Reuters
October 14, 2002
Indian demonstrators across Mexico and Central America on Saturday marked the 510th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' landing in the Americas by shutting borders to protest a regional development plan they scorn as a new attempt at colonization. Indigenous groups brought cross-border traffic to a standstill to protest the Mexico-led "Puebla-Panama" plan aimed at bringing prosperity to the poverty-stricken region through the construction of road, electricity and communications networks.
Launched last year by Mexican President Vicente Fox, it also includes energy and tourism projects and aims to benefit about 65 million people through loans for infrastructure. With the plan possibly attracting investment seen as key to stemming the flow of migrants to the United States, the Washington-based Inter-American Development Bank has pledged US$4 billion.
But indigenous groups whose ancestors were massacred and put to work as slaves by Spanish conquerors, say no one has consulted them on a plan they believe will benefit only big business. They fear it will endanger their livelihoods and destroy their culture, forcing them off scarce land and turning them into a source of cheap labor for foreign investors.
In Guatemala, against the backdrop of sheer cliffs and pine-studded mountains near the village of Colotenango, a stone's throw from the Mexican border, about 1,000 Maya Indians shut the Pan-American Highway. They blocked the route, which snakes from Mexico through to Panama, with a barricade of rocks, and planks of wood embedded with nails.
"They want to build six-lane highways," said Mam Indian corn farmer Crisanto Jimenez, one of a group of 200 who came in trucks from the nearby village of San Sebastian Huehuetenango. "They will destroy our lands and make us poorer." Men in straw hats with wool shoulder bags and women dressed in multicolored blouses and headdresses listened to speeches by leaders of peasant groups opposed to the plan. A leader from the countrywide Peasant Unity Committee delivered a speech in the consonant-heavy Mam language peppered with recognizable words like "gringos" and "globalization."
In Mexico City, thousands of Indians from southern states like Guerrero and Oaxaca flocked to the central plaza, or zocalo, to protest against the plan and against a recent indigenous law they feel falls short of their rights and autonomy demands. In Chiapas state, masked demonstrators and sympathizers of the leftist Zapatista rebels, who rose up in 1994 against the government in the name of Indian rights, blockaded roads with tree trunks and rocks demanding the army withdraw from the zone.
Columbus day is celebrated in the United States on the second Monday in October. But in much of Latin America, the Italian-born explorer's arrival in the continent is marked on October 12 and has become an occasion for indigenous protests.
In Costa Rica, Honduras and Nicaragua, Indians rejected a proposed free-trade pact between Central American nations and the United States, protesting outside World Bank and IADB offices. In Salvador, thousands of peasants, students and union workers blocked key transit routes. In Guatemala, hundreds of truckers beeped horns and pleaded with protesters organizers to let them through.
"You only have to wait a couple of hours," peasant leader Felix Mendez told the drivers over the microphone. "We've been suffering for hundreds of years."
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