The News Mexico
October 26, 2001

MEXICO CITY - A Honduran indigenous organization on Thursday slammed President Vicente Fox's Puebla-Panama Plan, charging it only intends to exploit natural resources and enslave workers in the region.

"The plan is an initiative of the Mexican government and the United States which contemplates Chiapas and Central America exclusively as a 'maquiladora' region," said Berta Caceres, head of Honduras' Confederation of Indigenous Communities.

"What they are looking for in Central America is cheap labor without offering security, guarantees or respect for human rights," Caceres told Reuters.

With the United States as their principal market, "maquiladoras"(or assembly plants) form the exports manufacturing industry which constitutes the only source of developing employment in Central America.

Central American governments and Mexico see the plan as an opportunity to combat poverty confronting southern Mexico and Central American nations.

The initiative calls for the construction of highways, cross-border electrical and communication networks, as well as the installation of industries to spur development in poverty-stricken and marginalized zones.

Caceres criticized the plan during the national assembly of the American Nations Conference which ends Friday in Tegucipalpa.

Caceres said ethnic leaders will analyze strategies to confront neoliberalism, which they claim has accentuated poverty effecting the majority of Honduras' 830,000 indigenous and black people.

"The Puebla-Panama Plan falls within the framework of neoliberalism and globalization, which in our nations only intends to exploit our natural, forest, mining and tourism resources," Caceres said.

"What we want are plans for self-sustainable indigenous development with community involvement," she said, "not plans based on the simple exploitation of cheap labor and the natural resources of needy nations."