With the refrain that "El Istmo es nuestros," (the Isthmus is ours) the "National Meeting for Responses and Resistance to Neoliberal Globalization" got under way last month in the village of San Juan Guichicovi, Oaxaca, Mexico. The meeting, or "encuentro" was part of a series of similar national and international conferences that have taken place throughout Mexico and Central America at least since 1997.

Some 400 participants, representing more than 130 organizations from throughout Mexico, and a few from elsewhere, gathered in this small town in the foothills of the Southern Sierra, rising over the plains of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. For three days, May 16 to 18, they discussed strategies of resistance and proactive alternatives to neoliberal projects like the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP).

San Juan Guichicovi is a Mixe town of a few thousand people, where the Mixe language is more commonly spoken than Spanish, and where the primary school is bilingual, assuring that the younger generation is equipped for the increasingly globalized world without losing contact with their roots.

This insistence on maintaining their culture in the face of the monoculture designs of neoliberalism is one of the reasons that brought the encuentro here. As a local school teacher told me, this region was never really conquered by the Spanish. "Only little by little, largely through the inroads of Catholic priests who told the people, Tyour language is worthless, your customs and your clothes are backward,' has our way of life been eroded by the outside world." Yet San Juan Guichicovi remains unconquered, and if the Encuentro is any evidence, it intends to stay that way.

The Encuentro was convened by the Mexican Alliance for the Self Determination of Communities (AMAP, for its initials in Spanish) and hosted by the Union of Indigenous Campesinos of the Northern Zone of the Isthmus (UCIZONI). It was attended by people from throughout Mexico, and special guests and observers from Nicaragua, Honduras, the US, Canada, Italy and Spain. An indigenous leader from Panama, who had been invited to attend was refused a visa by the Mexican government, "demonstrating that the globalization of the Fox government is not intended for the benefit of ordinary People," according to Carlos Beas, one of the main organizers.

With 6000 members in 70 communities, UCIZONI is a strong political force in the region, and is allied with similar organizations in the Isthmus and throughout Mexico. The municipal government of San Juan Guichicovi is part of that broad network and made itself available, including the police department, to welcome and support the conference.

The main effort of the conference was to strengthen networks and strategies of resistance in the face of privatization schemes, the FTAA and its linchpin, the PPP.

While the FTAA is a trade agreement with an uncertain future, the PPP is a linked series of development projects, many, such as superhighways and energy projects that are currently underway. And if the PPP is the key to perfecting the FTAA, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec is key for the PPP.

The Isthmus, the narrowest part of Mexico, stretches some 140 miles between the Pacific port of Salina Cruz, in the state of Oaxaca, and Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico.

This strategic region has long played a part in the schemes of globalization. Before seizing on Panama as the route for the canal that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec was considered as a potential canal zone. Now, with the Panama Canal at its absolute capacity for handling inter-ocean traffic, International Capital once again has its greedy eye on the Isthmus.

The new plans view the Isthmus, along with similar corridors throughout the narrow waist of Central America, such as in Nicaragua, as sites for constructing "dry canals" -- systems of ports, superhighways, railways and pipelines facilitating the flow of raw materials and finished goods. But more than simply transit corridors, plans for the region include the construction of large hydroelectric facilities to feed vast complexes of factories lining the dry canal routes, where raw materials and components shipped in from the west can be assembled prior to being shipped eastward, and vice versa. Combined with plantations of fast growing Eucalyptus (for paper), mines, oil wells and similar projects, Central America, from Puebla to Panama is intended to be transformed a conveniently located, massive sweatshop, serving the desires of multinational corporations and their customers, and feeding the consolidation of the FTAA.

First proposed by Mexican President Vicente Fox in 2001 as an economic development plan for the relatively poor regions of Southern Mexico and Central America, the PPP incorporates many lesser projects planned and initiated over the years by organizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank and the IMF. As is usual with the projects of these institutions, living breathing human beings are absent from their calculations, replaced by consumers, workers and the inevitable displaced.

In the three days of the conference in San Juan Guichicovi, there was no lack of stories of the depredations and destruction wrought by multinational corporations and their government lackeys -- superhighways whose construction is destroying ecosystems, cultural and archeological sites and disrupting communities, reservoirs for hydroelectric projects that will inundate farmland and displace people, false accusations and arrests and even the murder of people who dare to resist the demands of capital -- stories that made it quite clear that, for the campesinos of Mexico and Central America, globalization is not an abstract bugaboo, but a matter of life and death.

As response to the architects of "development" projects which are always proposed to lift the "backward" communities of the global South out of their poverty, Ellyn Gomez of Nicaragua said "We indigenous of Nicaragua don't live by dollars, but by the natural diversity of our land." She, like her Mexican counterparts at the conference thoroughly reject development that insists they sell that diversity in exchange for the monoculture and maquiladoras of neoliberalism.

Carlos Beas echoed the rejection of those who want to "construct a world where only the lifestyle of North America can exist -- the unnatural lifestyle of the television." Reminding us that the many heads of the hydra are all part of the same body, he equated the war the USA is waging against the people of Iraq with the low intensity war that is being waged to force globalization on the people of Central America, which is brought by the same people who have initiated the numerous coup attempts against the government of Venezuela, and the list goes on.

In the face of this empire of greed, the encuentro was not only a forum to share experiences and brainstorm strategies, but was itself an example of another way to think and another way to live -- a way of life that already serves its people, as it has for thousands of years and doesn't need neoliberal megaprojects to improve it.

For three days the 400 attendees enjoyed the hospitality of our hosts in San Juan Guichicovi. Sleeping on straw mats in school classrooms, eating three communal meals a day prepared by the women of UCIZONI and sharing experiences with those from similar and from widely different backgrounds, the encuentro not only developed plans for resistance but strengthened the network of communities that is the backbone of that resistance.

Among the decisions coming out of the encuentro was the desire to broaden alliances throughout Mexico and elsewhere, with groups whose own individual struggles are tied in with the greater struggle against neoliberal globalization. Included in this was the clear need for education at all levels, from remote indigenous villages to international forums. As part of this effort, the encuentro called for the establishment of a communication network including micro-radio, web sides and print projects as well as workshops and road shows to disseminate information not only concerning the implications of the PPP and the FTAA but also the effects of privatization of energy, transgenic crops and other development schemes. Various committees were designated to coordinate efforts to reassert control over energy use, food production, promote Fair Trade commerce, and facilitate communication and education among other projects.

For more information see www.mesoamericaresiste.org (Mexico.), www.acerca.org (USA)