Bulletins of CIEPAC
"Chiapas day by day"

Infrastructure

The development of transport and communications infrastructure, focused on the construction and modernization of a network of highways, ports, and international airports, is the foundation of the Plan Puebla Panama, the priority for the Declaración de Comitán, the major focus of the Programa del Sur, and one of the key policies of the World Banks’s Southern States Development Strategy. In critiquing this form of development, we are not criticizing roads or ports in themselves, but rather the political economy within which such megaprojects are planned and implemented. Just as during the ‘liberal’ era of the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship (1876-1910), when the development of the railways functioned to open Mexico to exploitation by foreign capital, and to dispossess indigenous populations of their territories, the neoliberal strategy behind the PPP’s infrastructure megaprojects is the domination of Mesoamerica by transnational capital, rather than the integral and autonomous development of the region. The logic, as the World Bank explains, is to lower the transportation costs of commodities in order to make regional production more competitive in the context of international free trade, and thus to integrate the region into the "global market system". The intention of this policy is not only to orient the regional economy towards export production, but also to apply a form of ‘disciplinary power’ (Foucault 1977) to "local producers" (ie peasant and indigenous communities), who, once "located in highly accessible areas, are more exposed to competition and are thus forced to improve productivity" (World Bank 2003: 19).

The international promotion of Chiapas by the state government has focused on the quality of its infrastructure, and its geostrategic location within the PPP. In a meeting in January 2008, for example, Roberto Albores Gleason sold the state to the Chinese ambassador as the "geographical centre of the Plan Puebla Panama", with "nationally and internationally connected airports".⁽¹²⁾ In February 2008, Chiapas-based businessmen met with the President of Honduras, presenting him with "a portfolio of investments to demonstrate the potential of Chiapas, thanks to its new infrastructure, emphasising the significance for international commerce of the highway system, Port Chiapas, and the Tuxtla and Tapachula airports, in the context of the relaunch of the Plan Puebla Panama."⁽¹³⁾ In the same month, the Interamerican Development Bank - the multilateral organization that promotes and finances the PPP, met with the Mexican Congress’s Special Commission for the South-Southeast - the promoters of the Programa del Sur, to jointly announce their full support for "the infrastructure projects of governor Sabines", declaring that "Chiapas is the number 1 priority for the IDB"⁽¹⁴⁾

The infrastructure megaprojects announced by Sabines include several highways - Tapachula-Ciudad Hidalgo/Talisman, Ocozocoautla-Arriaga, San Cristobal-Palenque, Motozintla-Angel Albino Corzo-Villaflores, and Villaflores-Aeropuerto Angel Albino Corzo, (the majority of which are listed in the Declaración de Comitán). Other Sabines infrastructure projects include the internationalisation of the Palenque airport, the expansion of the Angel Alnbino Corzo international airport, the modernization of the railway system, and the paving of a series of rural roads in the region of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. While some of the projects are being directly funded by foreign capital,⁽¹⁵⁾ the majority of the funding is being provided by the federal government. Calderon has baptised his presidency "the sexenio of infrastructure", and Luis Tellez Kuenzler, federal Minister of Communications and Transport, has announced that 2007-2008 constitutes "the greatest investment in roads in Mexican history".⁽¹⁶⁾ In Chiapas, federal financing for the infrastructure megaprojects is being partly provided via the Programa del Sur. In March 2008, Carlos Rojas met with the governors of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca, to announce an increase in the Programa’s budget, with 1,768 million pesos (US$176 million) granted to Chiapas in 2008 for "the modernization of road infrastructure, through which we will reinforce communications in this region of the country" (El Heraldo 05/03/08)

Highways and rural roads

Although Mexico’s bureaucrats and businessmen continue to use the concept of the Plan Puebla Panama to sell the region to international investors, the phrase disappears when their audience is the Mexican population itself. In early January 2008, in his seventh visit to Chiapas in little over a year, Calderon inaugurated the first section of the Arriaga-Ocozocoautla highway, which passes through the Sepultura Biosphere Reserve, cutting it in two. "With this road", Calderon announced, "we are truly connecting the coast with the capital- and in a certain way it is also a connection between our country and Central America". What he failed to mention, apart from its environmental impact, is that the road is included in the Plan Puebla Panama’s Mesoamerican National Road Network (RICAM),⁽¹⁷⁾ as one of the sections of the Pacific Corridor, which runs from Puebla to Panama, including in Mexico the sections Puebla - Coatzacoalcos, Coatzacoalcos - Ocozocoautla, Ocozocoautla - Arriaga, Arriaga - Tapachula, and Tapachula - Ciudad Hidalgo (Chiapas al Dia, CIEPAC 02/02/05). The road is also included as a priority in the World Bank’s Southern States Development Strategy (World Bank 2003: 40-41), in the Programa del Sur (Comision Especial del Sur-Sureste 2007: 52), and in the Declaración de Comitán.

