Plan Puebla Panama, Dams and Indigenous Survival.

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday March 18, 2002 03:42 by francisco rojas - Chiapas Indymedia frojas at genoaresistance dot org

Plan Puebla Panama may be trying to get rid of Indigenous resistance by drowning it.

"If we look at the State of Chiapas, for instance, the majority of the potential sites for the generation of hydroelectric power are located within the Conflict Zone. It’s calculated that over 40 potential sites are located in the Conflict Zone, where Zapatista Autonomous Communities are located. What this would do is dislocate the majority of the population in that region and could, essentially, create more conflict.
If the projects within the PPP were eventually realized, they could flood up to 800 archeological sites within the Peten and Chiapas. In fact, up to one third of the Peten could be flooded if all these dam sites were put into place.
Would the benefit be going to those communities that are dislocated and destroyed? No, it would be going to the people who are investing in the creation of that hydroelectric energy, and most of the hydroelectric energy used would then be exported and sold. So investors would probably make a bundle on the projects, while the local communities would suffer."
Chris Treter, Global Exchange

"the Isthmus is not for sale!",
Subcomandate Marcos, EZLN

From March 20th to 24th, representatives of indigenous communities, local civil society and Non Governmental Organizations from Mexico, Central and South America, Europe and the USA will be meeting in a small village near the Mexican Guatemalan border to plan how to resist dam projects in the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP). This will be the first time such a broad a range of groups will be meeting to organize against a specific aspect of the PPP.
Little know outside the region, the Plan Puebla Panama was proposed last year by President Vincente Fox of Mexico as a way of bringing "the fruits of globalization" to the region South and East of Mexico City along with the countries of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. It is an ambitious combination of infrastructure projects, tax and legal incentives designed to expand the Maquiladora (assembly plant) concept, where manufactured US goods are assembled in low wage factories in Mexico before being returned to the US, from the North of Mexico to the South, and to facilitate the shipping of those products to Asia.
A centerpiece of this will be a series of ‘dry canals’ from the Caribbean to Pacific, including one across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, near the border of the Mexican States of Chiapas and Oaxaca. This would cut out 2,500 miles from the present journey that goods have to take through the Panama Canal when they go by sea from the US East and West Coasts, and over 1000 miles from the journey that goods would have to take to go from the US East Coast to Asia. Given that some 80% of US manufacturing takes place on the East Coast, this would represent a massive cost savings to American, and increasingly European, multinational companies. The ‘dry canal’ would consist of a new port in Gulf of Mexico, a major freight railway to Salina Cruz on the Pacific side, a new highway network, and improvements to the port in Salina Cruz. This railway would be flanked by Maquiladoras to assemble the unfinished goods being manufactured in the US and Europe before they would be reshipped out to the Asian and West Coast markets for sale. And, in addition, there are plans for industrial shrimp farms, tree plantations, oil refineries, and smelters along this corridor.
To power this and other mega-projects, the PPP envisions some 70 new dams in the Chiapas, Mexico/Petan, Guatemala region. These dams would have the additional effect of helping to dislocate and disrupt the Indigenous populations of the region which have a long history of resistance against the exploitation of the Governments and businessmen of Mexico and Guatemala. Further, these displaced populations would provide a convenient workforce for the Maquiladoras in the Industrial Centers being envisaged by the PPP. Carlo Fazio, an Uruguayan writer, has concluded that the PPP represents a counter-insurgency strategy to undermine and eliminate the largely Mayan resistance in the area.
In order to respond to the challenge posed by PPP, NGOs, representatives of civil society and indigenous communities have begun to hold regional conferences. The first meeting was held in Tapachula in Chiapas in May, 2001, with a follow-up meeting in Quetzaltenango in Guatemala in November, 2001. During those meetings it was decided, given the broad nature of the PPP, that aside from general organizing against the Plan, it would be necessary to start to make action plans against specific elements of the PPP. As such, the Foro por la Vida in La Quetzal, Guatemala was planned to focus specifically on the question of dams and their impact.
Dams have a checkered history, particularly in Latin America. Anti-dam activists in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Brazil, Chile have repeatedly been harassed, beaten, disappeared and murdered. In 1982, almost 400 people were murdered by the Guatemalan Military and Paramilitaries for resisting the World Bank sponsored, Chixoy Hydroelectric Project. Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous peoples have been displaced and ‘resettled’ across Mexico and Central America in the last century, often resulting in near total destruction of communities and cultures. On the subject of large hydroelectric projects Balakrishnan Rajagopal, a professor of law and development at MIT states, ‘"development cleansing" may well constitute ethnic cleansing in disguise, as the people dislocated so often turn out to be from minority ethnic and racial communities.’ In order to learn from other experiences in resisting dams, the first day of the conference will be devoted to presentations from activists from Guatemala, Colombia, Bolivia, Honduras, El Salvador, and, possibly, Ecuador and the Mexican State of Guererro.
La Quetzal, near the river Usumacinta, on the Guatemalan side of the Mexico/Guatemalan border is particularly well situated to reflect the complicated context of the PPP. Having survived a civil war in which more than 100,000 Indigenous people were murdered, in April, 1995, after spending almost 15 years in refugee camps in Mexico, 200 families of Guatemalan refuges crossed back over the border into Peten to found the Union Maya Itza, as the La Quetzal finca is called. Within days, they found that they had been abandoned to their fate, lacking access to any real government aid or NGO assistance, and only through their own self organization were able to survive the first year in the jungle. Drawing on their experiences as refugees in Mexico, they organized their own health and education, and proceeded to develop a viable community in their new lands, with an economy based on agriculture, animal husbandry and sustainable forestry. Now, having lived through the upheavals of the past two decades to rebuild their lives in their homelands they face having their lands inundated and, once again, being displaced by the flooding of the Usumacinta river due to the PPP dam projects.
La Quetzal is remote and isolated, the 15 km trek from the town of Bethel on the border taking 1 ½ hours. Electricity is sparse, and there is only limited satellite phone available from the village. Bringing several hundred people to this spot is an attempt by the organizers to make the conference more accessible to the people living in the region, even if it represents added hardships for conference participants.
As Chris Treter of Global Exchange says, "One of the most important things we are trying to do in organizing conferences is to get local support for what’s going on. It is important for educating the communities which are going to be affected and to have the communities play a large part in the process of creating an organized resistance to the projects."
by Francisco Rojas,
[email protected]
http://www.genoaresistance.org
For more coverage of the Foro por la Vida in La Quetzal, Guatemala, visit http://chiapas.indymedia.org