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U.S. Plans Outline a Subsidized Pan-American Highway

Jones Report
January 8, 2008

U.S. Title Code TITLE 23 > CHAPTER 2 > § 212 provides for the construction and maintenance of the Inter-American Highway program in cooperation with the Governments of the American Republics in Central America (i.e. Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama).

“Title 23 of the US Code as currently published by the US Government reflects the laws passed by Congress as of Jan. 2, 2006.”

Under the code, the United States essentially pays for up to one-third of the total construction costs (depending on each nation’s wealth):

(a) Not to exceed one-third of the appropriation authorized for each fiscal year may be expended without requiring the country or countries in which such funds may be expended to match any part thereof, if the Secretary of State shall find that the cost of constructing said highway in such country or countries will be beyond their reasonable capacity to bear.

The U.S. also agrees to provide all the maintenance costs:

(5) will provide for the maintenance of said highway after its completion in condition adequately to serve the needs of present and future traffic.

The U.S. has cooperated with Latin America on highway systems since the first Pan American Highway Congress in Buenos Aires in 1925, but footing all the costs for infrastructure can’t be a good sign for expanded globalization to come.

This acceleration of hemispheric-consolidation only correlates with the passage CAFTA in the Central American States and the passage of ‘free trade’ agreements with Panama, Peru and Columbia during 2007. Further, Condoleezza Rice and President Bush have hailed the significant steps towards the broader ‘vision’ of a Pan-American Community.

“The founding ideal of our Pan-American Community, borne across many centuries and carried by us still, is the hope that life in the hemisphere would signify a break with the Old World, and a new beginning for all mankind,” Secretary Rice told the C.F.R. and the Organization of American States in October 2007.

“We now have the potential to create an unbroken chain of trading partners from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Circle,” Rice said to the OAS.

Vicente Fox has also advocated not only the North American Union, but hinted at a unified currency throughout the Americas sometime in the future during an appearance on Larry King Live.

An unbroken chain of trading partners– under ever-expanding ‘free trade’ blocs (yes, an oxymoron)– would certainly go hand-in-hand with an inter-connected, well-maintained highway– but subsidizing the expenses is no route to equal or independent nations inside a community, but rather a formula for guaranteeing centralized regional control.

That’s not to say that free travel and reasonably safe and convenient travel is not a worthwhile goal, but certainly many are concerned about the implications such a smaller hemisphere would mean for employment and wages. Even Mexican farmers are now protesting free trade, illegal immigration and the effects of NAFTA, a position American farmers likely never steered from.

Meanwhile, Mexico has already announced its intention to microchip migrant workers coming from Central and South America and other places.

L. Ronald Scheman, founder of the Pan American Development foundation and Senior Advisor to Kissinger McLarty Associates proposes that opportunities to harmonize the Americas can lead to long-term integration along the same route taken by the E.U.— early on, the E.U. was nothing more than a Coal and Steel Community which eventually solidified unification:

“To him, the strategy was clear. ‘This proposal [for a coal and steel community] has an essential political objective: to make a breach in the ramparts of national sovereignty, which will be narrow enough to secure consent — but deep enough to open the way toward the unity that is essential to peace [and we might add, for our purposes in the Americas, for development].'”