A document published by the Special Comission for the South-Southeast in 2001, called "Chiapas: System of Interregional Road Corridors", also mentions the Arriaga-Ocozocoautla road as a key aspect of the PPP in Chiapas. The document relates this and other highways to the proposed construction of a system of rural roads, which incorporates "the Chiapas jungle and the Conflict Zone- with the aim of integrating this network into the main infrastructure of the Plan Puebla Panama" (Comision Especial del Sur-Sureste 2001). Some of these rural roads have now been completed, but those which were not completed previously are now under rapid construction. Among these is the paving of the roads Campamento Lacantun-Zamora/Pico de Oro- Boca Chajul, and Ocosingo-San Quintin-Margaritas, which together encircle the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. The logic of the constructors is to "eliminate as far as possible the existing curves and slopes in the unsurfaced roads, cutting into hills, mountains, milpas-" (Capise 2007), and thus replacing lived space with the "smooth space" (Hardt and Negri 2000) of capital.⁽¹⁸⁾

The construction of the Margaritas-San Quintin road, March 2008 (Photo: Japhy Wilson)

As well as opening the Montes Azules region to full capitalist exploitation, the Ocosingo - San Quintin - Margaritas road also has its counterinsurgency function, as it leads deep into zapatista autonomous territory, passing directly through La Garrucha and La Realidad, locations of two of the five zapatista ‘caracoles’ (regional centres of government). The road predates the PPP, and was originally launched by Roberto Albores Guillen when he was governor. At that time, it was blocked by the EZLN support bases, who rejected it as part of "a military strategy in the region, in which the construction of such roads facilitates the rapid entry and exit of troops (La Jornada 17/08/1999). How coincidental then, that with Albores once more effectively in power, the construction of the road has begun again, though this time presented not as part of the PPP, but rather as a project of the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples (CDI), "for the benefit of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas"⁽¹⁹⁾

Economic Corridors

The production strategy of the PPP is based on the logic of ‘economic corridors’, or ‘clusters’, locations where large-scale private investments are concentrated in the production of specific commodities, taking advantage of ‘economies of scale’, and oriented towards global markets, to which they are connected via advanced communication and transport infrastructures. The World Bank’s recommendations for the southern states include the adoption of policies that "facilitate clustering development", with the focus on those products that are "active and successful in the export market" (World Bank 2003: 27). Coincidentally, the first of the Strategic Priorities of the Ministry of Tourism and Strategic Projects is "Economic Corridors and the Attraction of Investment".⁽²⁰⁾ In meetings with both local and transnational business organizations, including the Chiapas Business Centre (COPARMEX) and the Executive Council of Global Businesses (CEEG), Roberto Albores Gleason has repeatedly presented a "strategy based on promoting Chiapas’s competitive advantages, in other words, the exploitation- of the economic corridors and regions in which there are investment opportunities in agroindustry, tourism, services, and information technology"⁽²¹⁾

In the first phase of the strategy, the STPE is developing five economic corridors, or clusters: three ‘agroindustry’ clusters, one ‘tourism’ cluster, and one ‘logistics’ cluster. The logistics cluster constitutes a central node within the ‘space of flows’ of the PPP, located at "the point of entry between the NAFTA region and Central America".⁽²²⁾ Its aim is to strengthen the connections between Ciudad Hidalgo, on the border with Guatemala, Port Chiapas, Tapachula international airport, and the highway that leads towards Arriaga, Mexico City, and the USA. The three agroindustrial clusters include a poultry production corridor, located between Ocozocoautla and Villaflores, a meat-processing centre in the Cintalapa area, and a cluster of palm oil plantations near Palenque.⁽²³⁾ The latter is also part of the second Strategic Priority of the STPE: ‘Biofuel Promotion’. Chiapas is the national leader in the production of biofuels, and the state is attempting to attract large-scale investment in the industry, claiming that Chiapas "has 800,000 hectares of cultivable land that could be used for biofuels, land of high quality at affordable prices that improve profitability, because for Chiapas biofuels are a priority project".⁽²⁴⁾ The emphasis that the Chiapas government is placing on biofuels is consistent with the inclusion of biofuels as one of the new priority projects to emerge from the reconstruction of the PPP, as a key aspect in its planned development of a Mesoamerican network of ‘Centres of Productive Articulation’.⁽²⁵⁾

