Institute of Current World Affairs
June 1, 2001
By Wendy Call

MEXICO CITY - Zoila's worn T-shirt and shorts clung to her slim, muscular body; water dripped from her long braids and ran down to her bare feet. Like hundreds of thousands of other Mexicans, Zoila José Juan spent Easter weekend swimming. While the hotels in Acapulco and Veracruz filled up with tourists, Zoila and more than 100 of her neighbors -- about one-fifth of Boca del Monte's total population -- spent a hot afternoon at a bend in the Sarabia River. This swimming hole is a half-hour walk from the village of Boca del Monte, in the central region of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. To get there, I walked past the forest and meadows that are part of the town's communal land, and through cornfields planted nearly to the river's edge.

Zoila greeted me with a damp hug. She is the kind of person that welcomes the world with open arms. After a quick hello, she returned to the water. Most of the people swimming in the river with Zoila were closer to her grandson's age (nine) than her own (44). While she swam, men waded downriver to fish or slept in hammocks slung between trees. Girls splashed each other in the river's current. Boys climbed up on the rocks and practiced their dives. Most of the women made tamales. Eaten here since long before the conquest, tamales are Mexico's most important celebration food. For this riverside picnic, a few men went to their fields and returned with huge sacks of freshly harvested corn. The women husked and sheared the cobs, then poured the buckets full of juicy kernels into a hand grinder bolted to the back of an ox cart. A little chicken broth, heavy with fat, was added to the ground corn masa. The women folded each green husk into a small pocket, filled it with masa, and tied it tight with a narrow strip torn from another husk.

Like most of the people in Boca del Monte, Zoila was born here. Her mother was about 14 when she had Zoila. "No one knows for sure how old she is," Zoila says. "She doesn't have a birth certificate." Zoila attended school for just three years because at that time the school in Boca del Monte had only three grades. Her grandparents, who raised her, did not want her leaving the village to finish primary school somewhere else. Zoila regrets not having learned to read and write well, but on the other hand, she is proud that she speaks fluent Mixe, the language of 75,000 indigenous people in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the mountains west of it. Boca del Monte is like many indigenous communities in southern Mexico: the longer its children attend school, the less likely they are to speak their language.

By the time the tamales were steaming in washtubs on the riverside fire, Zoila had gone home. Less than two weeks ago, she had returned from more than a month away from Boca del Monte. In late February, the caravan accompanying 24 Zapatista leaders to Mexico City rolled though La Ventosa, Oaxaca, a stop on the highway about an hour south of Boca del Monte. Zoila had joined the caravan there. She participated as a representative of the Association of Indigenous Communities in the Northern Zone of the Isthmus (UCIZONI), one of Mexico's oldest and largest indigenous rights organizations. After many years as an UCIZONI member, Zoila became one of the leaders of the UCIZONI Women's Commission about five years ago. "If I, as a woman, don't participate, no one is going to do it for me," she says. "We have to take the space for ourselves." UCIZONI organized a welcoming event for the Zapatista caravan. The morning of February 25, 2001, people from Boca del Monte and dozens of other isthmus villages and towns traveled south to La Ventosa, where the trans-isthmus highway crosses the Pan American. Sometime that afternoon, the Zapatista caravan would pass by, on its way from the highlands of Chiapas to Mexico City. About 2,000 people gathered to greet the travelers and wish them well on their journey. A few of the people in the crowd came to join the caravan, and accompany the Zapatistas through the isthmus, or to the state capital, or all the way to the nation's capital. Zoila did not intend to do that; she simply wanted to greet the leaders of the movement she has supported for the past seven years. She planned to return home to Boca del Monte that evening. She didn't really like to travel, she didn't have enough money for the trip, and she had family problems that needed her attention.

The crowd began to gather before noon in a vast triangle of parched grass and leafless bushes where the highways meet. Hundreds of ragged plastic bags, brought by the stiff wind that nearly always blows here, fluttered from brittle branches. Usually, they are the primary movement and color in this neglected space. On this day, however, a brass band played traditional Mixe music, which sounds remarkably like polka. People put up huge banners and stood in the scant shade they created. They chatted and ate oranges, which grow lushly in much of the isthmus, though not in La Ventosa. Hot air blew through the brown bowl. As the afternoon wore on, the scattered clusters of people grew tighter as the strips of shade contracted into narrow slits. They leaned into the wind, squinting. Women draped white towels over their heads to deflect some of the sun's rays. When the bus carrying the Zapatista leaders finally arrived, shortly before four in the afternoon, the day's fatigue evaporated. The crowd began to shout and surged toward the small, rough stage that had been built that morning at the highway's edge. Three Zapatista leaders, comandantes Tacho and David and subcomandante Marcos, emerged from a bus.

