Introduction
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Introduction
9/17/2004

What is Plan Puebla Panama?

First introduced by President Vicente Fox of Mexico in 2001 and later joined by all Central American Presidents, the PPP is a $10 billion, 10 to 25 year regional integration project to create and interconnect transportation routes, industrial corridors and a variety of infrastructure projects throughout Mesoamerica (Southern Mexico and Central America), and firmly root the global "free trade" agenda in the region. Fox promised the PPP's industrial corridors and transportation routes would bring the NAFTA model to a "backward south," and now the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and the PPP are combining forces to do just that. Multilateral banks, private industry, and the Central American public are providing the capital, loans and resources to fund this controversial megaproject.

The primary objective of the PPP is to consolidate what is, in fact, a highly contested neoliberal "vision of development" in Mesoamerica, which includes:

• Privatizing land, resources, and basic services.
  
• Attracting foreign investment through the privatization of transportation infrastructure, industrial zones, and energy markets.
  
• Promoting and enhancing the profitability of, and dependency on, export-oriented neoliberal development.
  
• Shifting from locally- to corporate-owned forms of agriculture, forestry and industry.

Officially, the PPP promotes eight different initiatives: sustainable development, human development, prevention and mitigation of natural disasters, tourism, facilitation of commerce, transportation, interconnection of electricity, and integration of telecommunications services. However, despite the human face some of the initiatives bring to the PPP, in reality the transportation and electrification initiatives - both of which are key to the advancement of corporate globalization in the region - account for 92% of the over $5 billion budgeted so far for the PPP.

The PPP's region

Geopolitically, Mesoamerica's position is very precarious. The region is located just south of the worlds' most powerful military and political-economic force and is the only narrow strip of land between the world's fastest growing production sites in East Asia and the world's largest consumer markets in the eastern United States and Western Europe. Thus, the region's strategic location, highly coveted biodiversity, and its peoples' growing rejection of the "free trade" agenda, makes Mesoamerica both the linchpin and Achilles heel for the advancement of global capitalism.

PPP: Pavement, Privatization and Poverty

The PPP's primary "arteries" include an "industrial corridor" from Puebla, Mexico, to Panama, supported by a network of roadways and "dry canals" that link important ports, "free trade" zones (sweatshop-dominated, export-processing zones), and transportation routes. Additionally, the PPP creates and facilitates the privatization of a hemispheric-wide energy grid connecting the energy sector of South America, by way of Colombia, to Central America and Mexico. Each primary "artery" of the PPP - such as the region-wide energy grid - is linked to a series of secondary veins of megaprojects - in this case, hydroelectric dams - that may or may not be "officially" part of the PPP. This intersection between official PPP projects and even more controversial PPP-related projects reflects a calculated decision on the part of PPP designers to mask the plan's most controversial components. Therefore, to truly understand the PPP, we need to study not only its individual projects, but also how the PPP fits into a regional and global "development" framework.

The focus and massive scale of the primary arteries alone shed light on the fact that the PPP is not a plan to "develop" the "backward south" to benefit the region's poor majority or protect its rich biodiversity, as claimed by promoters. Rather, the PPP is a global project that enables transnational corporations and the regions' elites to profit from the flow of goods across the region to consumers in the north as it displaces and destroys local communities, economies and ecology. It is no accident that the PPP offers rural peoples little choice but to abandon, or be forcefully removed from, their lands and migrate to cities to compete with other workers for inhumane sweatshop jobs. Indeed, the PPP builds upon a regional legacy of genocide and ecocide, systematically attacking the areas' diverse cultures and environment by restructuring Mesoamerica to favor U.S. and local political and economic interests, and by tightening the grip of transnational corporations on the regions' diverse and abundant natural resources and labor force.

What's new with the PPP?

Since 2002, the PPP has been extended to include 402 km of roadways that connect the Atlantic and Pacific corridors in southern Mexico to the NAFTA infrastructure and markets of the U.S. and Canada. On the U.S. side of the border there is an onslaught of new superhighways, industrial corridors and roadways being built that link to PPP infrastructure in the south. Additionally, the PPP has a southern twin called the Integration of Infrastructure in the Region of South America (IIRSA), which will extend the same PPP-style network of megaprojects throughout South America.

As of February 2004 the International Network of Mesoamerican Roadways (PPP's road integration initiative known as RICAM in Spanish) has received 83% of project funding, 76% of which has been allocated to the project's Pacific Corridor. Another significant development is that Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala have signed an agreement approving the creation and privatization of the regional energy grid known as SIEPAC.

Thus far, slightly less than 50% of all PPP projects have received funding, testament to the success of a growing and widespread grassroots resistance to the PPP throughout the region. Increasingly fearful of civil society's ability to stop the PPP, the IDB has recently invested additional resources into conducting voluminous environmental impact assessments and hired a public relations firm to determine how to put a gentler face on the PPP.

Organizing to stop the PPP is a major challenge. The lack of information about and magnitude of the project make it easy for PPP sponsors and profiteers to hide the destructive activities of the plan and avoid accountability. Reports of engineers arriving unannounced in communities hauling survey equipment, bulldozers, and work crews are on the rise, and make it clear the PPP is moving forward. Nonetheless, key struggles, such as those in the Mexican state of Puebla, in the city of San Salvador and in Nicaragua, have been successful in stopping official parts of the plan cold.

In July 2003 the Fourth Mesoamerican Forum against Plan Puebla Panama was held in Honduras. As with the first three forums held in Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua, the thousand-plus delegates who gathered in Tegucigalpa rejected Plan Puebla Panama, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), all so-called 'free trade' agreements, and the accompanying militarization of the region. A growing Mesoamerican network of diverse organizations and coalitions is clearly not looking to the IDB or the PPP for solutions to regional problems. Rather, this growing resistance is part of a much larger struggle to topple neoliberalism, from its most local to its most global form, and to build, from the bottom up, the necessary relationships, processes and structures to globalize justice.

**Excerpted from the "Introduction," Plan Puebla Panama: Battle over the Future of Mesoamerica, 2nd edition, Brendan O'Neill, ACERCA