The Palenque-Agua Azul Integrally Planned Centre

The fifth of the Economic Corridors is a ‘tourist corridor’ located in Palenque and its surrounding area. The corridor connects the construction of the San Cristobal-Palenque highway and the expansion and internationalisation of the Palenque airport to the construction of the Palenque-Agua Azul Integrally Planned Centre (CIPP),⁽²⁶⁾ a vast pre-planned resort combining waterfalls and pyramids, which is being promoted by the state government as "the country’s first ‘ecoarchaological’ development."⁽²⁷⁾ The San Cristobal-Palenque highway will be the most expensive infrastructure project of the Calderon sexenio in the whole of Mexico, with an estimated cost of 5 billion pesos (US$500 million), not to mention potentially disastrous implications for the environment and communities of the region (La Jornada 18/01/08).⁽²⁸⁾ Together with the Palenque international airport, the highway will improve the quantity and ‘quality’ (i.e. wealth) of the tourists visiting the region, thus encouraging private investment in the CIPP, which envisions the intensive development of a total area of 21,000 hectares, including the construction by major hotel chains of 5,710 new rooms in Palenque and 1,260 new rooms in Agua Azul, the creation of ‘commercial zones’ and a PGA-standard golf course, and the construction of a ‘nature theme park’ in Agua Azul (FONATUR 2004: 17).

All the Tourist Corridor’s projects are included in the Declaración de Comitán, as part of Albores’ dream to construct "a new Cancun in the north of Chiapas". But it also has its roots in the PPP. The Mexican Chapter of the PPP concludes that "Ecological and cultural tourism do not have the infrastructure necessary to exploit their full market potential", and proposes the development of "a basic access system for tourist destinations in the region, placing emphasis on ecological and archaeological tourism- and the development of the Palenque-Agua Azul Integrally Planned Centre" (Presidencia de la Republica 2001: 136, 183). The CIPP is also part of the ‘Mundo Maya’, a transnational tourist project, itself part of the PPP, in which the CIPP constitutes a section of the ‘Tikal-Bonampak-Palenque-Agua Azul Tourist Corridor’.⁽²⁹⁾ Furthermore, the CIPP is included in the strategies of the World Bank (2003: 34), and the Programa del Sur (Comision Especial del Sur-Sureste 2007: 52), which classifies it as strategic priority 13 for Chiapas, while number 4 is Palenque airport, and number 1 is the San-Cristobal-Palenque highway.

The planners who conceptualise the CIPP, and the tourists who visit its waterfalls and pyramids, perceive the landscape abstractly. The planners view it from afar, as a series of spectacles potentially attractive for tourism and investment, without taking into account the communities that dwell within it, while the tourists enjoy the archaeological sites and natural wonders as mirages entirely divorced from their social-historical context of hundreds of years of exploitation and dispossession. This "tourist gaze" (Urry 1990) is expressed in the Mundo Maya’s slogan: "Where man, nature and time are one", a fantasy that utterly negates the long and violent history of the forced separation of the Mayan people from Mesoamerican nature, conducted by a succession of colonial, liberal, ‘post-revolutionary’ and neoliberal states.

Furthermore, the CIPP’s ‘ecoarchaological development’ itself implies a further step in this process of dispossession. A significant concrete reality that the visions of the planners and tourists conceal beneath their abstractions is that the site proposed for the new ‘Agua Azul Theme Park’ lies largely within the recuperated territories of the EZLN, and is inhabited by the zapatista communities of Bolon Ajaw, Nuevo Progreso Agua Azul, Lindavista, and San Miguel, pertaining to the caracoles of Roberto Barrios and Morelia. It is within this context that we must interpret the recent campaign of violence and intimidation perpetrated by members of the Organization for the Defence of Indigenous and Peasant Rights (OPDDIC) against these communities, including assaults, the burning of houses, the invasion of land, shots fired into the air, and threats of rape and death, the function of which is to "undermine community relations and clear the way for investment" (La Jornada 16/01/2008).⁽³⁰⁾