Just one person, Zoila José Juan, represented all of those who had gathered to welcome the Zapatistas to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. When Zoila took the microphone to speak, the crowd continued to scream their welcomes to the Zapatistas -- and particularly to Marcos. She had been asked to give the speech just hours earlier. It was only the next day when she read in the newspaper, "Zoila, a woman with a wide isthmus-style skirt and a good voice," that she realized she had not even introduced herself. Even more distressing for her, she had forgotten to greet them in Mixe.

She told the Zapatistas, "We have come down from the mountains, we have come from the jungle, we have traveled hours to be here with you and to tell you that you are welcome in our home." Zoila concluded her brief speech by saying, "We want to tell you that our land is in grave danger, because the rich and their government want to impose a Megaproject on us -- which means the loss of our lands and more poverty. We ask for your support, and that our struggle in defense of the isthmus may also be your struggle." Subcomandante Marcos answered Zoila's appeal immediately. He repeated the phrase lettered in bright red and flapping in front of him, declaring: "We agree with that banner, the isthmus is not for sale!" He told the people gathered that he would take that message to Mexico City.

"We have always been invaded," Zoila says. The Mixe and their neighbors, the Zoque, are thought to have lived in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec longer than the other eight indigenous groups that live there today. The Mixe tell a history that includes a succession of invasions. The Zapotecs came 600 years ago from the Valley of Oaxaca. The Aztecs came 550 years ago when they expanded their empire south. The Spaniards arrived 480 years ago, and stayed. The British came nearly a century ago to build the railroad that slices through the isthmus from the Atlantic to Pacific, passing just a few miles from Boca del Monte. These days, isthmus residents talk about another invasion. Five years ago, the Mexican government announced the Trans-Isthmus Megaproject, the latest incarnation of the perennial trans-oceanic corridor dream. President Vicente Fox has made the Trans-Isthmus Project a central part of what the Financial Times calls his "revolutionary plan": the Puebla-Panama Plan.

The first hint of Fox's plans for southern Mexico appeared on the front page of Oaxaca's primary newspaper on September 5, three months before his inauguration. A large photo showed a smiling Fox on his first post-election visit to Oaxaca, standing with his northern cowboy boot on a table. The accompanying article announced that he would travel the following week to Central America, to promote the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas and to "lobby for an ambitious regional development proposal." A week later in Guatemala City, Fox named his new proposal: "The Three P, Puebla-Panama Plan," including all seven Central American countries and the Mexican states of Campeche, Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Puebla, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, Veracruz, and Yucatan. On November 30, the day before he was inaugurated president, Fox announced that the budget for the Puebla-Panama Plan during his administration would be four billion dollars. He anticipated funding from the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and the Central American Development Bank. The funds would be invested in new highways, port and airport expansion, telecommunications, and gas and oil pipelines.

The morning after Zoila and subcomandante Marcos spoke in La Ventosa, the slogan "the isthmus is not for sale" appeared as a top story in Mexican newspapers. That same morning, Zoila packed a bag and said goodbye to her husband, grandson and the youngest of her four children. The rush of energy she felt at the welcoming event for the Zapatistas had inspired her to join the caravan. A truck full of UCIZONI members had planned to accompany the caravan; she squeezed in with them. Her husband supported her decision, Zoila says, "because he is a sensible person." She traveled with the Zapatistas to Mexico City, waited with them for their chance to address the federal legislature, joined them in Congress as a representative of the Mixe people, and accompanied them all the way back to Chiapas: 32 days in all.

The day after the La Ventosa rally, subcomandante Marcos reiterated his rejection of the Trans-Isthmus Project at a rally in the state capital of Oaxaca City: "There will be no plan nor project, by anyone, that does not take us into account. No Puebla-Panama Plan, no Trans-Isthmus Project, nor anything else that means the sale or destruction of the indigenous peoples' home. I am going to repeat this, so that they can hear us all the way in Cancun."

