How NAFTA Unleashed the Violence in Mexico

[Judi Lynn]

How NAFTA Unleashed the Violence in Mexico
By Victor M. Quintana | 7 / February / 2014

The Mexican countryside is not the same twenty years after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Rural Mexico is on fire, and not just because of the “bad guys”–the drug cartels and groups of hit men and thugs.


Criminal violence is not the only kind of violence, nor is it the factor that unleashed the humanitarian crisis in so many parts of rural Mexico. The drastic transformation of public agricultural policies–brought about by structural adjustment programs and the trade opening whose crowning moment was the passage of NAFTA–generated the conditions for the emergence of multiple forms of violence in the Mexican countryside.

Mexican presidents since 1983 pushed through a series of economic adjustment polices, including the expulsion of all seasonal farmers from the rural credit system. The price of fuel shot up: in 1983, a liter of gas cost 1.36 pesos; now it is more than 12 pesos. Prices began to drip for crops produced by small farmers since guarantee prices were eliminated. New subsidies were created, like Procampo, but these went mostly to large producers.

In spite of many warnings from farmer organization and researchers, NAFTA was signed when Mexican basic grains producers, especially peasants and medium-sized producers, could not compete–in terms of climatic conditions or subsidies or technology or governmental support program–with the most powerful agriculture in the world.

Without being able to compete with U.S. agriculture under the terms of the trade opening, hundreds of thousands of peasant groups went broke. Migration to the cities and the United States shot up. According to the Ministry of Labor, since 1994 1,780,000 people left the countryside. The Ministry of Social Development found that each day an average of 600 peasant farmers leave the countryside. Rural communities are being left without young men, converted into populations of women, children and old people. Community life has broken down; many town organizations have closed down. This is violence. Silent, but real.

More:
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/11427

[Peace Patriot]

1. It is very important to understand what NAFTA did to Mexico's traditional farming communities,

not only because it is the root cause of violence in these communities, but also because it is the pattern for numerous other destructions of local farmers and their communities wherever U.S. "free trade for the rich" has struck, including other countries in Latin America--notably Guatemala and Honduras (where most of the current child refugees are from), and Jamaica (famous documentary about that one)--but also in Asia (many small farmer suicides in South Korea, for instance). Latin America has suffered the simultaneous blight of the vastly corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs."

The Corporate News talks about "gangs" but they never identify the biggest gang of all--U.S.-based, transglobal corporations and their U.S. "police state" chaos-making agencies.

[Judi Lynn]

2. I had not discovered the information regarding South Korean farmers. Familiar story, isn't it?

Such long-reaching tentacles. The effects are the same everywhere they touch, too.

The same innocent, non-greedy, modest kinds of people suffer everywhere this happens, people who are simply trying to survive, support their loved ones, keep them from suffering.

[Peace Patriot]

3. U.S. "free trade for the rich" also destroys knowledge itself,

that passes from the elders in a traditional farming family to the young people. This is critically important knowledge about how to farm--knowledge of plants, animals, environments, products. When the elders in the family are bankrupted by U.S. "free trade for the rich" policies, they lose their farms and all of the knowledge behind what they do--handed down over centuries, even millennia--is lost as the farm passes to other hands--often to a transglobal corporation which consolidates it with other lands to grow monoculture cash crops (like palm oil or soy) or develops it (real estate schemes, strip malls)--and the family with the no-how to produce food disperses, with the kids often relocating to cities to become cheap labor for other businesses, and the elders dependent on them and feeling useless and depressed. This is precisely what happened in Jamaica, according to a documentary I saw some time ago--they even created a dock area free of Jamaican labor laws to directly manufacture and ship products to other countries, and the kids of the dairy farmers and other food producers who had been driven out of business by U.S. Big Ag dumping, ended up working for shit wages with no rights. I will never forget what a dairy farmer said in that documentary, that the saddest thing to him was that he could not pass his knowledge along to his children.

[Judi Lynn]

4. He understands what kind of committment, personal investment it takes to do this work correctly,

to avoid destroying everything in one's path. He understood the need to preserve the environment, rather than to rip it to shreds, and leave its remnants behind for future generations to try to sustain.

Food producers in the past learned how to do it successfully. The man you mention without a doubt is totally aware how much people like him are needed now, and always throughout the entire future of the human race.

What a shame those who know and care enough to preserve, protect (real conservatives) have been abused, exploited, murdered by the political conservative plague upon the human race.

The image you summon of an older man carrying that sadness, that awareness is painful. Something must be done, enough people have to care, and have enough strength and wisdom to function when they are needed in the future. They will be needed. A whole world can never benefit from leaders like the trash leading the greed-based governments now.