Plan Puebla Panama
Call, Wendy
The British came to southern Mexico nearly a cen- tury ago to build the railroad that slices across Oaxaca's Tehuantepec Isthmus connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which are separated by...
...He anticipated funding from the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and the Central American Development Bank...
...Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador have all put out proposals for highway, rail, and even waterbased trans-oceanic connections...
...4 The commission has made slow but steady progress-in spite of the U.S...
...Southern Mexico still is not really part of the nation that joined the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 2Economically, the region's most important export is probably the thousands of young people that migrate to northern Mexico and the United States in search of work each year...
...With the Panama Canal now extremely overburdened and out of U.S...
...hands, global capital is searching for new routes...
...In its essence, the PPP has three goals: (1) increase the transit and industrial infrastructure of the region, improving the capacity for export industries, (2) catalyze a shift of the region's economy from agriculture to assembly plant maquiladoras and manufacturing, and (3) expand private control over the vast natural resources in the region...
...In many ways, southern Mexico now has more in common with Central America than it does with central and northern Mexico...
...2. See Carlos Salas, "Mexico's Have and Have-Nots: NAFTA Sharpens the Divide," 3. "Integraci6n de carencias," Reforma, M4xico City, September 26, 2000...
...The PPP would work hand-inhand with the FTAA, providing the physical infrastructure and cheap labor force needed for the postFTAA pried-open markets of the Americas...
...ment they said, "Given that any development plan The PPP was proposed in an essay by Santiago must be the result of a democratic process and not Levy called "The South also Exists...
...One of the essay's key points concerns PROCEDE, a government land-certification program that often converts communally owned land into individual, private holdings...
...government, Fox hopes to start shifting the maquiladora sector south, stemming the human flood and reducing the social and environmental problems that plague the U.S.-Mexico border region...
...For more on FTAA, see Claudio Katz, "FTAA: NAFTA Marches South," NACLA Report, XXXV, No...
...Shortport a huge energy interconnection program in Cen- ly after the PPP was officially presented, representatral America, based on fossil fuels and big dams...
...Levy, formerly an an authoritarian one, we firmly reject the Plan official in the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Puebla-Panama...
...Just one week after the September 11 disaster, Mexico's Foreign Trade Bank the PPP and is the key to achieving its goals of expansion of manufacturing and increased private control over the region's natural resources...
...We condemn all strategies geared Party (PRI), and now a Fox administration official, toward the destruction of the national, peasant and prepared the document before the July 2000 elec- popular economy, and/or food self-sufficiency...
...In El Salvador, the infant mortality rate is 16.5 per thousand live births...
...Six years ago, the Mexican government announced the Trans-Isthmus Megaproject, the latest incarnation of the same trans-oceanic corridor dream...
...Available online at http://www.nacla.org/art display.php?art=528 5. Press conference at PPP summit meeting, San Salvador, El Salvador, June 15, 2001...
...Now Mexican President Vicente Fox has made Mexico's Trans-Isthmus Project, or "dry canal," a central part of what the Financial Times called his "revolutionary plan"-the Plan Puebla-Panama (PPP).I The plan includes new superhighways along the Pacific and Gulf coasts of the country, connecting southern Mexico to the north and also to Central America...
...On tives of 131 organizations from southern Mexico, December 15, 2001, the Central American Economic Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador gathered in Integration Bank announced it would loan $135 mil- Tapachula, a city on the Chiapas-Guatemala border lion to El Salvador's government to rebuild a port to develop a coordinated response...
...The president of the Inter-American Development Bank, Enrique Iglesias, heads the PPP Financing Commission, which also includes several World Bank and United Nations agencies...
...As it becomes harder and harder to earn a living as a small-scale farmer in rural Mexico, privatization becomes more likely, as farmers give up and sell off their land...
...A front-page article in a Oaxaca newspaper announced that he would travel to Central America to promote the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and to "lobby for an ambitious regional development proposal...
...4. "Presenta Fox Programa de Desarrollo Sur Sureste," Noticias: Voz e Imagen de Oaxaca, September 5, 2000...
...When Labastida lost the election, Levy turned, successfully, to Fox...
...The British came to southern Mexico nearly a cen- tury ago to build the railroad that slices across Oaxaca's Tehuantepec Isthmus connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which are separated by less than 200 miles at this point...
...Oaxaca has almost the same illiteracy rate as Honduras, nearly one quarter of the adult population...
...In the Mexican state of Yucatan, it is 17.1.3 The first hint of Fox's plans for southern Mexico appeared three months before his December 2000 inauguration...
...In a joint stateand construct several highways...
...4, Jan-Feb 2002...
...The day before he was inaugurated, Fox announced that the budget for the PPP during his administration would be four billion dollars...
...The funds would be invested in the new highways, port and airport expansion, telecommunications, and gas and oil pipelines...
...Land privatization underpins But the PPP's success depends on indigenous Mexhalf for textile and manufacturing industries...
...Bancomext) announced it would invest $300 million in the PPP region: half for hotel development and tions, hoping to convince PRI presidential candidate Fernando Labastida to make it part of his national program...
...Under pressure from the U.S...
...war and economic recession...
...Plan Puebla-Panama 1. "Fox addresses regional development," Financial Times, March 26, 2001...
...3 A week later in Guatemala City, Fox named his new proposal: "The Three P, Plan Puebla-Panama," named for the geographic region it would encompass: all seven Central American countries and the Mexican states of Campeche, Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Puebla, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, Veracruz, and Yucatan...
...In icans' willingness to abandon their rural homes and November 2001, Japanese investors agreed to sup- farms, something they may well refuse to do...
...These two new routes will be linked by an expanded highway across the Isthmus of Tehuante- pec...
...Conversion can mean that any title holder can sell to people outside the community, or, indirectly, to foreigners...
Vol. 35 • March 2002 • No. 5
