Sitting on a motorized canoe traveling between Mexico and Guatemala on the Umascinta River, I get the feeling that I'm heading for the strangest Anti-globalization meeting I've ever witnessed. An hour later, packed with four bus loads of participants from Mexico into the back of a lumber truck, standing room only, heading deep into the forests of Peten, that idea seems confirmed.

The typical image of the Anti-globalization movement is of Europeans and North American protestors camping in a major city and facing off against police at some meeting of a big multinational institution. Often, as with migrants last year in Genoa, the people in whose name the mobilization is happening are largely absent from the event. Whether dressed as a daisy or in solid black, the protestors often have a hard time describing why, specifically, they are protesting this particular meeting or institution. The meeting I'm heading to shatters that image. Surrounded by old growth forests, in the village of Union Maya Itzá, La Libertad, Peten, Indigenous and Internationals have gathered from the Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Belize, Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, Bolivia, the US, Italy, Germany and more (21 nations in all) to discuss how to battle the front line of Globalization in there lives.

While for many of us ‘Globalization’ is a nebulous term covering a multitude of sins, policies and institutions we object to, for the Indigenous peoples of the world it is a question of survival. Here in Central America they are facing direct and imminent attack from two distinct but related arms of the Globalization Machine. On the one hand, Mexican President Fox’s Plan Puebla Panama is trying to bring the “fruits of Globalization” to the region by building dams in the remote regions of Chiapas and Guatemala to drown out these centers of Indigenous resistance and rebellion, while relocating the refugees from the dams to industrial centers so that they can work in the sweatshops in the service of International Trade. On the other hand, traditional maize, the staple of the Indigenous diet, is being contaminated with genetically modified varieties coming out of the labs of Monsanto and other big biotech firms with potentially disastrous effects for the survival of these subsistence communities.

Since the contamination of Mexico’s maize was accidentally discovered last year there has been much controversy as to how it happened. It is illegal to plant genetically modified maize in Mexico, though, as is often true, good laws don’t make for good actions, particularly this part of the world where laws are largely irrelevant for the powerful. The facts on the ground, however, are that the homeland of maize, and the storehouse of it’s bio-diversity is now, possibly irreversibly, contaminated by the results of dubious laboratory experiments undertaken by multinational firms in pursuit of their own aims. Talking with one conference participant about this, the wiry four foot, ten inch, sixty-six year old farmer tells me that he is very concerned because of the problems of infertility related to GM maize. At first, I take his comment to refer to worries about the ‘terminator gene’ which Monsanto patented, and which insures that the crop resulting from the GM maize are sterile and cannot be replanted. This is certainly a major problem for indigenous farmers who are cultivating corn for their own subsistence and don’t have money to buy seed corn every year. Then, later, it occurs to me that he may have been talking about something very different. Over the 500 years of Indigenous resistance to Colonialism, the people of this region have repeatedly faced acts of unintended and intended genocide and many communities have not survived. It remains a preoccupation of the Indians in this area. Recent government projects have involved forced sterilization, and some Indigenous people refuse vaccinations for fear of secret plans to cause infertility. According to Michael Hansen from the Consumer Union, a California biotech firm is planning on splicing into maize the gene for an enzyme that kills human sperm. This would, in theory, be used only in limited applications to produce contraceptives, but the threat it presents is not lost on the Indigenous activists. In theory, genetically modified maize was not supposed to get mixed into the local Mexican crop, but it has, and other contamination and mixing is bound to occur.

The village of Union Maya Itzá, itself, is emblematic of the clash of forces in Central America. It is made up entirely of refugees from Guatemala’s long and bloody civil war who returned from Mexico in 1995, and have slowly built up a fragile but functioning economy based on sustainable forestry. The civil war was largely over the question of access to land, which in Guatemala is owned by three large companies, heirs to the United Fruit (now Del Monte) banana empire, an early pioneer in International Trade. Now that the inhabitants of Union Maya Itzá have started to rebuild their lives, they face being drowned by dams that would inundate one third of the Petén, Guatemala’s largest region.

Conference participants listen to a talk by a representative from the struggle against Chixoy dam in Guatemala, a project of the World Bank which in 1982 resulted in the massacre of almost 400 people resisting it’s construction. Despite their cheers and raised fists of defiance, those listening are often pragmatic when they speak individually. They know that Globalization uses whatever means necessary to achieve it’s aims. If the Governments make a decent offer, most presume that they will not be much resistance. The only hope to stop the dams would be war, and after more than 100,000 dead and missing in the Civil War, people don’t want to talk about war.

There is a lot of talk about communication and action plans. Working groups draw up plans to help build a regional network on dams as a first step towards cooperation on broader issues. A Honduran delegate from the Garifuna community (free blacks deported from the Caribbean Islands of Dominica and St. Vincent in the 19th century to break their resistance to British rule), encapsulates the sentiment. “I don’t like to always be talking about today, we need to think about tomorrow. We have to build an international resistance to have any chance, and we have to link everyone up from isolated villages to activists in developed world.”

This is the crux of the problem. Alone they know they have little chance, but with help from the outside world, there may be a possibility to keep history from repeating itself. It remains the best hope of the people of Central America in their fight against Globaization and to preserve their way of life. Without help from Europe and North America they will be left, once again, alone to face the soldiers guns as the bulldozers roll and the genetically modified corn seeps into their soil, eroding their dreams and way of life.

Francisco Rojas
frojas@genoaresistance.org
http://www.genoaresistance.org