Mesoamerica.com
February 19, 2002
Translated by S. Camayd

The South is the deep planet. Baptized and limited by an expansive and colonizing north that since the beginning has defined the upper and lower sections of the map of the world, the South is a geographic but also symbolic concept. An allegory that connects prodigal nature with social indigence, opulent and lush vegetation with an inert, sluggish, incontinent, barbaric humanity... It associates the canicular sun with the boisterous spirit, with the liberation of the repressed impulses, with the feminine and unkempt side, with the imagination and the dream, with the unconscious, with the revolution, with the utopia.

The American south, and in particular its ample equinoctial strip, is the rural and peasant subcontinent, the America of the Indians and the blacks, the periphery par excellence. Although the presidents of our Republics have long been dreaming in English, the south still begins at the Bravo river; but equinoctial Mexico and Central America are the south of the south, the underdeveloped underdevelopment. Some think we are referring to a marginal scope, an uncomfortable and insignificant suburb in an increasingly excluding world geared toward the north, where even the agriculture is of the First World and the bulk of the commerce flows between industrialized countries.

Nevertheless, the presumption that the waist of the continent is irrelevant for the capital does not hold up. In addition to its role as agroexporter of plantation cultures -- the proverbial banana tree and the like -- the zone turned out to be a hideaway of strategic resources: petroleum, natural gas and nonmetallic minerals, mantles of valuable underground mineral water and rivers of high hydroelectric potential, wood-furnishing forests but also generators of the so-called environmental services, potential fishing waters both fresh and salty. And, above all, biodiversity: profusion of flora, fauna and microorganisms, frequently endemic, of increasing interest for mighty genetic engineering, and of decisive importance for the great capital, given the progressive biologization of the productive activity. It is necessary to consider as well that, by nature and history, Mesoamerica and the Caribbean are privileged realms for the tourist services. But beyond its natural and cultural resources, and due in part to its geographic location, the isthmus is the inevitable path for the tremendous commerce that flows from the East Coast of the United States to the Pacific searching for routes eluding the Appalachians and Rocky Mountains. Finally, squandered and out in the open, Mesoamerican manual labor is very attractive to a capital that segments the productive processes, scattering them throughout the entire planet.

If we want a habitable future for Mesoamerica, we need from the start to rethink the relation between north and south, question the archaic metaphor of center and periphery. The concentric model of the world, by which the planetary progress is conceived as a result of successive civilized waves originating from a few metropolitan poles, is in crisis. The modernity we want is not the one that emerges from a center, like the waves caused by the fall of a stone in a pond. A proverbial sphere of discovery and colonization, the south comes from behind. And this is not only about the multitudinal sudaca exodus that flows unwillingly against the old migrations, rather it is also about the potential colonization of the North at the hands of the third-world culture, about the spiritual wall erected around the metropolis by a South that exports ideas and utopias like it used to export cochineal and precious wood.

But it's not about inverting the metaphor and turning around the map of the world. The challenge of the alternative globalization is to eradicate the hegemonies and absolute beliefs; it is to conceive and to build an off-center or multi-centered world, to the way of a pond pestered by the rain where countless undulations meet. And to transform, as well, the hegemonic globalization into a network of networks, it is necessary to subvert rancid ideas. For example, the idea that just as there are central and modern men, we others are peripheral and anachronistic, is to say that the world is divided into the privileged people of the north who live in the present and the evicted ones of the south who live in the past. The truth is that in the times of instantaneous communication and planetary exoduses, we are all rigorously contemporary. The dualist social model does not hold either, employed as a pretext to ignore the misery beyond the walls; in the days of globalization, the abysmal inequalities cannot link themselves to a premodern future, they are seemingly acceptable rifts, intrinsic to the real existing mercantilism; in the crystal house of the globalized world the inside and outside lose their meaning, and if there is no outside neither are there prebourgeois reservations nor subcapitalist margins. At the present time we are all simultaneous and central, rigorous contemporaries who've entered the new millenium the same day, walking side by side. In a world of absolute inner strength, either we are all saved or not even God is saved. Another idea to reject is the prejudice that the economy is hard and the society is soft, which is to say that human aspirations must be geared to the unquestionable failure of the market. Moreover, there are those who believe that if the market is to be the provider, then human aspirations are simply excessive. The truth is that in the last century a heartless economy reigned. It is our turn to domesticate production and circulation, making the XXI century the century of the society.

