More than 250 delegates representing 52 campesino organizations and indigenous groups, who carried the interests hundreds of thousands of small and medium scale producers from Belize, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama gathered in Tapachula, Chiapas, from May 3rd 5th, 2002, in the First Mesoamerican Campesino Encounter. After an extensive interchange of information and experiences, an intense debate about the critical situation in the countryside and the possible impacts of the Plan Puebla Panama, we arrived at the following conclusions and resolutions.
We agree with and approve the Declaration of Tapachula, Chiapas from May 12, 2001, the Declaration of Xelaju, Guatemala from November 24, 2001, and the declarations from the different encounters that have taken place throughout the region.
We firmly reject the Plan Puebla Panama because it is a project of salvage colonization that will distroy our lands, culture, biodiversity and natural resources in an area of 102 million hectares of highly productive land within the communities of Southeastern Mexico and Central America.
The PPP is a neoliberal project, globalized and authorized by the US government, carried out through president Vicente fox, which follows a narrow line in a series of trade agreements (FTAA) and public anti-campesino policies that have ruined the Mesoamerican agricultural system, transforming our countries into importers of food goods while benefiting agro exporters with the fall of the price of primary agricultural materials. The price of these policies and trade agreements is the loss of our food security, the massive expulsion of campesinos from our communities, and the loss of our ancestral agricultural culture.
The PPP is a authoritarian and antidemocratic project that violates the sovereignty and auto determination of our towns, destroys the family based agricultural system, deteriorates the environment, and condemns more than 64 million regional inhabitants to a life of poverty.
Within the Mesoamerican region lives a majority of Indigenous and Afro Caribbean communities from the American Continent, by which it is of the utmost importance that ILO Convention 169, regarding the rights and culture of indigenous communities, as well as the Protocol of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights from the UN are ratified and complied with.
The PPP accelerates the agrarian counter reform that neoliberalism imposes on our countries, with the privatization and the displacement as instruments, causing the loss of alimentary auto sufficiency, increasing migratory flow with precarious employment while sacrificing fundamental labor rights.
Confronting the exterminating nature of a war initiated by neoliberalism against the small and medium scale rural producers this first encounter announces:
1. For the defense of our food sovereignty, it is our right to produce our own food goods. Without it, we are unable to have food security.
2. For an integral agrarian reform that considers land as a social good and a patrimonial right for our communities, respecting cultural and environmental aspects, incorporating agrarian rights of women campesinos.
3. For an increase in productive agricultural and forestal investment, as such against the importation of genetically modified products.
4. For a sustainable agriculture, economically viable, socially just, and environmentally healthy.
5. For the defense of the enormous quantity of biological diversity and culture in Mesoamerica, which is the most important patrimony of our region and communities.
6. For the respect of human rights and the liberty of prisoners of conscience of campesino and indigenous organizations in our region.
Immediately:
· We join all resistance movements against the trade agreements that ruin our agricultural rights, such as projects of the FTAA and the recommendations of the IMF and the World Bank. We demand the departure of the World Trade Organization from agricultural matters.
· We support the strengthening of a just and solidarity based market, as we have seen with coffee producing initiatives, with the maintenance of organics and sustainable agricultural practices while promoting specialty coffees.
· This First Mesoamerican Campesino Encounter agrees to continue the process of dialogue and communication between the various campesino and indigenous organizations in a Second Encounter where we will approve a common platform and advance toward regional coordination. This encounter will take place in Managua, Nicaragua on July 14th and 15th, 2002.
· We agree to promote more in-depth participation of indigenous and campesino organizations in the Third Mesoamerican Foro Against the PPP to be held on July 16th-18th in Managua.
· We endorse the resolutions from the Second World Social Forum from Porto Alegre Brazil, as well as the actions agreed upon by Via Campesina and the Latin American Coordination of Farming Organizations.
Translated by Chris Treter