The message did reach the Yucatan peninsula resort where Vicente Fox was attending the regional meeting of the World Economic Forum, a network of the world's most powerful government and corporate leaders. The next day, Fox retorted, "To criticize the Puebla-Panama Plan, first you have to be familiar with it, then you have to understand it." His reply seemed a bit too convenient, given that his government has been extremely slow to give out concrete information about the PPP.

"Without being present, Marcos set the framework for the meeting of the [World] Economic Forum in Cancun," wrote a Mexican governor who participated in the meeting, "and the topics of Chiapas and the EZLN passed like ghosts through the hallways of the Westin Regina Hotel." Meanwhile, outside the hotel, young protesters who came to express their opposition to economic globalization were beaten viciously by the police. Marcos addressed his words to the gathering in Cancun not only because President Fox was there, but also because the interests the World Economic Forum represents will play a significant role in determining what the Puebla-Panama Plan will look like. One of the first English-language articles about the PPP appeared in the Forum's magazine, worldlink. One month before Fox took office, the magazine spoke hopefully about the PPP and other elements of "Fox's great crusade."

Marcos' message also reached Mexico City. The staff of the Puebla-Panama Plan, in their brand-new penthouse offices in an upscale neighborhood, had planned a public announcement of the program on March 12 at the presidential residence. Marcos' public condemnation on February 26 forced them unexpectedly into the public eye -- playing defense rather than offense. I visited their offices and interviewed PPP director Florencio Salazar and press officer Tomás Tenorio on March 13, the day after their official announcement. Tenorio told me they had been caught a bit off guard by Marcos' statements. On March 12, the public was still focused on the Zapatista caravan. Most newspapers relegated news about the PPP to the back pages. El Financiero, Mexico's business newspaper of record, published a biting image with its article. A thin woman dressed in indigenous clothing sits on the ground, a begging hand raised in the air. A landing strip stretches across her outstretched palm, with a tiny plane zooming above.

Five days after the official PPP announcement landed with a thud in the Mexican media, several hundred people flocked to the Casa Lamm, a Mexico City cultural center. The event: a debate between Florencio Salazar and critics of the Puebla-Panama Plan. The interest in the subject overwhelmed the debate's hosts; most of us sat in other rooms and listened to the debate through speakers. While we crowded the Casa Lamm's ornate rooms, Zoila was rolling up her woven bed mat and moving just a few miles away. She had spent nearly a week camping at Mexico City's Olympic Village with several thousand others accompanying the Zapatistas. That day, the Zapatista leadership requested that members of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) -- a group of more than 3,000 elected representatives from nearly all of Mexico's indigenous nations -- provide official security and informal counsel for them. Zoila was one of about 300 CNI representatives who was chosen to do this. The night of the debate, she joined the Zapatistas at the National School of Anthropology and History.

Florencio Salazar began the debate, laying out his impression of Mexico in 2001: "a North that looks towards the United States and Canada" and "a backward South, with a majority indigenous population." In many ways, southern Mexico has more in common with Central America than it does with central and northern Mexico. The state of Oaxaca has almost the same illiteracy rate as Honduras -- nearly one quarter of the adult population. In El Salvador, the infant mortality rate is 16.5 per thousand live births. In the state of Yucatan, it is 17.1. In Chiapas, phone lines are only slightly more common (30 for every 1,000 residents) than they are in Guatemala (27 per 1,000). Until this situation changes, Salazar said, "We can't say that Mexico is a healthy country."

Describing the PPP, Salazar spoke first about roads. The PPP will change the highway system from one in which nearly all roads -- at least the large, efficient ones -- lead to Mexico City. The plan includes new superhighways along the Pacific and Gulf coasts of the country, connecting southern Mexico to the north and to Central America. These two new routes will be linked by an expanded trans-isthmus highway. This latter route will likely pass, as the current, two-lane road does, right by Zoila's hometown of Boca del Monte.

Zoila worries about this new highway, wondering how a new four-lane toll road will affect her community. The superhighway will have pedestrian overpasses only every couple of miles, dividing the people and animals that live on side from those on the other. Almost no one in Boca del Monte will be able to afford the highway's access fees. This highway, part of the Trans-Isthmus Megaproject, has been planned for years. Route surveying began in 1998. People in Boca del Monte and other communities complained about surveyors coming onto their land, without explaining what they were doing. At the Casa Lamm, Salazar complained about "the Isthmus of Tehuantepec being so controversial," assuring the audience "we are only planning a transport system that will permit an industrial corridor." He seemed to deny that PPP planners have visions of the isthmus as a trans-continental shipping site -- the vision of the Trans-Isthmus Megaproject that has been so vehemently criticized by community organizations like UCIZONI.