Middle America

Formed by Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Belize, and the Mexican states of Campeche, Yucatan, Quintana Roo, Chiapas, Tabasco, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Puebla and Veracruz, the region extends across some 102 million hectares, inhabited by 64 million people, of whom almost half live in the country, around 40% work in agriculture, and 18% are indigenous. But the most remarkable shared characteristic is that more than 60% of Mesoamericans live below the poverty line. They are impoverished amid a shocking biological wealth: 1,797 species of mammals, 4,153 of birds, 1,882 of reptiles, 944 of amphibians, 1,132 of fish, 75,861 of plants, and countless microorganisms, form an opulent biological zone in process of international formalization. Nevertheless, much of the flora and fauna is depredated for the illegal sale of mammals, reptiles and plants, mainly orchids. The forest is being rapidly lost: 11 million hectares between 1992 and 1996. Such deforestation is particularly serious in the Mexican sector. In 1960, for instance, the Lacandona forest had 1.5 million hoisted hectares and 12 thousand inhabitants; today 325 thousand hectares with trees remain, occupied now by 215 thousand inhabitants. This biological wealth is made possible, among other things, by the abundance of fresh water, that in and of itself is a strategic resource: in Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, precipitation is very high and there are extensive underground aquifers: in squared meters of water per inhabitant, Belice had 66,470, Panama 51, 616, Nicaragua 32, 484, Costa Rica 27, 936, Honduras 14, 818, Guatemala 11,805, Mexico 4, 136 and El Salvador 2,820.

As far as the external economic activity is concerned, if we put aside the Mexican petroleum and the industrial production in states such as Puebla and, to a lesser extent, Costa Rica, the zone is overwhelmingly agroexporter. Regions where the production of coffee is outstanding, produced by practically all of the countries there; sugar, more important for Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and Nicaragua; the banana, relevant for Costa Rica and Mexico; and the meat that Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Mexico commercialize. The exportations of fish and seafood are significant for Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. Recently, vertiginous forest plantations have been established in Mesoamerica; Mexico only has 60,700 hectares of artificial forests, whereas most, 256, 650, correspond to the rest of the Central American countries, particularly to Costa Rica and Guatemala. Another important activity turned over to the outside is tourism, since around 5 million visitors per year arrive to the region. Nevertheless, the presumed comparative advantage of the zone is its curse, because in the last years the prices of tropical agricultural products have fallen, causing a deficit of 23.6 billion 23,600 million dollars, barely compensated by direct foreign investments and credits.

As far as the internal economy is concerned, Mesoamericans are men of maize. Ancestral cultivation practiced on 5,300,000 hectares, where ten million tons of the grain is annually harvested; this, along with over a million tons of beans, constitutes our basic diet. Even so, the towns of landlocked America live suspended, on the brink of a grave misfortune: when the prices of coffee, sugar or banana do not fall, the region is choked by droughts as the one of 1994 or shaken by hurricanes with English names such as Lily, George and Mitch.

Although there are also classes among Mesoamericans, the economic relation between Mexico and the countries of Central America is deeply asymmetric: for each dollar in merchandise that the seven countries of the isthmus export to Mexico, they import goods of that country for four dollars. As such, in the year 2000 the Mexican exportations to Central America were of 1,690 million of dollars and the importations of only 453, tossing a surplus of 1,131 million of dollars in favor of the former. On the other hand, this commercial relation is insignificant for Mexico because for each dollar of exports it sends to its seven neighbors of the south, it invoices 11 to the two partners of the north, and as far as the Mexican imports, the original percentage of Central America is insignificant. The economies of the poor countries glance upward and the relations between Mesoamerica and North America, with Mexico as hinge, confirm the asseveration. Even if Mexico expands economically toward the north, socially it is included in the south.

