The Neo-liberal Experiment

       Quebec City, April 2001

      Every head of state from the Americas, except Fidel Castro, was in Quebec City for negotiations on the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a proposed duty-free zone stretching from Canada to Chile, excluding Cuba. Although it was lauded as revolutionary by big business, many believed the neo-liberal FTAA (ALCA in Spanish) would only intensify poverty and inequality across the region and threaten the survival of rural and indigenous communities. It was a crisp spring day and Berta was there wrapped up, pumped and ready to resist on behalf of the Lencas.

      Tens of thousands of spirited protesters armed with drums, flutes, confetti and canny banners had descended on the picturesque French colonial city in eastern Canada, determined to force the continent’s leaders to pay attention. Amid the colourful crowd were indigenous leaders, environmental groups, trade unions, students, fringe political parties and anti-poverty campaigners, all ready for open debate and direct action. A giant catapult was being winched up to launch teddy bears towards the summit site, in contrast to the secretive negotiations taking place inside.

      Berta was with the Mexican environmentalist Gustavo Castro. They had travelled to Quebec up the east coast as part of a speaking tour organized by Rights Action,¹ a notfor-profit group investigating the impact of North American trade, economic and security policies in Central America. ‘Berta’s family history and early experiences fostered a clear local-to-global perspective,’ said Rights Action’s Grahame Russell. ‘She understood that free trade agreements were just the latest repackaged tool of repression, a new twist on the same exploitative economic model imposed on Central America for hundreds of years.’ Berta told audiences in Toronto and Montreal: ‘Free trade deals are legal tools to impose a model that advocates taking control over the planet’s natural resources for profit.’ She went on: ‘I don’t accept a system that must destroy some in order to thrive. Cutting down forests our ancestors protected for centuries cannot be called development … we need to fight this oppressive political and economic model together. This is our problem.’

      Details were already emerging about the Plan Panama Puebla (PPP), a US-inspired Mexican brainchild, soon to be launched as the missing development piece of the neo-liberal jigsaw puzzle. It was extolled as the mother of all development projects, tackling poverty by opening up the ‘backward’ Mesoamerican region to the global market. The two central pillars of PPP were transport infrastructure – a network of highways, dry canals and ports to speed up the movement of freely traded products – and energy liberalization: specifically, an increased capacity to generate energy by constructing dozens of dams and gas and oil pipelines, and then transport it further and faster by connecting the region’s energy grids from North America to Colombia (a sort of NAFTA–CAFTA energy grid).

      The multibillion-dollar, mainly publicly funded, project promoted and depended on a momentous shift of the region’s economy, from small-scale farming to agro-industry and manufacturing, and expanding private control over natural resources. It included the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor which sounds like a good thing – a mammoth protected nature reserve – but in reality involved patenting the genetic codes of plants and animals in the second biggest bank of bio-genetic resources in the world. Why? To provide essential raw material for biotechnologies that could revolutionize medicines and food production, but without sharing economic benefits with local people. You could call it corporate bio-piracy.

      PPP enthusiasts such as the Mexican president, Vicente Fox, considered this the only way to lift rural communities out of entrenched poverty.² However, the Zapatistas and the Convergence of Movements of the Peoples of the Americas (COMPA) – the fledgling regional coalition where Berta and Gustavo first met – saw PPP as a poverty plan masquerading as development, which would force thousands of rural families to migrate to overcrowded cities or north to the US. Auctioning off rivers, seabeds, fertile plains and forests to the private sector threatened to raze or prohibit access to vast swathes of the ancestral land and natural resources that define the economic, social and cultural survival of countless rural and indigenous peoples. Looking back, nowhere has this played out more flagrantly than in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a narrow, richly biodiverse strip of Mexican territory connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, which is home to Huave, Mixe, Zapotec, Zoque and Chontal communities. Its abundance of natural resources – oil, timber, rivers and minerals (silver, copper, iron, crystalline graphite, coal, gypsum and travertine) – has favoured scores of mining, infrastructure and energy projects including oil refineries, electricity substations, dams and massive wind farms. Communities complain that many of these megaprojects provide inadequate information, consultation and compensation, fuelling social opposition, military repression, environmental damage, evictions and forced migration.³ In Honduras, Berta warned back in 2001 that PPP would be a death sentence for the Lenca people, and the Agua Zarca dam turned out to be a perfect example of this.

      Berta was right: it was the PPP that killed her, according to Annie Bird.

      At the anti-capitalist gathering in downtown Quebec City, people had had enough of talking. It was time for direct action. But the summit organizers were determined to shield political leaders from the deafening crowds branded as anarchists by Canadian intelligence. A three-metre-high concrete and wire partition was erected around Parliament Hill as a first line of defence. Hundreds of riot cops unleashed a wave of brutality the protesters weren’t prepared for. Tear gas engulfed the city in dense, eye-stinging smoke. So much of it was fired that it seeped into the summit hall, forcing delegates to take cover. Berta and Gustavo stood in front of parliament facing the impenetrable chain of riot cops, among protesters drumming and singing. It struck Berta that the demonstration was too far back. ‘¡Hermano! Let’s get closer. Vamos,’ she shouted, grinning at Gustavo, grabbing one end of the blue and white Honduran flag. Gustavo seized the other end and they rushed forward into a cold jet of water from a cannon behind police lines. They were pushed back and soaked, the flag went flying. But Berta jumped up and yelled, ‘Let’s go again.’ This time, blinding tear gas forced the pair back. But they surged forward again and again, recalled Gustavo. ‘That was Berta. Always tenacious and always willing to put herself in the middle of every act of resistance. She never lost that energy.’

      ~

      COPINH, founded as a grassroots organization, managed to stay true to its roots partly because Berta was never power-hungry. Whenever possible, everywhere she went, busloads of COPINH members went with her, meaning