtla, DECLARACIÓN CONJUNTA DE LA QUINTA CUMBRE DEL MECANISMO DE DIÁLOGO Y CONCERTACIÓN DE TUXTLA, June 28, 2002.

http://www.iadb.org/ppp/files/documents/OTRO/OTRO-New/DeclaracionMerida.pdf

 (4) http://www.iadb.org/ppp/files/documents/OTRO/OTROICP/

ReporteFinal%20PPPFleishmanHillardweb.doc 

(5) The utilization of the conditional is necessary for us because it has not been possible to obtain more detailed information on this aspect.  We therefore limit ourselves to referring to what Cesar Bustamante, responsible for the PPP in Mexico’s IADB office, told us in an interview that took place ten days before the Managua meeting.

Bustamante also confirmed that to date Mexico has not carried out any program to consult indigenous peoples and that the Fox Government has its own agenda for this, which is different from that of the IADB.  This has also been confirmed by Mr. Antinori, responsible for the PPP in the IADB offices of Washington, D.C., on the occasion of a meeting on 12/2/2004 between the NGO and BID, when it was recorded that Mexico cannot be included in the strategy of Information, Consultation, and Participation promoted by the Bank, since its money does not come from the IADB.

(6) Researchers whose specific themes of analysis are militarization and migration.  He is director of the Seminario permanente de estudios chicanos y de la frontera del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH).

(7) Juan Manuel Sandoval, El PPP como regulador de la migración laboral, in A. Bartra, coordinador, op. cit., pág. 251.

(8) As is described in detail in Armando Bartra, Sur. Megaplanes y utopías en la América equinoccial, in A. Bartra, coordinador, op. cit., pág. 27.

“The trade relationship between Mexico and Central American countries is profoundly asymmetrical: for every dollar of commodities that the seven Isthmus economies export to Mexico, they import goods from this country worth four dollars. […] On the other hand, for Mexico this trade relationship is not particularly relevant, because for every dollar that its seven southern neighbors send, there are eleven from its two neighbors to the north, and as far as Mexican imports, the percentage originating in Central America is insignificant.  The economics of poor countries look upward and the articulation between Mesoamerica and North America, with Mexico as the hinge, confirms this asseveration.”

(9) It is no coincidence that they have also negotiated a free trade agreement with Central America (Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA).  Juan Manuel Sandoval, op. cit., in A. Bartra, coordinador, op. cit., pág... 251.

(10)  “Reforma”, Plantea Colombia  sumarse al PPP, México DF., January 14, 2001.

(11) Ibidem.

(12)  “The United States today is faced with European and Japanese competition.  The European Union has advanced, as we know, a long processed of integration and, moreover, has encountered a new area for exploitation in the condition of the sub-developed periphery, in the former socialist countries.  Japan, for its part, has an Asian area of influence, in which the economy has a strong currency.  So, for the United States, regionalizing Latin America under its dominion and command is also a form of confronting the competition with these large centers of economic power; it is tighten its control over the region in the battle for markets or investments, for the placement of speculative capital, for access to natural resources, especially energy, fundamentally petroleum […]” citation by O. Martínez, ALCA – El proyecto de anexión de América Latina a Estados Unidos en el siglo XXI, en CRIE, Construyendo, No. 181-182, December 2001 – January 2002, pg. 14.

(13) AA.VV., Documento de Santa Fe II, Una estrategia por América Latina en la década de 1990, Santa Fe, 1988. http://www.geocities.com/proyectoemancipacion/documentossantafe/santafeii.doc

(14) “The United States should reconsider the Program of Twin Plants/Border Industries with Mexico, in light of possible long-term economic and social costs in both republics.  The maquiladoras along the Mexican-North American border have provided employment to hundreds of thousands of Mexicans.  Nonetheless, it is not clear if there have been corresponding benefits for North American workers.  Moreover, millions of Mexicans who have been attracted to the north, and whose aspirations have not been satisfied, tend to arrive to the United States by crossing the border, which accelerates illegal immigration even more.  Many Mexicans that cross the Mexican-American border are men, who in general were unable to obtain employment in the maquiladoras, since the principal manual skills and the piecework is done better by women.  This excessive employment of women has tended to debilitate family structure and exacerbate the nightmarish social, environmental, sanitary, and educational conditions in border towns.  In addition, the concentration of new industries along the northern border of Mexican has unbalanced even more the already irregular development of this country.  So, the North American industries should consider the transfer of their factories further into the interior of Mexico.  This change towards the south of the border would increase balanced development in Mexico, promote local industries, stabilize the Mexican family and help to resolve some of the social and sanitary conditions stimulated by the Industrial Border Program.  Long term, this transfer towards Mexico’s interior would benefit both countries.”

(15) We recall, among others, the actions in Guatemala (1954, 1960, y 1967/69), Cuba (1959-2004), Chile (1973), Argentina (1976), Granada (1983), El Salvador (1980’s); Nicaragua (1980’s); Panama (1989).

(16) For every 100 people who attempt to enter the territory of the United States of America, 40 are Mexican citizens.

 (17) C. Fazio, El juego de poder y el contenido geopolítico del Plan Puebla Panamá, en CRIE, op. cit., pág. 62-63. 

(18) Ivi, pag. 63.

(19) Y. Moguel/Finsat, Una torre de Babel el Plan Pueble Panamá, El Financiero, November 4, 2004.

(20) The definition of indigenous and peasant Mexico as “Mexico profundo” or deep/profound Mexico is from historians Guillermo Bonfil Batalla.

Note: If you wish to be placed on a list to receive this English version of the Bulletin, or the Spanish, or both, please direct a request to: ciepac@laneta.apc.org and indicate whether you wish to receive the bulletin in plain text or as a Word 7 for Windows 95 attachment.

Note: If you use this information, cite the source and our email address. We are grateful to the persons and institutions who have given us their comments on these Bulletins. CIEPAC, A.C. is a non-government and non-profit organization, and your support is necessary for us to be able to continue offering you this news and analysis service. If you would like to contribute, in any amount, we would infinitely appreciate your remittance to the bank account in the name of:

CIEPAC, A.C.
Bank: Banamex
Account number: 7049672 Sucursal 386
San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, México.
You will also need to use an ABA number:
BNMXMXMM

Thank you! CIEPAC

Telephone:
in México: 01 967 674 5168
from outside Mexico:: +52 967 674 5168