Race is Politics: Plan Pueblo Panama and Increased Violence in Honduras

November 27, 2018

Guest blogger: Pilar Calderon, law student, University of San Francisco

On an eternal stretch of road before and behind, poor Central American migrants are greeted like pilgrims as they pass small villages and pueblos that sprinkle Mexico’s dusted trails. Women and children come out to greet the line of hungry, sun-backed, and tired people, handing them bottles of water, offerings of bread or tortilla, or perhaps a simple pair of socks. The humble contributors emerge from dilapidated structures, adding to a sense that their acts of charity are not spun from sympathy or empathy, but recognition. Recognition that any one of them could fall on hard times. Rural and indigenous people throughout South and Central America may not share a form of dress, dance, or custom, but they each share the scars of surviving all the changes the New World has endured.

Pueblo Sin Frontiers (Country without Borders) is an American tax-exempt organization that has been in operation for almost fifteen years. Their mission has always been to guide, assist, and document the pilgrimages of migrants as they move in search of better resources.

Though the recent 2018 caravan was dominantly Honduran, the nonprofit had reported that about twenty percent of people walking are from El Salvador, with a few migrants joining the march in Mexico. Pueblo Sin Frontiers charges itself with choosing the best routes that will keep the vulnerable pilgrims safe from the domestic violence that consumes the nation. What’s more, this group of volunteers oversees 300 minor children, ranging in age from one month to eleven years old. The caravan is made of mothers, young men, and about four hundred women who identify themselves as LGBT.

The mind reels to imagine what life must have been like, that someone would pack a lifetime’s worth of belongings in a bag and, step by step, march toward something different.

The first group that made international headlines this summer was composed of some four thousand men, women, and children, who crossed the border from Guatemala into Mexico on the morning of October 19, 2018. One of the largest caravans in Pueblo Sin Frontiers record, was composed of able-bodied men, elderly women, young children, couples, grandparents, mechanics, musicians, cobblers, and dancers.

Economic stagnation and severe unemployment in Honduras is the reason given when media reporters attempt to understand why a family would choose to join the caravan. Never-ending financial crisis, the rise of organized crime, and extortion of local businesses is understood to be at the crux of the mass exodus. The Eleconomista.net, a Honduran news outlet, reported that between 2012 and 2013 some 18,000 businesses closed because of pressure from gang members (Silvio Larios, Extortion in Honduras, en.centralamericandata.com). A typical scenario may begin with a phone call from a cartel demanding “collaboration” money. Should the business resist, an initial demand of $25 could quickly rise to $250 and the small-business owner is forced to choose between materially contributing to a terrorist organization (an enumerated ground for inadmissibility into the U.S.) or close its doors. The impact of these “collaboration” demands has decimated the local trading posts and lifeblood of small rural communities. The organized crime has even destroyed larger corporate ecosystems. In one statement, a national construction company was unable to meet cartel demands and was forced to close its doors, lay off its employees, and was helpless to rebuild the city. In Honduras, since 2012, owners who are unable or unwilling to pay “collaboration” tax to non-federated criminal rings, are being forced to abandon their livelihood in search of more reliable means of survival.

Unsatisfied, I dove deeper into Honduran history of organize crime. What I found was a series of roads completed in 2013 that connected Mexico to Honduras by means of a superhighway. The roads, one might suspect, were not only used to move Honduran exports of coffee and bananas to Mexico for market, but also to give access to the weak country that was easily overwhelmed with the superior weaponry, sophistication, and size of the Mexican and Columbian drug rings (PPP Knowledge Lab; Total PPP Projects; https://pppknowledgelab.org/countries/honduras).

Plan Pueblo Panama (PPP) was a development project initiated by President Vicente Fox after the United States, Canada, and Mexico entered into the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The agreement, which delivered exacting agreements regarding trade among the three statesmade for easier movement of goods between the borders of the three North American states, made Mexico poised to become the gateway where all South and Central American goods might travel to Mexico for sale in the American marketplace.

After severe rioting in 1994, when the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) took the capital city of San Cristobal de las Casas in protest of the signing of NAFTA, activists and watchdogs kept a close watch on the proposed roadways, electrical grids, and sewage lines, President Vicente Fox had planned to cross over the Sierra Madre Mountain Range, the sacred and secluded land of the Tzotzil and Yucatec people living in the high plans of Chiapas. Realizing that poor publicity would hurt negotiations with the other eight Central American countries and the World Bank, President Fox had ordered that no public announcements concerning the construction of the superhighway would be made. As such, many watchdog and activist groups assumed, after so many years of apparent inactivity, that the project must have failed. Not until 2012, in a regional summit, did President Fox announce that they had completed the first phase of PPP and was preparing to apply the remaining investment funds to complete the project.

Honduras has long been one of the poorest countries in Latin America. Today, it is also among the most violent and crime-ridden of places. The violence carried out on their streets is usually led by gangs, crime rings, security forces, and trafficking groups based in Mexico and Colombia.

The completion of the road infrastructures orchestrated through PPP coincides with the records local journalists were keeping with regard to the astonishing rate of coercion and ultimately a collapse in the country’s domestic marketplace. Curiously, no current data has been published by The Eleconomista.net. Perhaps this business, too, was unable to remain in the area.