MEXICO:
NAFTA and Zapatistas both reach 10-year anniversaries


John Ross

Ten years on, NAFTA’s benefits are dubious and Zapatistas reaffirm their autonomy.

Just after midnight, the pitch-black New Year’s night suddenly came alive with darting shadows. The slap-slap of rubber boots against the slick pavement echoed throughout the silent neighborhoods on the outskirts of San Cristóbal de las Casas, in Chiapas, Mexico’s most southern and impoverished state.

Across the narrow Puente Blanco, dark columns jogged in military cadence. With their features hidden behind ski-masks and bandannas, men and women advanced on the city center.

So it began, the rebellion of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), Jan. 1st, 1994, in the first hour that the North American Free Agreement (NAFTA) took effect.

During the run-up to NAFTA, then president Carlos Salinas (1988-94) had bragged that the trade treaty would elevate Mexico into the first world, but that day’s takeover of San Cristobal and six other county seats in southeastern Chiapas by dirt-poor Indian farmers forcefully reminded the nation that it was still deeply mired in the third. The Zapatista uprising acutely embarrassed Salinas at the beginning of a tumultuous election year and he eventually left office in disgrace.

Ten years later, Mexico remains in the third world with one of the widest income divides between rich and poor outside of Africa, a recent World Bank report said.

Another World Bank report issued in anticipation of NAFTA’s 10th anniversary concludes that while the trade treaty has spurred Mexico’s economic development, the benefits of NAFTA have been unequal across sectors and region, especially in the south where the poorest Mexicans live.

While the World Bank study, called “Lessons from NAFTA for Latin America and the Caribbean Countries: A Summary of Research Findings” says Mexican farmers, even those living at the subsistence level, were not adversely affected by trade accord, OXFAM takes issue with this view.

An OXFAM report issued in August on the situation of corn farmers says real prices for Mexican corn have declined more than 70 percent since NAFTA’s implementation in 1994. As a result 15 million Mexican who depend on the crop have seen a sharp decline in incomes.

According to a recently released Carnegie Endowment for International Peace study, 1.3 million farmers here have abandoned their plots as the direct result of the inundation of NAFTA-driven imports (LP, Jan. 15, 2003) — Mexico will import 6 million tons of corn in 2004, 60 percent of it thought to be genetically modified (LP, March 25, 2002 and Dec. 3, 2003).

As the Zapatistas foretold a decade ago, the trade treaty would soon sound a death knell for Mexican campesinos. Since NAFTA was signed, over 3,000 Mexicans, many of them displaced farmers, have lost their lives crossing the northern border to seek gainful employment (LP, April 9, 2003). Although NAFTA was billed as a deterrent to “illegal” immigration, the numbers have actually gone up since 1994, the Pew Hispanic Insatiate concludes — about 650,000 Mexicans, almost all of them undocumented, have arrived in the United States each year since Mexico’s 1995 peso devaluation crisis.

The massive importation of genetically modified corn has produced contamination of native seed in the Indian highlands of central and southern Mexico. The destruction of ancient corn in the very place in which it was first cultivated is a frontal attack on biodiversity but it is not the only downside of how NAFTA has stained the environment here at a cost the Carnegie report calculates at US$36 billion.

One example: since NAFTA kicked in, southern Mexico has lost 2 million acres (800,000 hectares) of tropical forests to transnational timber giants like the Boise Cascade Corporation. Industrial workers have fared no better under NAFTA’s heavy hand. The invasion of manufactured goods has decimated national industries from textiles to toys. Mexico’s banking system is now all but wholly owned by U.S., Canadian, and European banks and its railroads now belong to Union Pacific.

Although trade between the U.S. and Mexico has multiplied 300 fold since that fateful Jan. 1, only half a million jobs have been created south of the border. Most of the new jobs created as a result of NAFTA were in the maquiladora sector along the border where transnationals were flocking to absorb cheap Mexican labor. In the past two years, however, more than 600 foreign-owned “maquiladoras” have fled Mexico for lower wage climes like Honduras, Haiti and China (LP, Nov. 18, 2002).

Meanwhile, a quarter of a million maquiladora workers are not working and Mexico is experiencing its highest unemployment numbers since the 1995 crisis. Real wages have fallen by 3.4 percent since Jan 1. 1994, the Carnegie report says.

U.S. efforts to extend NAFTA’s dubious benefits all the way to Tierra Del Fuego via the Free Trade Area of the Americas) have hit a wall as leery Latin leaders like Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva resist Washington’s commercial hegemony. Rather than suffer another loss of face on top of the failed World Trade Organization negotiations in Cancun in September, at the ALCA summit in Miami in November, the U.S. signed off on a non-accord that would allow any Latin signatory to opt out of protocols in the accord with which it did not agree.

If NAFTA has had a rocky row to hoe, the Zapatistas too have traveled an arduous track since that night ten years ago. Invaded, occupied (18,000 Mexican army troops still patrol the highlands and jungle of southeastern Chiapas), and massacred (46 Tzotzil Indian supporters at Acteal six years ago this Christmas), the rebels have also been attacked by the political parties and suffered indifference from congress, the courts and much of the press.

But the Zapatista movement has survived and ten years later, with a boost from national and international non-government organizations (NGOs) and a fair trade price for their organic coffee, they are expanding infrastructure. Rebuffed by the modified indigenous rights bill (LP, March 26, 2001), the EZLN is building its own autonomy. Thirty-eight autonomous municipalities under Zapatista influence now exist in this heavily-Indian state.

This past summer, the Zapatistas reformed their organizational structure, creating Committees of Good Government (“Juntas de Buen Gobierno”) at five regional “caracoles” (literally “spirals’) or political and cultural centers, establishing regional autonomy as a living reality, at least in southeastern Chiapas.