CU Wild, the Environmental Justice Steering Committee and the Student Environmental Action Coalition are bringing the Beehive Collective to campus Thursday for an interactive, graphic workshop presenting the third installment of their regional mural series.

Mesoamerica Resiste, a mural five years in the making, is a "metaphorical journey through the brutal and courageous history of Central America."

The series as a whole was created in response to Plan Puebla Panama (now Project Mesoamerica), a series of neoliberal reforms put forth in 2001 by the president of Mexico and the Interamerican Development Bank.

The murals depict the effects of trade liberalization efforts on the peoples and places of southern Mexico and Central America.

The Beehive Design Collective -- a nonprofit, volunteer-driven, political arts organization based in eastern Maine -- is headed this way on Thursday.

The group's mission is to "cross-pollinate the grassroots" through the creation of images as an effective medium for deconstructing and educating the public about complex geopolitical issues.

The bees create collaborative, hand-illustrated posters of dizzying intricacy that are patchwork "quilts" of personal stories related to them in their travels by communities in the global south.

In their incendiary "Plan Colombia" presentation, the bees take participants on a "tour" through a larger-than-life graphic narrative of the multifold effects of globalization and "drug war" policies in the Andean region of Colombia.

Interweaving anecdotes and statistics, they perforate dubious "drug war" rhetoric and expose broad connections between militarism and resource extraction.

The Beehive Collective is currently touring the United States to raise funds for the printing and distribution of their trilogy finale graphic.

This event is designed to educate and raise questions in the CU community, and to aid in channeling concerns and ideas to the participating groups and organizations.

For more information visit www.beehivecollective.org or ecenter.colorado.edu.

Andrea Zaragoza-Ballesteros is the diversity outreach coordinator for the CU Environmental Center.