By Paul Jeffrey for Response

Tehuacán, Mexico - Hector Cuevas walks through his corn field, the irrigation water that swirls around his feet giving off a strong chemical stench. Cuevas’ corn patch, located on the outskirts of Tehuacán, a city in central Mexico, appears healthy. Yet he wonders about the effects of the sultry blue water, a cocktail of industrial waste that he diverts from ancient irrigation ditches which crisscross the flat valley floor. After the irrigation “water” dries up, a light blue layer of industrial residue remains on top of the soil. “Some inspectors from the government came one day and told me that because of the water I could no longer grow vegetables here. That’s too bad, cause I can make more money with vegetables than with corn,” he says.

So Cuevas grows just corn, even though its market price has steadily plummeted as imported U.S. corn has inundated Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Cuevas says he likes growing corn; looking around the valley he says, “It’s part of who we are as peasants.” And it’s been done here for more than 7,000 years. Archeologists say that the fields around Tehuacán were the site of some of the earliest agriculture in Mexico, with Cuevas’ Aztec ancestors growing chilies, avocados, cotton, and maize–the predecessor to Cuevas’ corn crop today. The Aztecs could depend on clear, abundant water; even today, much of Mexico’s bottled drinking water is produced in Tehuacán, pumped from endangered aquifers lurking under nearby mountains. Yet no one would want to drink the water that Cuevas uses to grow his corn.

I follow the irrigation ditches to a stream, and then continue upstream about two kilometers to where I find the source of the blue water. It’s a factory that washes blue jeans, mixing bleach and pumice stones in giant vats to produce a faded look that adds value to the designer clothing. A worker on his lunch break tells me that some of the jeans he helps wash inside the factory are fixed with price tags as high as $300 when they leave the building. He shows me the cement drain, hidden in the trees behind the factory, where the plant’s industrial waste flows directly into the stream that runs down the valley floor to where Cuevas waters his corn.

Tehuacán is the blue jeans capital of the world. More jeans are produced here than anywhere else. The factories–which produce about $600 million a year in retail products, more than the exports of many small countries–have made the city a magnet, drawing workers from a rapidly depopulating countryside, putting tremendous strains on the environment. Yet despite the problems, Mexico’s economic and political leaders see Tehuacán as a model, and want to replicate its development throughout the south of Mexico, beginning in the nearby town of Puebla and running through Mexico’s nine southern states and beyond through Central America all the way to Panama.

In 2001, Mexican President Vicente Fox launched what he dubbed the Plan Puebla-Panama (PPP). In theory, the PPP would redress a heritage of lopsided economic development and bring closer together two distinct Mexicos. While the industrialized center and north of Mexico provide most of the gross domestic product, the resource-rich, heavily indigenous and chronically malnourished south has long been left behind. Only ten percent of foreign investment in recent years has gone to the nine southern states of Puebla, Guerrero, Veracruz, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo. Mired in crushing poverty amid biological splendor, 714 of Mexico’s 850 poorest counties are found in the nine-state region. Illiteracy in the south is the highest in Mexico and the average life span is eight years less than the national norm. Infant mortality in Chiapas and Oaxaca is double that of Mexico City. “More meat is consumed in a year in upper-class Mexico City neighborhoods like Lomas de Chapultepec than in all the state of Oaxaca,” observes John Ross, a U.S. journalist based in Mexico.

With a price tag of $10 billion to be covered by loans from the Inter-American Development Bank, the PPP is an ambitious integration and development package that would link together those nine Mexican states with the seven Central American countries–Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama–in an area comprising 102 million square kilometers and 63 million people. The PPP area holds huge petroleum reserves, 34 million hectares of virgin timber, spectacular water resources, and the World Bank-created Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, which contains at least 7 percent of the world’s biodiversity. The plan envisions new highways and communications networks, and a Pacific freight terminal that would ship cargo by bullet train and truck over the narrow hump of the Mexican isthmus, shaving as much as two weeks off transit time through the increasingly congested Panama Canal.

Much of the infrastructure to be built under the PPP will support the installation of thousands of maquiladoras–final assembly plants–to take advantage of the region’s 30 million low wage workers. That will produce a major population shift, accelerating flight from the countryside to new population centers located around the factories.

Although Fox unveiled the PPP at a summit with Central American presidents, his counterparts have been skeptical about Mexico’s plan, which certainly seemed more Puebla than Panama. Their concern deepened when just days after the PPP’s announcement, Fox’s administration announced a new program–the Plan Sur, or Southern Plan–to seal off Mexico’s southern border against northbound immigrants. The two plans, when taken together, made Central Americans wonder why capital was going to be allowed to cross borders, but not people. The PPP also met with prompt opposition from environmentalists and indigenous groups, who saw it as a blatant land grab by Mexico’s elite. Not coincidentally, the PPP’s debut coincided with the gutting of an indigenous rights law which Mexico’s Indian groups struggled to push through the Mexican Congress. The original version of the law had recognized the rights of indigenous communities to political autonomy and control over land and natural resources, something obviously incompatible with the PPP and thus deleted from the final version.

