By Dale Sorensen, TFA Advisory Board

For the previous two centuries, the US has dominated Latin America under the protection of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny through a combination of privileged trade relations, patronage, clientelism, covert coercion and coup d’états, and most recently via the financialization of the economy through the Washington Consensus (1989), using the power of the US Treasury Department- IMF/World Bank/IDB complex. The US has promoted a series of megaprojects on a continental scale using violence, plunder, fraud, usurpation, and dispossession of the commons. Mexico has been targeted, particularly the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, for a dry canal through the states of Veracruz and Oaxaca.

In 1992, looking forward to the privatization of PEMEX and the Federal Electricity Commission,

 the US negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico (NAFTA) which went into effect in 1994.With the help of President Carlos Salinas the way was opened for the extraction of gas, oil, and mining resources from the subsoil. 

During the presidency of Vicente Fox (2000-06) the US launched the Plan-Pueblo-Panama (PPP), as part of a territorial reorganization project that introduced Mexico to the Alliance for North American Security and Prosperity (2005). The ASPAN included cross-border energy integration (gas pipelines and laying electricity networks from the US to the Panama Canal through Mexico). Then Washington and the megaprojects of transnational capital took control over the regulation and legislative power of the weakest partner, Mexico. At this time, counterinsurgency laws were passed that criminalized protest and poverty. 

With Felipe Calderon (2006-12), the PPP mutated into the Mesoamerican Project and incorporated “democratic security” as part of the Merida Initiative, which with the help of the CIA, the DEA and the Pentagon militarized and para-militarized Mexico and led to the special economic zones of President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-18).

Now, with the government of Andrés Manuel Obrador, the US desire to control the Isthmus of Tehuantepec

is realized through an interoceanic corridor that will link Coatzacoalcos, in the Gulf of Mexico (Atlantic Ocean) with Salina Cruz, Oaxaca (Pacific Ocean). The dry canal is interrelated with two other megaprojects: the Maya Train in the Yucatán Peninsula and the Olmec refinery in Dos Bocas, Tobasco. All three projects provide for the accumulation of capital at the expense of the lives and livelihoods of the indigenous people who reside there. 

Source: www.jornada.com.mx/2022/07/25/opinion; Translated by: Chiapas Support Committee