We are pleased to pass on the following translation of an interview with Ted Lewis (Global Exchange's Mexico Program Director) by Blanche Petrich, long-time correspondent for La Jornada.

PLEASE NOTE that the interview states that three Global Exchange tour participants were expelled from Mexico. This is inaccurate. In fact, the three were only cited by immigration authorities. The two US citizens left the country voluntarily before completing the citation process. The Japanese national remains in Mexico where she lives and works.

La Jornada
January 20, 1999

Blanche Petrich § The U.S. non-government organization Global Exchange has organized its reality tours in Mexico for five years. It was not until the last trip in December - number 25 - that the organization's objective "collided" with the new policies of the immigration authorities and provoked the expulsion of three of their tourists from the country.

"There is nothing illegal about our project. Obviously certain sectors of the government don't like us," commented Ted Lewis, director of the organization, in a telephone interview from San Francisco. "Maybe," he conjectured, "it was because in Washington, the Leahy Resolution is heating up again." The initiative, although it does not have the force of law, proposes that the Executive Branch pressure the Mexican government to offer solutions in the conflict zone. "I imagine that the mere mention of the resolution causes vibrations in Mexico."

Lewis believes that the public education that Global Exchange carries out in the United States about the situation in the Mexican conflict areas, in particular Chiapas, provokes uncomfortable questions in some politicized media about Washington's military policy towards Mexico, and questions actions such as the fact that since 1997 Mexican officials have been the largest group to receive training in the various Pentagon installations. (In 1998, 829 Mexican military personnel received some type of training in U.S. military schools, 305 of them at the School of the Americas.)

La Jornada: Is that why you are the "bad guys" for the National Immigration Institute now?

Ted Lewis: I can't imagine anything else. We have been organizing these tours in Mexico for five years now . We have brought approximately 500 people to Michoacan, Tabasco, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Hidalgo, and Baja California.

LJ: The criticism made about you is that you promote "revolutionary tourism"...

TL: And that we make money off of the people's pain. That is what they say. What we try to do is allow the common citizen of the United States get to know the other side of the reality of the people, an alternative to conventional tourism. It is said generally that the U.S. population knows very little about what happens outside their borders. Well, that is what we are trying to remedy. We direct ourselves towards particularly sensitive situations. During apartheid we brought a lot of people to South Africa. We have gone to Iraq, Cuba, Haiti. Our focus is to educate at the grassroots level about countries that suffer from the strong influence of the United States.

LJ: Why Mexico?

TL: We started with the subject of immigration, learning and disseminating information about the living conditions of Mexican immigrants on the border, in U.S. factories on both sides, in California [labor] camps, or the prisoners held illegally in U.S. prisons. Later we expanded our project to other regions.

LJ: Who do you appeal to?

TL: Business men and women, people of color, students and workers. The projects are non-profit. With the process of learning about Mexico we hope to generate a climate in the United Sates for changing the policies of our government.

LJ: So they do have political ends.

TL: Yes, regarding the internal policies of the United States, not abroad. It is our right and our goal.

LJ: What type of clientele is drawn by these tours?

TL: Anyone that is interested in Mexico. It could be someone that has been to Acapulco or Mazatlan once and was left very unsatisfied, suspecting that behind the tourist facade there is much more to see. Or an Internet surfer interested in Mexico. Our basic package costs 850 dollars, which includes the round-trip flight from Mexico City to Tuxtla Gutierrez, accommodation in inexpensive hotels, and bus rentals. Intensive working days are organized -- starting early in the morning -- and full of meetings, lectures, and many hours on the road. At night our tourists arrive to the hotel tired and impressed, with many questions and concerns. For a middle class citizen from cities in the U.S. it can be quite a shock, that contact with reality. But we can say that the general reaction is not one of pity. More than the misery, [our participants] are impressed by the dignity of the people, the richness of their community life, the refusal to be victims of poverty. The best part of the trip, for each of them, has been getting to know the incredible capacity of the Mexican people to overcome great difficulties.

LJ: Where did the problems come from? How did it arrive to the point where three of your tourists were expelled?

TL: We became worried in May when groups of human rights observers began to have problems in obtaining visas. I consulted with the Mexican consul in San Francisco, who at that time was Cesar Lajoud. We agreed to make clear the difference between observers on a Global Exchange mission and tourists. For the first we ask for observer visas, and for the second tourist visas. Later we learned that after the incident with the Italian observers, the consul was accused of being too friendly with Global Exchange.

This last New Year's trip was promoted by Internet. We had no problems obtaining the visas with the new consul in San Francisco, Carlos Tello. It was not until the newspaper Cuarto Poder, of Tuxtla, started a campaign against us, titled something like "800 dollars to get to know misery," that the government began to pound the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center for 'promoting revolutionary tourism' and things like that. There were threats that they would apply Article 33 against us if we organized a tour for the fifth anniversary of the Zapatista uprising.

Despite the climate, we continued to move forward with the plan, informing our tourists of the risks, advising them that it was possible that they would be detained and cited by Immigration. Of the 14 delegation members, 11 decided to go, and on the way back from Oventic a military check-point detained them. There they chose at random the names of two Americans and one Japanese citizen. The rest is a known story.

LJ: Will the project of Global Exchange continue?

TL: We think so. There is no reason to consider our tourism illegal.