Plan Puebla Panama and "La Quetzal" of Guatemala

by Donna Staggs

What is Plan Puebla Panama?

Plan Puebla Panama (PPP) is a 25-year planned mega project which seeks to open up the southern half of Mexico and Central America to private foreign investment and establishing the foundation for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). The plan depends upon multi-lateral development bank support and private investment to create infrastructure that will attract industry and expand natural resource extraction. With the Inter-American Development Bank as the head of the PPP's financial structure and major credit and technical assistance coming from the International Monetary Fund, and World Bank, among others, controversial projects have already begun.

This is the first step in the latest 'Fast-Track' push to globalize the Americas with the end goal of incorporating all of the Western Hemisphere (except Cuba) under the FTAA and CAFTA . The PPP will create an elaborate infrastructure of ports, highways, airports, and railways aimed to connect the development of petroleum, energy, maquiladoras, and agricultural industries.

Vicente Fox, the President of Mexico, is particularly pushing for PPP as a major transportation and industrial corridor connecting Puebla, Mexico to the Panama/Colombia border region. According to the Action for Community & Ecology in the Regions of Central America, the plan calls for "vast displacement of native communities, rampant and uncontrolled ecological devastation, and massive industrial development."

About 'La Quetzal'

During the 36 years of civil war in Guatemala over 300,000 indigenous Mayan people fled to Mexico. As the Peace Accords were being reached, many of these refugees organized new communities and negotiated to acquire new land in Guatemala in order to return to their homelands, restart their lives and seek justice for the atrocities. They asked international groups to assist in this return by providing human rights accompaniers (observers) to live with them, hear and tell their stories of the tremendous suffering in the war and to support them in their work as they begin new lives in their homeland and seek a new future of peace and justice. See www.niusgua.org (Network in Solidarity with the people of Guatemala) to find out about becoming a human rights observer in Guatemala.

La Quetzal is a cooperative that has been established in the Peten and certified to manage 14,600 acres of forest in that area of Guatemala. The cooperative has developed a 20-year forest management plan with help from forestry experts. They have been trained to select wood for logging and be stewards of the overall care of the forest ecosystem. They select cedar and mahogany trees for harvest that are a minimum of 60 cm in diameter and from 9 to 18 feet long.

La Quetzal is one of a number of small rural communities facing the very real threat being flooded from the proposed building of dams on the Usumacinta River for hydroelectric power, for the maquiladoras, causing irreversible damage to the ecosystem -- creating megatons of methane the number one greenhouse gas (from decaying plant matter), and displacing hundreds of thousands of indigenous people.

According to a report by the World Commission on Dams, www.damsreport.org, a previous World Bank sponsored dam in Guatemala was the cause of the massacre of over 400 men, women, and children in the village of Rio Negro. When the indigenous Maya Achi stood upagainst the plan to flood the homelands and the prospect of forced relocation, the Bank looked the other way while military and paramilitary forces raped, tortured, abducted, and murdered from 1980 to 1984. The dam has proved to be a financial disaster, only operating at 70% of it's capacity. The harrassment continues even today as human rights activist lives are threatend for exhuming bodies from mass graves as evidence of the massacres.

Santos Choc is currently the vice president of the Junta Directiva of the Cooperativa Union Maya Itza (aka "La Quetzal"), in the northern Peten rainforest of Guatemala. Prior to serving as vice president, Santos was the Director of Education, managing the schools in La Quetzal. Currently, he is also employed by the Association of Forestry Communities in the Peten (ACOFOP), supporting the development of forestry products and marketing for the 19 organizations in the Peten that do forestry management. We are privileged that he will be speaking on this topic in Los Angeles in October.

Santos is a very bright, articulate speaker with extensive background on the struggles to return and the current major challenges to the Peten of Plan Puebla Panama. Don't miss his presentation at 7:30pm on Monday, October 7 at the Peace Center, 8124 E. 3rd St., Los Angeles. For more information about this event contact (323)782-0953 - or greview@igc.org.

Some information for this article was provided by www.nisgua.org, www.soaw.org and www.globalexchange.org.