A Brief Economic History of Mexico Pt. 2
This is the continuation of the post I published yesterday, on Mexico’s economic history. It can be found here.
The North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), which went into effect on January 1, 1994, basically wrote many of the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) into law. Not surprisingly, international corporations had a large hand in crafting the legislation, and when NAFTA was ratified and all final foreign investment restrictions were stripped away, it created the largest contiguous free trade zone in the world. In Mexico, it scrapped Article 27 of the Constitution, paving the way for the sale of community-owned land. How did Clinton, Salinas, and Cartier sell this plan? They claimed by phasing out trade barriers and encouraging private investment, NAFTA would allow each country to do what it did best, with jobs and a rise in standards of living for everyone. For Mexico, this was said to be factory production, though the indigenous farmers of Oaxaca certainly disagree. Clearly, NAFTA wasn’t for them, or any other Mexican farmers for that matter: Mexico lost two million jobs (NAFTA created an estimated 800,000, though many of these have since moved to cheaper Asian labor markets) and corn farmers saw a 70% decrease in income from 1998-2008! In the same period agri-giant Cargill’s net income went up 660%! In reality, NAFTA has done little for Mexico except cement rising inequality and push the poorest even deeper into poverty: the richest 1/5 of the population receives over 50% of annual income while the bottom 1/5 of the population receives only 3.5%.
And since 9/11, U.S. led foreign policy has seen the convolution of economic and security policy in the name of keeping us safe. There is no better example than the Security & Prosperity Partnership (SPP), commonly called NAFTA plus, comprised of the executive powers of the three member nations and the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC), a group of 30 CEOs from some of the largest corporations in each country. This partnership marks a disturbing trend of militarization to protect economic interests along with the characterization of economic problems like migration as security issues. The largest policy initiative to come from the SPP has been the Meridia Initiative, which provides 1.6 billion in military aid over three years to Mexico for “counterterrorism, counternarcotics, and border security.” However, a concurrent jump in human rights abuses and the Mexican government’s usually brutal repression of social movements, occurring often in Oaxaca, point to another reality altogether, one in which the symptoms of failed economic policies are violently swept under the rug in the name of security. Indeed, every day since we’ve arrived here we’ve seen los federales driving around in shiny new Ford 150s, with three soldiers in full riot gear and M16’s standing in the bed (they also drive Dodge Chargers). And I can’t help delving into this a little bit here, but don’t believe for a second that any of the Meridia Initiative’s designers actually expect this aid to help win the drug war; it’s based on the same failed model as the Columbia Plan (supply-side only), and no one really wants to win the war on drugs anyway, it employs too many people and injects too much money into the economies of both countries. This lack of sincerity on the part of the plan’s architects only further reveals its true intention to protect the economic interests of corporations, like the government’s disturbing use of force to break up Oaxacans peaceful blockading a polluting mine owned by Canadian giant Fortuna Silver Mines. I highly recommend the linked article on this story; it’s hard to doubt any of this once you find out what’s really going on on the ground down here.
Tomorrow we will be leaving for Barranca Fierro Mixteca, but we should have a post up on our second day in Santa Maria Tindu before we go.
–John