A moratorium on biopiracy

According to Onécimo Hidalgo, the PPP is really a project dictated by the United States. “The Plan is but one of several pieces of the puzzle of stepped-up U.S. hegemony in the region,” he told me. An analyst at the Center for Economic and Political Investigations in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Hidalgo argues that when considered alongside the expansion of hemispheric free trade agreements and specific political projects like the Plan Colombia, which is rapidly militarizing the so-called “drug war” in the Andean region, the PPP is nothing but the same old colonialism dressed in the well-pressed clothes of a modern business executive. Whereas the riches of old were gold and silver, northern transnationals today seek petroleum and genetic riches from the untamed forests of the isthmus, along with the cheap labor of those displaced from the jungle by “economic progress.”

As Hidalgo talked with me, I looked out his window at the green hillsides of Chiapas. It’s no wonder Fox, the former executive of Coca-Cola’s Mexican operations, wants to better integrate Chiapas into the national economy. It’s a lush place. One-third of the nation’s electricity is generated in Chiapas, including over half of the hydroelectricity. And the federal government wants to dramatically increase that; some 32 new dams are planned for Chiapas under the PPP. Maquiladoras need electricity to operate.

Chiapas is host to a variety of other natural resources that capitalists in Mexico City and abroad dream of getting their hands on. A French company, which had found a sizeable petroleum reserve under the Lacandón Jungle, capped and hid its dozen exploratory wells when the Zapatista uprising took place in 1994. It’s probably the same oil reserve as in the neighboring Petén region of Guatemala, an area where 12,000 U.S. troops carried out military maneuvers in 2001.

The connection between natural resources and militarization is not coincidental. Chiapas is the most militarized Mexican state, yet it’s not exclusively a response to the Zapatistas. The military is there to repress indigenous rebellion, to be sure. Yet it’s also there to “protect” the area’s natural resources. If there were no natural resources to be exploited, the Mexican military might leave the uppity Indians alone. Yet the threat of autonomous control in indigenous communities means that the benefits of natural resource exploitation would have to be shared with the poor, a scenario that’s anathema to the Mexican and foreign companies with their eyes on Mexico’s south. The PPP has a counterinsurgency role to play.

Another resource at stake under the PPP is the region’s biodiversity. Long a source of mahogany and other hardwoods, the jungle in the far south of Mexico is today an incredible money-making machine for pharmaceutical and chemical companies looking for new genetic materials they can patent, and thus control. Yet local communities have begun to fight for a fair share in the profits. In 2001, indigenous groups in Chiapas achieved the cancellation of a bio-prospecting enterprise sponsored jointly by the U.S. government, the University of Georgia-Athens, the Mexican College of the Southern Border, and a Welsh biotech company. One of the project’s opponents, Antonio Perez, head of a group of traditional doctors and midwives in Chiapas, claimed the project’s cancellation was a victory for all indigenous peoples in Mexico. “Indigenous communities are asking for a moratorium on all biopiracy projects in Mexico, so that we can discuss, understand and propose our own alternative approaches to using our resources and knowledge,” he says. “We want to insure that no one can patent these resources and that the benefits are shared by all.”

One such alternative approach, a seed preservation program to protect the “mother seed of resistance” from genetic contamination, was launched early this year by school children in the Zapatista stronghold of Oventic, Chiapas. They started collecting corn seeds and storing them, as per Mayan tradition, in clay pots with ash and eucalyptus leaves to protect against insects. The project hopes eventually to collect seeds from local bean, squash, chile and medicinal plants, and conserve them in a building with refrigeration and a lab for doing genetic analysis.

The concern about genetic contamination emerges from the revelation in 2001 that Mexico–the birthplace of corn–had been invaded by genetically modified corn. Despite the government’s ban on GM corn seeds, corn plants with laboratory-inserted genes were discovered on remote farms in Oaxaca state. The modified strains apparently came to Mexico in the six million tons of corn that it imports annually from the U.S.; about a quarter of that corn in genetically modified, but it’s supposed to be eaten, not planted. Some farmers evidently planted the imported corn, however, and now the genie is out of the bottle, worrying scientists that the new strains could displace or contaminate the country’s genetic warehouse of over 60 corn varieties, reducing biodiversity–a critical hedge against disease, pests and climate change. That fear wasn’t shared by all; in a blatant example of corporate disregard for national sensitivity, the Mexico City office of the U.S. Grain Council argued that Mexican farmers should pay for the “genetic improvement” incarnated in the half-breed Oaxaca corn. As foreign companies flock to southern Mexico under the PPP, agricultural specialists worry that such attitudes will prevail, and that the newcomers will take what they want, only to patent it and later sell it back to Mexicans living in an environmentally- and genetically-ravaged agricultural landscape.