As we move away from the United States, entering deeply into the equinoctial America, the temperature increases, the vegetation moves, the landscape shifts, and the poverty becomes fiercer. A good indicator of the descent toward this social hell is the average salary. A man is not worth the same in the north as in the south. The minimum wage per hour in the United States is 5.15 dollars, whereas in Mexico 35 cents of a dollar, 14 times less, although in the case of the industrial salaries the difference is only of 1,000 percent. But these are deceptive national averages, and the south is mainly a field, where remunerations are still lower since 70% of those concerned earn less than the minimum wage. The most dramatic examples of salary differentials are found in the maquiladoras or assembly plants: working in a factory of the capital, with American machinery and raw material, and where production is destined for the U.S. yet located on the southern side of the border, means to earn in pesos ten times less than by working in a gabacho; but this is not everything, because the assembly plants in the center of the country pay 10% less than those of the north, 40% less in those of the Mexican Southeast and in those of Central America even less, in order to compete with the 25 or 30 cents of a dollar an hour accepted by the Chinese manual labor. And if the wages are lowered along with the latitude, the workers climb the continent up north. It is the law of the market and cannot be blocked by the bloody Maginot Line into which the border between Mexico and the United States has been transformed. But even between the victims of the south there are differences. As far as age is concerned, the worst part reaches the new generations: in Mexico and the rest of Central America, young people constitute 20% of the population, but more than half of the unemployed population. As far as gender is concerned, women are in a circus, because the proverbial double shift is becoming triple: in Mexico the men of the countryside emigrate in greater proportion (15% more) and agriculture has been "feminized". Thus, today we have 600 thousand ejidatarias, when in 1970 they were only 31 thousand; and of the 11 million campesinas or female farm workers, all fulfill their domestic work, but the majority also toils for their wage, in the commerce, the parcels or the crafts, working shifts of up to 18 hours. When they are paid, their salary is 25% less than that of men for the same work. In terms of ethnicity, the National Employment Surveys demonstrate that the Mexican Indians are clustered in the most impoverished strip of the social strata: 95% are poor and 80% indigent, in addition 93% of the employees earn less than two minimum wages. Poverty is generalized, but the south is poorer than the north, the countryside more than the city, the Indians more than the mestizos, the women more than the men and the youth more than the adults. And since disability is cumulative, young indigenous women occupy the social cellar.

The great stride to the north dramatizes this situation because Mexico and Central America share the condition of work force ejectors, generating more than half of the total of illegal immigrants in the United States. Thus, of each 100 fuereños without papers, 70 are Latin, and of those forty are Mexican, ten Salvadoran, four Guatemalan, two Nicaraguan and two Honduran. There they undergo the same humiliations, but also the Latin course of their exodus is a hell. The treatment the sudaca migrants receive in our country document the true disposition of the Mexican authorities, beyond the Tuxtla Agreement and the promises of the PPP. With the diaspora in transit, the Mexican government does not act as the older brother of the Central Americans, but as cerberus of Northern Americans. Besides the bad ways, in 1995 deported 105,932, in 1996 110,484, in 1997 86,973, in 1998 to 118,786, in 1999 to 131, 486, in the year 2000 168,755, and in the first months of 2001, the colored migra returned to their countries almost 30,000. Most of the undocumented immigrants intercepted here are Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans.

Megaplans

Mesoamerica urgently needs development, and if some believe the Puebla Panama Plan is a threat others consider it, at the same time, an opportunity. In any case, if we do not want to repeat the cycle of savage colonization, we must assume that investment is necessary but not sufficient for development, and that attracting capital by all means, overlapping its predatory proclivity of men and natural resources, does not generate social welfare but often the contrary. But, not only do the new promoters of modernity not learn from history, they now try to sustain the policy of maximizing savings by any means, with the stale theory that one thing is economic development and another very different is social development.