Salazar concluded his speech by saying the PPP "is for the people." That line recalled old-fashioned Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) rhetoric. Not surprising, since Salazar was a high-ranking PRI official for many years, who joined Fox's National Action Party (PAN) a month after being chosen to direct the PPP.

Senator Daniel López Nelio, who is from the isthmus city of Juchitán and represents the state of Oaxaca, called his presentation "an indigenous opinion." He did not give a speech, but told a story about a hunting dog, a beautiful hen, a wild iguana and a curlew -- a wading bird whose morning song tells indigenous farmers it is time to go work in the fields. No one clapped after Salazar's speech. When López Nelio finished his story, the rooms filled with cheers and sustained applause.

Although López Nelio told his version of a Zapotec folktale in Spanish, he and Salazar spoke different languages. Still, the two arrived at more or less the same conclusion. López Nelio gave the moral for his story: "This Foxista plan intends to apply the policies of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization to complete the second phase of neoliberal economic reform, and in doing so, continue to exploit the oil, rivers and forests of the southeast." In an analysis of the "strengths" of southern Mexico's economy, a PPP document notes "The region's fishery, agricultural, and oil resources are of high national importance." It also says, "Some of the resources of the region are not sufficiently exploited." Meanwhile, the public summary of the plan blames small-scale farmers for the region's ecological problems: "The productive activities of the inhabitants of the southern and south-eastern region constitute an environmental risk, capable of provoking a massive and selective extinction of animal and plant species."

Journalist Carlos Fazio followed Senator López Nelio. Fazio asserted that the PPP "is the antithesis of the San Andrés accords," referring to the 1996 peace agreement between the Mexican government and the Zapatista rebels. (In contrast, Secretary of State Jorge Castañeda has described the PPP as "the logical corollary" to the peace process in Chiapas. ) The San Andrés accords assured autonomy for Mexico's indigenous communities, as well as considerable control over the vast natural resources on their lands. If the government indeed sees the PPP as linked to the Chiapas peace process, that would explain why the guarantees of indigenous political autonomy and control of natural resources were stripped from the indigenous rights law the Mexican Congress passed at the end of April. The PPP depends upon corporate access to land and natural resources in Mexico's south -- the opposite of what the government promised the Zapatistas in the San Andrés accords. This does not seem to concern Florencio Salazar. When the subject of the Zapatistas came up during the debate, Salazar said, "I don't know how anyone can talk about the rights of a group that has risen up in arms against the state." From this debate, a single image of the PPP emerged, even though each of the panelists had very different visions of the plan's meaning and impacts. In its essence, the plan has three goals: (1) increase the transit and industrial infrastructure of the region, improving the capacity for export industries, (2) catalyze a shift of the region's economy from agriculture to assembly plant maquiladoras and manufacturing, and (3) expand private control over the vast natural resources in the region. Land privatization is key to all of these goals and underpins the PPP.

The PPP is based on an essay by PRI official Santiago Levy, called "The South also Exists." Levy prepared the document before the July 2000 elections, hoping to convince PRI candidate Francisco Lasbastida to make it part of his national program. When Labastida lost the election Levy turned, successfully, to Fox. One of the essay's central points is that the government's certification program for communal land rights (PROCEDE) must operate more efficiently. PROCEDE converts communal lands into individual holdings. This often means any title holder can sell to people outside the community, or, indirectly, to foreigners. As it becomes harder and harder to earn a living as a small-scale farmer, privatization becomes more likely, as farmers give up and sell off their land.

Ninety-three percent of Mexico's current exports go to the United States. Of this huge portion, only one percent comes from Mexico's southern and southeastern states (the PPP region, excluding Puebla). Another 4.5% of this total comes from Puebla, or more specifically, from hundreds of assembly plants in and around the state capital. Southern Mexico still is not really part of the nation that joined NAFTA in 1994. Economically, the region's most important export is probably the thousands of young people that immigrate to northern Mexico and the United States in search of work each year.

