A plait of three colors.

• Author: Carr, Archie, III
• Position: Viewpoint - Brief Article

President Vicente Fox of Mexico has launched a regional economic development program called the Puebla-Panama Plan. He has received encouragement from President George W. Bush; he has secured financial commitments from the Inter-American Development Bank; he has gained the approval of other governments in Mesoamerica. Implementation of the PPP is imminent.

Thus far, the PPP appears to emphasize massive investments in fundamental infrastructure, including highways and electric power grids, in several southern states of Mexico and all seven countries in Central America. The notion of an "industrial corridor" comes to my mind, reaching from the heart of Mexico all the way to Panama. If it had a color, it would be gray, I think; the color of asphalt.

Is that gray corridor a bad thing? I'm not an expert on macroeconomics, but I am an Eisenhower-era witness to the interstate highway system in the United States. Superhighways will probably be good for the Mesoamerican region, at least in terms of economic development and cultural integration.

But, there are two corridors already out there in Mesoamerica, two strands of other hues. To achieve the greatest measure of progress in the region, it is incumbent upon President Fox and his allies to bind these two corridors, to plait them, with the gray of the PPP, into a cord of greater strength.

One of these corridors is green. Since 1990, on behalf of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), I have worked on a biological corridor for Central America, a greenway, to contrast with the gray of the PPP.

At its inception, we called our corridor project the Paseo Pantera (Path of the Panther), after one of the great cats, the puma, which would need to move from park to park or country to country in Central America in order to find prey and mates; to find the wherewithal to survive. Our suggestion was to facilitate that movement with an international greenway or corridor system. For the sake of wildlife survival, the idea was to link together the remaining "fragmented" habitats in the contiguous countries of Central America and their neighboring states in Mexico.

With support from the U.S. Agency for International Development, we refined the concept of the corridor and aired it to audiences that grew in size and interest over a period of five years. Eventually, the seven countries of the region adopted the reasoning offered by the Paseo Pantera project. To implement it, they formulated a new project known as...