Thus, Santiago Levy maintains in respect to the problem of the Southeast that there are "two points of view," one which focus on "its conditions of poverty and marginalization" and the one that considers "production," and that the connection between both "is far from being total," because if in a region there are no activities that generate income, people migrate and poverty comes along; on the other hand, to generate "development poles" in a marginalized zone attracts qualified workers from the entire country, but does not employ the locals satisfactorily. Therefore, given that "the creation of a development pole in an underdeveloped region does not necessarily solve its problems of poverty..., the design of public policies for the Southeast must separate the objectives of the battle against poverty from those of regional development, because the instruments to use in each case are not the same, at least in the short run." Further on he reiterates: "... to impel the development of Chiapas, and the Southeast in general, the objectives of the battle against poverty must be separated from those of regional development..." And he explains: "to fight poverty we count on the instruments of social policy... [on the other hand, the]... displayed diagnosis... suggests... that public policies have repressed the productive development of the Southeast by annulling to a great extent its comparative advantages. For this reason, we argue that an ample space exists to design policies that will release the productive potential of the region."

The "investments in human capital" -that are in fact welfare expenditures focused on the individual, like the "Progresa" that Levy has inspired--are the "instruments of social policy" already "counted on;" so now we need to excessively promote capital investment, without useless and annoying societary considerations.

An opposing position is held through the arguments of priísta senator Red Carlos, who in the presentation of reasons for his Initiative of the South, focused on Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero, arguing that: "Mexico continues to be... an example... of the inability to fully articulate the economic policy and the social development." And later on says, "a strategy is required which understands regional development as a complex process, as opposed to other approaches that center their actions on unique aspects like infrastructure or social assistance." Portraits of the old regime, Rojas and Levy represent the two coexisting tendencies in the last years of the State's party system: the social clientelism and the neoliberal conversion of the economy. Conceptually Rojas is right when he proposes the integral nature of regional development and questions the approaches that separate the promotion of the production by means of infrastructure from the social assistance expenditures. The problem is that the now senator, who continues to be identified with the cliental vision of the public policies, is responsible for the incorporation of the unfortunately well-known Section B of Article 2 of the constitutional indigenous law sketched by the Senate. He has recently defended the prolongation of the Cañadas Program in Chiapas, which he authored, when everyone questions its counterinsurgent character and dividing effects. As far as Levy is concerned, it is symptomatic that being an illustrious representative of the "noxious animals, dark vipers and tepocatas," responsible according to Fox for the social disaster of last the two decades, has been recovered, not only as director of the IMSS, but as ideologist of the new colonization of the Southeast. Thus, Santiago Levy's career as a shining technocrat, able to serve gallantly governments of different political orientations, provided they preserve the same economic neoliberal premises.

The document released in March 2001, with which the PPP made its formal presentation, is a clear example of a two-sided discourse. In the so-called "Base Document," two positions coexist: the paternalistic social development, sustained by service and assistance programs, and the savage colonization with transnational capital, caused by the State by means of guarantees, infrastructure, and facilities. The first one originates in the Populist branch of the old regime, retaken by Foxism through Florencio Salazar, and by the PAN with the alliance of senators Carlos Rojas and Diego Fernandez with regard to the indigenous law. The second also stems from the old regime, but from the neoliberal technocracy, recovered by Foxism through the Secretary of the Treasury Francisco Gil and the director of the IMSS, Santiago Levy.

We have already said that the core of the proposal is the new colonization, but this does not mean that the facet of counterinsurgent development and social control is a simple smoke screen. The Base Document of the PPP identifies as weaknesses of the zone: "discontinuous direct foreign investment with a short-term horizon, caused by the perception of a high risk-region, as much physical as political." And lists as threats: "increasing inequality between the rich and the poor... with the consequent increase of social tension." From there the necessity of a social policy of counterinsurgency and control that will allow to handle the "social tension" and reduce the "political risk."

