Standing at the end of Avenida Madero (Madero Avenue) on the last day of January 2008, a stone throw from the Zócalo or City Center of Mexico City, I am swept along in a sea of thousands of farmers and laborers, carrying signs and banners. Streaming from the historic statue of the Angel of Independence, symbolically setting fire to a decrepit tractor, one hundred and fifty thousand small farmers, teachers, workers, and neighborhood activists are marching to repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and end the illegal “dumping” by Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto of billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidized U.S. agricultural crops–beans, rice, sugar, powdered milk, soybeans, and genetically engineered corn–onto the Mexican market.
NAFTA, pushed through in Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. in 1994 over the opposition of the majority of North Americans, is literally driving Mexico’s thirty million small farmers and villagers off the land and into the slums of Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Tijuana, Juarez, and other cities; or else, following the path of twelve million others before them, across the increasingly dangerous border into the United States to find work. Rural villages in Mexico have become literal economic ghost towns of women, children, and the elderly. In some municipalities, 80-90% of the men and boys are gone, increasingly joined by the young women.
A dark-skinned peasant woman, wearing her kitchen apron, approaches me. I stand out in the crowd, an obvious gringo with my Code Pink anti-war T-shirt and my Organic Consumers Association baseball cap. The farm woman patiently explains to me how NAFTA has broken up her family. Her two sons and her daughter, like millions of other jovenes (young people), she explains, desperate for a living wage, did not want to leave their community or abandon their families, but they had no choice. And now, with the militarized border, so-called illegal aliens, like her children, can no longer take the risk of coming back home to visit. Her sons and daughter, like most other immigrants, send back remesas (money) to help support their families. This twenty-four billion dollar annual lifeline is the only thing standing between Mexico¹s rural population and utter poverty.
Moving up behind the farmers, flanked by banners protesting the imminent sell-off of Mexico’s publicly owned electricity and oil industries, union workers and students fill the massive square in front of the National Palace. Mexican workers, whose minimum wage is 1/12 that of the U.S., are already suffering from high prices for electricity and gasoline. But once U.S. and European corporations take over the petroleum and electricity sectors, prices will inevitably skyrocket.
Passionate speakers from the podium call for a repeal of NAFTA and the restoration of food and energy sovereignty, but everyone knows that Big Business and Agribusiness call the shots in Mexico City, Ottawa, and Washington. Short of a miracle, rural and urban poverty will increase, as will the power and obscene wealth of the industrial agriculture, oil, and utilities multinationals. In July 2006 Mexicans launched an impressive though ultimately abortive ballot box revolution, turning out in droves for the anti-NAFTA presidential candidate, Manuel López Obrador, from the left-of-center PRD (Party of Democratic Revolution). Although Obrador won the popular vote, according to reliable exit polls and election experts, in a U.S.-style electronic vote theft, the elections were stolen, and Felipe Calderón, a pro-NAFTA corporatist was installed as President. As a Mexican activist friend reminds me today, we are at the end of the road for polite protest. Nothing short of a second Mexican (and American) revolution will save us.
Corporate globalization, savagely embodied by NAFTA
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/12/6994/
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