“Our future is cancelled”

The crisis in Mexican agriculture–provoked by environmental degradation, population growth, and official disinterest–is not addressed by the PPP. Rather, tough times on the farm produce a migration to the cities where the string of maquiladoras envisioned by PPP planners will be waiting to absorb the displaced workforce. It’s not surprising that the PPP makes no provision for rejuvenating Mexican farms other than to plant huge junk tree plantations where rapidly-growing trees would be ground up for pulp.

“The countryside just doesn’t produce food like it used to,” says Enrique Flores, a Puebla-based Methodist bishop whose episcopal area includes most of southern Mexico. “The peasants work hard to produce corn and beans but there’s barely enough for their family. The government has agencies that supposedly help these rural farmers, but the help, when it arrives, is inevitably at the wrong time and in a form that doesn’t help the farmer. The money the government spends to help farmers is more show than real assistance. Peasants no longer believe the government, which hasn’t really cared about peasants for 50 years, and today only thinks about them when it needs their votes in an election.”

Lourdes Amayo came to Tehuacán two years ago from a small village in the mountains. “If it rained at the right time, we had a crop and could eat. If it didn’t, we went hungry,”she tells me, standing in front of her shack made from scrap materials on the outskirts of Tehuacán. “With the rains coming less and less, we moved here, but it’s been hard. The work kills you, you’re not paid well, the bus to work takes a big chunk of your wages. There are a lot of days I wished we’d stayed at home in the mountains. Maybe we would have starved to death, but we would have been home.”

For decades, bad crop years in the countryside were ameliorated by the opportunity to earn a small amount of cash as seasonal laborers in the yearly coffee harvest. But with the world market flooded with an oversupply of Asian coffee beans and coffee prices at an abysmal and chronic low, many coffee farmers are letting the beans rot on the bush rather than pick them. So in the countryside today, there’s no food and no work. As a result, Flores says, “there’s no longer any hope in the countryside. Only the old and the very young remain there. The youth and adults have gone to the cities. Or they’ve migrated to the other side. The old peasants may have resigned themselves to a life of millennial poverty, but not the youth, who are looking for ways to escape.”

In some small Mexican towns, the whole social culture supports this exodus. Parents select which of their children will go to the city to work, sending home enough money to keep the family alive and perhaps educate one or two with promise. Or the girls in the family work in maquiladoras until the family has saved enough to pay a migrant smuggler to take the eldest son to the U.S. The town’s mayor fakes birth records so that underage workers can carry the right documents to get a job in a maquiladora.

According to Huberto Juárez, an economist at the Autonomous University of Puebla who has studied area maquiladoras for years, for many industrial workers the move to the city cuts off other possibilities in their lives. “The politicians like to talk about our responsibility to educate young people, yet they push development models that yank children from their communities and put them in factories where they work hard for ten hours a day. When are they going to study? Or they talk about adult education programs but what worker has any energy left to study? Their education is aborted, their future cancelled–our future as a nation is cancelled–when they leave home for the maquiladoras in the city,” Juárez says.

Despite its drawbacks, Tehuacán is touted as a model, and the PPP proposes to replicate it throughout southern Mexico as a quick fix to the region’s poverty. In late 2001, the first maquiladora was built in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the quaint colonial city nestled in the Chiapas mountains. If the PPP progresses, more rural residents will leave their homes for the squalid shacks that grow up around urban factories, and more farmers will irrigate their fields with blue water so that consumers in the north can buy prefaded jeans. While the maquiladoras will offer badly needed employment, will the price be worth it?

Before the PPP could celebrate its first anniversary, however, it was in trouble. After years of dizzying growth in the maquiladora sector, the last two years has seen a drop in orders and the firing of more than 150,000 workers. Recession in the north, an overpriced peso, cheaper wages elsewhere, the entry of China into the World Trade Organization–all these have made it tough for the economic planners and government bureaucrats pitching Mexico to potential maquiladoras. A successful union organizing drive at a Nike maquiladora in Puebla raised a red flag to foreign investors looking for an environment unrestricted by considerations of human rights. Indigenous communities refused to accept the weakened indigenous rights law. Small farmers protested the expropriation of their farms for the highways and airports that need to be constructed for the PPP to work. In the end, the PPP may have ironically provoked the resurgence of a popular movement that questions the decisions the rich make every day about the future of the poor.

As the controversies around the PPP rage, southern Mexico remains poor. Yet an increasing number of Mexicans living in the region are coming to see the PPP not as the solution the politicians proclaim but rather as a Faustian bargain, as a development scheme that will make a few people richer while ravaging the environment and leaving the majority displaced and worse off economically than it is now.