Nevertheless, the PPP solely bets on external economic growth, with expenditures for social containment, and for this growth puts its trust in capital and, particularly, foreign capital. Thus, the mentioned document is full of promises to the great money: "construction of industrial parks" and "productive infrastructure," at the expense of public costs, "fiscal incentives", "immediate deductability of new investments," "simplification of proceedings," "federal deregulation," and in general a disposition "to eliminate regulatory obstacles," "security, stability and legal certainty," etc; because the external saving is always fought over and it is widely known that the only thing more frightening than a dollar is two dollars. However, there is practically not a single reference to the national market, and outside the statistical panels and an allusion on page 28, the sector of the small and medium cultivators is not mentioned; decisive contingent in basic grains but also in commercial harvests like coffee, cane, cacao, copra and citruses. And it is in these emphases and omissions where the document shows its strength.

Neither the public cost, social and in infrastructure, nor the projects with money from the multilateral bank, nor the private investments, are undesirable as such. On the contrary, they must be increased significantly, but always tied with promotion policies for the social sector of the production, as much familiar as associative. And it is this sector that needs "incentives", "elimination of obstacles", "security, stability and certainty" as far as it concerns public policies. Since its output is a socially necessary production in terms of self-sufficiency in food production and employment generation, and therefore, of labor sovereignty. It is also a sector with successful experiences and viable proposals: sustainable technologies, integral development projects, more or less equitable forms of shared economic organization.

Less rigorous than Levy, the person in charge of the PPP, Florencio Salazar, insists that attracting investments is merely synonymous to social welfare, and emphasizes the creation of jobs in two headings: assembly plants and agriculture. Thus, the Budget of Debits for 2001 indicates that this year "37,000 well remunerated jobs" will be created "in the assembly plants of the Southeast", not a very realistic figure in the days of the deceleration of the U.S. economy and when the growth rate of the assembly industry diminishes to half, but that the person responsible already elevated the number to 50,000 in declarations on April 24th. Goals aside, the doubtful thing is that they refer to "well remunerated jobs", because the 337 companies of that type that already exist in the region -10.3% of the national total-- pay salaries 30% less than those of their like in the center, and 40% lower than the border plants. But the most debatable promise is the creation of farming jobs, since "...to rent great tracts of land... to establish a plantation agriculture... where only one product of a perennial type in technified form is cultivated... by economic agents endowed with ample financial resources,"(Levy) perhaps allows to exploit the "regional comparative advantages," "repressed" by the "public policies", but it will not generate more and better agricultural jobs than the present one, above all if we take into account that the new plantations will have to substitute the smaller, inefficient and diversified farmer parcels.

Against nightmares of the north guajiro dreams

Some say the skillful plan of the megaprojects of the South is to restrain the exodus to the United States, by means of cross-sectional runners sustained by interoceanic communication routes and plagued by commercial services and assembly plants. If this were to be true, I must admit that finally I agree in something with those intentions. Because, indeed, it is necessary to stop the migratory compulsions of the southerners; a zeal that tears as much families as cultures and threatens to drain our countries. The journeys illustrate, but not when they are pilgrimage of misery. So that, in effect, the Mesoamericans must be retained in their place of origin, but not intercepted by the maquilero runners of the day: social hells whose greater comparative advantages are the lax and easily avoided environmental controls and the flexible if not breakable labor regulations. To detain the compulsive economic migration is to recover the hope in an habitable regional future. And in this future there will be agricultural production, agroindustrty and services; since there will be industry, including assembly plants. What we cannot have are labor conditions worthy of the England of the XIX century, sacking of natural resources like in the days of the Colonial Overseas Companies and forced agricultural work of the plantations and hunting grounds of the Porfiriato.

