Roads To Riches?(multilateralism in Central America)

The impoverished nations of Central America haven't seen a scheme this grand in the 100 years since Teddy Roosevelt decided to dig a canal that would link the Pacific with the Atlantic. Everything about the Plan Puebla-Panama is writ large, from its $10 billion price tag to its 1 million-square-kilometer scope and the 65 million people who stand to benefit in the eyes of its advocates. The simple but sweeping ambition is to link the roads, ports and electrical grids of southern Mexico and seven Central American countries by 2006, helping a chronically poor region compete for investment with the increasingly powerful and united economies of Europe and Asia. "Central American countries will not reach a higher standard of living without integration," says Marcelo Antinori of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a prime mover behind the initiative. "Economic union is a must for the region."

The multilateral model is in vogue throughout Latin America these days, and the hope is that linking every road in the region will lay a concrete foundation for expanding trade. The new multilateralism helped spawn the Mercosur trading bloc in South America in the 1990s and is driving current talks over a hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica opened talks with the Bush administration earlier this year over a Central America Free Trade Agreement, and those negotiations are scheduled to end in early 2004. In a region perhaps best known to the outside world for its 1980s-era guerrilla wars and death squads, the grand building plan is touted as something more than a Big Dig. Along with new trade agreements, it "can secure economic and social development and contribute to stability and democracy," says Alvaro Trejos, the Costa Rican representative to the eight-nation board of commissioners that oversees the project.

The brainchild of Mexican President Vicente Fox, the initiative is being run out of IDB headquarters in Washington, and its sheer size has already drawn flak from many quarters. Launched in June 2001, the centerpiece of the scheme is a $7.5 billion plan to create a 9,000- kilometer network of new and existing roads, including a modern Pacific Corridor highway from the Mexican city of Puebla to Panama City. This would be connected by a separate maze of roads to an Atlantic Corridor running from the Yucatan Peninsula to Belize and Honduras. The IDB figures the combination of better cargo routes and new treaties could boost annual trade flows in Central America from $5.1 billion today to $8.5 billion in 2010. To critics, that's precisely the problem. The Plan Puebla-Panama "means the construction of dams, highways and port expansions... that advance the expansion of multinational corporations in the region," says Mexican indigenous-rights activist Carlos Beas Torres. "This means the immediate expulsion of our communities from our lands."

The anti-global crowd has been mobilizing. Last October thousands of demonstrators blockaded highways and staged rallies from the southern Mexican state of Chiapas to the Costa Rican capital of San Jose. They charge that the Atlantic Corridor will inevitably slice through Mayan Indian reserve lands in northern Guatemala, a charge project officials deny. The activists also take aim at another big-ticket ...