OPDDIC is an organization that incorporates paramilitary and civilian elements. It was founded by the Priista (PRI member) Pedro Chulin Jiminez, as a new guise for the Indigenous Revolutionary Antizapatista Movement (MIRA), a paramilitary organization led by Chulin (Vasquez et al 2008: 22-24). Chulin has close ties to Roberto Albores Guillen, who supported MIRA’s activities when he was governor, and is also connected to Constantino Kanter - latifundista, ex-municipal president of Comitan, ally of Albores, leader of ‘guardias blancas’ against the EZLN, and author of the phrase "in Chiapas a chicken is worth more than an indio" (La Jornada 16/12/07). The election of Sabines (under the control of Albores), and the inclusion in his government of both Albores’ son and Constantino Kanter himself (as Junior Minister of Commercialization in the Ministry of Agriculture), has been accompanied by an intensification of paramilitary activities and territorial dispossession against zapatista communities, "spearheaded by OPDDIC" (La Jornada 17/02/07). The strategy is two-pronged: the collaboration of the state in the certification of land recuperated by the EZLN as the property of OPDDIC members, and a campaign of violence and intimidation against zapatista communities. The objective is to "re-establish private property, in order to avoid the development of zapatista autonomy" (Vasquez et al 2008: 25), and to facilitate the concretization of the economic corridors and tourist megaprojects of the Declaración de Comitán and the PPP.

TO BE CONTINUED...

NOTES:

http://www.cocoso.chiapas.gob.mx/documento.php?id=20080116100024

http://www.cocoso.chiapas.gob.mx/documento.php?id=20080204110631

http://www.cocoso.chiapas.gob.mx/documento.php?id=20080204124618

The Tapachula-Ciudad Hidalgo/Talisman and Ocozocoautla-Arriaga highways, for example, are being funded by Spanish companies. (Interview at the Chiapas branch of the Ministry of Communications and Transport, 03/03/08)

http://www.cocoso.chiapas.gob.mx/documento.php?id=20080114103653
With the launch of the National Infrastructure Plan, and the parallel creation of the National Infrastructure Fund, the Mexican state anticipates investments of 270 billion pesos (US$27 billion) in infrastructure projects nationwide during the Calderon sexenio. Where is all the money coming from? Paradoxically, while the global recession of 2001 discouraged investment in the PPP, the new global recession of 2008 might provoke it, given high petrol prices and the crisis in the US and European credit markets. Calderon is promoting investment in infrastructure as a way of using the excess funds accumulated by PEMEX in the reactivation of the internal market, in order to protect Mexico from a recession in the USA (the destination of 80% of Mexican exports). At the same time, Tellez Kuenzler is offering "investors in Mexico the possibility of a high rate of return on investment in the infrastructure projects planned by the federal government- as a good opportunity to diversify their portfolios and obtain reasonable utilities in this era of global financial volatility" (La Jornada 12/03/08)

http://www.planpuebla-panama.org/main-pages/monitoreos.htm

For neoliberal technocrats, the cultural territory of Mexico’s indigenous peoples, which includes "the milpa (the land that they cultivate) and the mountain (where the ‘spirits’ dwell, and where wood and herbs are collected)" (Nolasco et al 2003: 367), is nothing more than an "unfriendly geography" (World Bank 2003: 10) of communal property and physical obstructions, which must be replaced by private property and rapid transportation systems

http://www.cocoso.chiapas.gob.mx/documento.php?id=20080214115318
These are the words of Juan Sabines Guerrero, at the launch in February 2008 of an agreement between the Chiapas government and the CDI for the investment of 479 million pesos (US $47 million) in "social infrastructure projects to benefit the indigenous communities of the state". 14 of the 23 projects included in the programme are the paving of rural roads. Thus, once again, a project that was previously part of the PPP is disguised under a new name and discourse.

http://www.cocoso.chiapas.gob.mx/documento.php?id=20071228104704

http://www.cocoso.chiapas.gob.mx/documento.php?id=20070822052419

Interview at the Chiapas Ministry of Tourism and Strategic Projects, 10/03/08

ibid

http://www.cocoso.chiapas.gob.mx/documento.php?id=20080108110302

Interview at the Office of the Plan Puebla Panama, 28/11/07

http://www.cocoso.chiapas.gob.mx/documento.php?id=20080229125200

http://www.cocoso.chiapas.gob.mx/documento.php?id=20080117104202

Interview with a bureaucrat at the Chiapas Ministry of Infrastructure, 05/03/08!

http://www.cocoso.chiapas.gob.mx/documento.php?id=20070220050548

See the CAPISE website for a series of reports on the OPDDIC and their campaign of violence and intimidation against the community of Bolon Ajaw (www.capise.org.mx/)