If to attract investment at the expense of "eco-cide" and social ignominy is inadmissible, it is also the rejection by principle to the expansion of the real existing capital, when this one generates the only sources of work available for many Mexicans. To propose a policy of sovereign labor that allows us to retain to the migrants with worthy options does not mean to disqualify the migration nor to satanize its working conditions; and in the same way to vindicate the good wages and the integrated productive chains that would report a dynamic internal market, instead of an economy where only the exportation sector grows does not mean to exorcise the industry of the assembly, and less when it is almost the only one generating additional employment. In the last decade of the XX century our economy grew an annual average of 3%, whereas the exports at 15%, which means that the external market sector, particularly the maquila, has generated the only options of income available for new job hunters, whose number has grown more than the population and more than the economy. The maquilera concentration camps are a purgatory, but without them we would be in a hell of uncontrolled unemployment. The labor situation is certainly untenable and imposes a shift toward a more equitable and balanced development. But, meanwhile, the economic exodus and the assembly industry with intensive manual labor will continue being an unrelinquished destiny for numerous Mexicans. Without a doubt it is necessary to denounce the criminalized migration and the prison regime in the factories, but also it is necessary to fight for the humanization of these critical situations, for many unavoidable. Because revolution no longer kills reform, and while they are pears or apples, the ancient economic model hangs on, and the worn out maquileras and the undocumented dead people continue to be there.

It is not about, then, rejecting investments as such. The problem is to reduce everything to the creation of "development poles", where perhaps the "comparative advantages" are being taken advantage of in terms of local resources, but that will respond with difficulty to the social necessities of the region, in a way that most people will continue being poor, marginalized and migrant. And they will be even more if, as long as not to repress the "productive potential", the land concentration is promoted through sale or rent, and the great cellulose plantations of African or another type of palm, devastate what is left of the farmer economy. These "poles of development" will be, then, authentic enclave economies, depending without a doubt on the worldwide market but ignoring the local society.

Levy is right: following this model, the economic development of the Southeast does not decrease the social poverty of the Southeast; on the contrary, it increases it. What is there to do, then? Try to compensate the damage with focused social assistance expenditures, which when forming "human capital" in the long run allows local survivors to take advantage of those growth "opportunities"? Oppose all economic development because it is intrinsically malignant? I believe the solution is to rethink the economy and its statute, so that, escaping from the presumed market dictatorship, we can make out of productive promotion not an aim in itself but a lever for social development. And for this it is not necessary to voluntarily deny the "comparative advantages". The "signals of the market" are, without a doubt, conditioners of all of the respected promotion policies, hard premises of any development strategy, but the values and objectives of the project should be of social nature. The function of the State is not to be to croupier that serves marked cards to the big-moneyed cardsharps and the economic policy is not made to serve them. We need an economy for the subject but not for the object, an economy that takes care of human necessities and potential and not only of merchandise, a moral economy. And this economy already exists, not in the governmental megaprojects, but in the logic of the rural domestic production, in the community life, in the practices of some farmer organizations.

To compare the world above to the world below, the northern nightmares to the guajiro dreams, the hegemonic globalization to the stubborn tropical utopias, means to question the new colonization, disguised behind the creation of megaprojects like the Puebla-Panama Plan, from the autonomic and self-run experiences developed in the region. The strong strategy of the Panama-Mexico Social Alliance that we need lies in confronting the dominant globalizing model with options built by the producers themselves, particularly coffee harvesters. Because the most categorical response to the prophets of the free commerce, are not as much the counterprojects as the hand made societary alternatives; these alternatives are everywhere, but in the Mexican case have had an exceptional unfolding in autonomic indigenous movement and the organizations of the small producers, particularly coffee harvesters. Emancipated from the external yoke and their own demons, the indigenous communities prefigure forms of harmonious coexistence for all, and the networks of modest milperos and huerteros, that sometimes extend to First World consumers, are laboratories of a moral economy. In the social construction of the experience, in the practical and collective invention of virtuous models of production and circulation, is the realm where neoliberal ideas can be defeated, and also where a social force capable of restraining the excluding globalization and of constructing a habitable order.