The PPP's architects believe that urbanizing the south will help stem this human flood. Official PPP documents describe goals such as: expanding the land that is designated as nature reserves, making it easier for foreign corporations to own land, moving the dispersed population into urban centers, and reducing the region's dependence on small scale agriculture, fishing and forestry. Though not stated directly in the documents that have become public, the end goal of all this seems clear: separating rural and indigenous communities from the land that has sustained them -- and they have protected -- for hundreds or thousands of years. This raises the question: what happens to this land, once the people move off it?

Alfonso Romo has a plan: he wants to expand mono-cropped tree plantations. Romo serves as a PPP advisor and directs Grupo Pulsar, one of Mexico's most important transnational corporations. He has told the media that Grupo Pulsar's current plantations in Chiapas (nearly 50,000 acres) are "a really small area, compared to the potential of the region -- which is above all for forestry, and not agriculture or ranching." Government plans reflect his desires. A document prepared by the Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources says that the agency's goal is to establish 75,000 acres of new forest plantations in the PPP region by 2006. The PPP master plan describes "medium-term" goals of establishing nearly 150,000 acres of African palm plantations and 120,000 acres of coconut palm plantations. These chemical-intensive, non-labor-intensive operations will irreparably damage the land without even offering significant local employment.

The PPP's success depends upon indigenous Mexicans' willingness to leave their rural villages. While this has become the way of most of the world, it is not so clear that Mexico's southern states will follow suit so easily. The Zapatistas rebelled precisely to defend their rural way of life. In another part of Chiapas, the indigenous communities who live in and around the Montes Azules biosphere reserve seek the same rural future. They have clashed with the government in their efforts to remain in the 6.4 million-acre tropical forest -- one of the largest and most ecologically important in Latin America. A couple of weeks after the official announcement of the PPP, an association of Montes Azules communities issued a statement demanding secure land tenure and rejecting the Puebla-Panama Plan.

During the debate at the Casa Lamm, Florencio Salazar said that public approval would be a key element of the Puebla-Panama Plan. A woman in the audience asked Salazar what the public consultation would look like (Who would organize the consultation? Who would be invited to participate? What languages would the meetings be held in?) She received no clear response. I had asked Salazar the same basic question three days earlier. At that time, he had said the consultation would likely be in June, and there was no plan yet worked out for its structure or content.

The third week of April notices began to circulate in southern Mexico, inviting "citizens in general, social organizations, academic institutions, and the public and private sectors of the states in the south and south-eastern region," to participate in public forums in each of the nine states included in the PPP. In Oaxaca the National Indigenous Institute, the federal government agency responsible for indigenous affairs, was to host the meeting. News of the announcement made its way from the capital to rural Oaxaca just three days before the event. Representatives of many community organizations quickly made arrangements to make the trip, in some cases seven to ten hours each way, to the state capital.

At 10:30 am on Friday, April 27, half an hour after the public forum was to begin, the appointed room at the four-star Fortin Hotel was nearly empty. The same hotel employee who had directed me to the room explained that the event had been cancelled the night before. He had no idea why. The newspaper reporters who had come interviewed a few people from social organizations, then left. One man, holding a stack of fat manila folders, stayed behind. He introduced himself as Pablo González, the head of community relations for the PPP. He had flown in from Mexico City to give the main presentation. No one had told him the meeting was canceled. Later that day I learned through the grapevine why: the governor of Oaxaca -- a PRI leader -- had ordered its hosts to cancel it. While governor José Murat claimed he did this because it was not a fair consultation, it was more likely a public manifestation of party politics. Governor Murat has never shown much interest in community participation, but he is very sensitive to a PAN-led federal government organizing independent events in PRI-led Oaxaca.

Two weeks after the aborted public consultation, some members of the public organized their own consultation: a meeting about the PPP in Tapachula, a city on the Chiapas-Guatemala border. Zoila attended, representing UCIZONI's Women's Commission. UCIZONI was one of 131 organizations present at the meeting, including groups from most of the southern states, as well as Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador. The group of 250 met for nearly three days at a Catholic seminary, pooling the scant information they had about the PPP and deciding on a common strategy to respond. The meeting's first day was filled with long speeches by academics and staff members of large non-governmental organizations: all men, only a couple of them indigenous. Zoila was one of the first indigenous women to approach the podium. She spoke about her fears for her community and its land. She said that she sees corporate investment as a poison seeping into the soil of Boca del Monte. At the end of the meeting, the group issued a statement. It read, in part: "Given that any development plan must be the result of a democratic process, and not an authoritarian one, we firmly reject the Puebla-Panama Plan... We condemn all strategies geared toward the destruction of the national, peasant and popular economy, [and] food and labor self-sufficiency."

