CIUDAD OBREGON, Sonora , Nov. 12, 2007 (LPAC)--Over 500 people overflowed this city's principal auditorium on Nov. 9, for the regional forum entitled "Let Us Build the Bridge to the Future, the PLHINO of the Twenty-first Century: Water, Energy and Food for Mexico." The conference was organized by the 15-organization Pro-Plhino Committee, founded at the initiative of Lyndon LaRouche's associates in the region, to assemble the political juggernaut required to finally get construction going on the long-planned, tri-state water management project known as the North West Hydraulic Plan, or PLHINO.

The discussion was shaped by the intense national debate and shock over the horrible destruction just wrecked on the south of the country by heavy rains, precisely because long-planned necessary water projects were not built.

As presented with beautiful, detailed maps by Mexican engineer Manuel Frias Alcaracaz, the PLHINO entails a 400-plus kilometer-long set of dams, tunnels and canals, bringing the waters of 16 rivers from the state of Nayarit to the dry but fertile lands of neighboring Sinoloa and Sonora, opening up 700,000 new hectares of land for farming, while generating electricity and jobs in all three states. Pro-Plhino coordinator and LaRouche associate Alberto Vizcarra Osuna detailed how such state-directed infrastructure projects as the PLHINO are a matter of {national} interest, for Mexico to secure its food sovereignty.

The centerpiece of the five hour forum, was a presentation by Executive Intelligence Review's Dennis Small, on Lyndon LaRouche's global strategy to save civilization from financial collapse and a new dark age, by mobilizing global cooperation behind great infrastructure projects. Not only must Mexico build the PLHINO, Small argued, but the United States and Mexico, must establish exemplary cooperation, along with Canada, in jointly building the gigantic North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) project, to transport waters currently flowing into the Arctic Ocean from Canada and Alaska, down through the western United States, and into northern Mexico, including into Sonora's Yaqui River .

The audience responded enthusiastically, remarking: "the PLHINO is good, but why stop there? NAWAPA, the Bering Straits Tunnel project: now those are {big}!"

Participation in the conference revealed the political army forming for a return to great state-directed infrastructure: two federal senators and several federal Congressmen from the states of Sonora and Sinoloa, Sonoran state legislators and officials, mayors from across southern Sonora, national and regional peasant leaders, students, farmers and labor representatives.

The conference was closed by Sonora's Senator Alfonso Elias Serrano and Governor Eduardo Bours, both of whom endorsed the PHLINO, and the idea of "thinking big," as necessary to secure Mexico's future.