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O'Neill, Brendan

Geography

2005

MA

Over the past decade the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has provided more funding than any other multilateral development bank to 'develop' Latin America. Today, the IDB is sponsoring a new regionalism project called the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP). The goal of the PPP is to coordinate and integrate the economic, social, and human development agendas of the region between Puebla, Mexico and Panama. I demonstrate that the primary justification for the IDB' s case for the PPP is the perception that the space of and in Mesoamerica (Puebla, Mexico to Panama) is not currently organized as it should be. Thus, the PPP prioritizes the construction and integration of the region's main ports, industrial centers, economic clusters and corridors to promote neoliberal economic growth at the regional scale. The IDB limits its imagination of the prospects for Mesoamerica's 'development' within a development discourse that constructs Mesoamerica as a coherent region competing against other developing world regions. Despite the IDB's rhetoric of 'sustainability' or 'participatory development' the IDB is discursively and materially re-making the space within (and of) Mesoamerica through the PPP according to the logics of neoliberalism and this will reproduce spatial, social, economic and ecological injustice in the region.