Toward the end of her travel with the caravan, Zoila had been interviewed by a national Mexican newspaper about why she devoted a full month to accompanying the Zapatistas. She replied by talking about the Puebla-Panama Plan.

We are still on our land because we fight for it. The Trans-Isthmus Megaproject disappeared and turned into the Puebla-Panama Plan. They are changing the name so that the indigenous people won't understand it. But we understand it, we understand why we are fighting for our land. Some of my neighbors in the isthmus say that the Plan is a good thing, that it will be good for the women, and for the men, that there will be work and all that. But that is nothing more than covering your eyes. They don't believe that ... they are going to die from the effects of the companies, the machinery and the filth they will bring...

[T]his expansion of the highway, the expansion of the train. Are the indigenous people really going to use it? Are the indigenous really going to go back and forth in their cars? What cars do we have? We only have our animals to carry our corn... There is no way we are going to teach our horses and burros to go up the stairs [of the overpass] to carry our firewood.

• "Organizaciones independientes del Istmo de Tehuantepec se unen a la marcha zapatista," La Jornada, February 26, 2001, p. 7.
• "Fox addresses regional development," Financial Times, March 26, 2001, globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/articles.html
• "Presenta Fox Programa de Desarrollo Sur Sureste," Noticias: Voz e Imagen de Oaxaca, September 5, 2000, p. 1.
• "Mayor respeto a derechos de migrantes de CA, ofrece Fox," La Jornada, September 12, 2000 www.jornada.unam.mx
• "Avalan bancos el proyecto Puebla-Panamá," Reforma, November 30, 2000, www.reforma.com/nacional/articulo/052882
• "Autonomía indígena, pero responsable: Vicente Fox," unomásuno, February 28, 2001, p. 7.
• "Marcos enmarca Cancún," Milenio Diario, February 27, 2001, p. 22.
• "Cancun police chief fired over violence against economic protesters," San Diego Union-Tribune, March 21, 2001, www.uniontribune.com/news/mexico
• "Fox's Great Crusade," worldlink: The magazine of the World Economic Forum, November/December 2000 www.worldlink.co.uk/stories
• "Arranca el Plan Puebla-Panamá con inversión de 4 mil 200 mdp," El Financiero, March 13, 2001, p. 14.
• "Integración de carencias," Cecilia González, Reforma, September 26, 2000, www.reforma.com
• "Pide Florencio Salazar ingresar al PAN," Reforma, January 5, 2001, www.reforma.com
• "Plan Puebla-Panamá, antítesis de acuerdos de San Andrés: analistas," La Jornada, March 18, 2001, p. 5.
• "Documento Base, Plan Puebla Panamá," Presidencia de la República, p. 2.
• "Plan Puebla Panamá, Capítulo México, Documento base," Presidencia de la República, March 2001, p. 81.
• "El Plan Puebla Panamá, corolario lógico del gobierno para la paz en Chiapas," La Jornada, March 1, 2001, p. 3.
• "Fondo y trasfondo del Plan Puebla Panamá," José Gil Ramos, Proceso #1271, March 11, 2001, p. 41.
• "Las maquiladoras 'no son el diablo que se nos mete' al sur: Florencio Salazar,"La Jornada, April 25, 2001, p. 47.
• "Savia, el EZLN, PEMEX y resultados financieros," Milenio Diario, February 27, 2001.
• "Sección 10: Plantaciones Forestales Comerciales," in "Plan Puebla-Panamá: Propuesta de Proyectos para la Región," January 2001, pages unnumbered. Summary of plans for Puebla-Panama Plan, prepared by Alejandro Villamar.
• "La ARIC independiente externa su oposición al Plan Puebla-Panamá," La Jornada, April 4, 2001, p. 46.
• "Esta lucha, se las recomendamos," Ojarasca, A supplement to La Jornada, April 28, 2001 www.jornada.com.mx/2001/abr01/010423/oja48-lucha.html

This article was published originally by Institute of Current World Affairs in its ICWA Letters series (ISSN 1083-4303). Wendy Call is an ICWA Fellow. She lives and works in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico, and can be reached at wendycall@world.oberlin.edu