Section III
Poverty and Misery Aggravation by NAFTA
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Poverty and Misery in Mexico
Since 1982, when Mexico agreed to begin "structural adjustment," privatization and deregulation have contributed to ever more concentration of income and wealth. The massive transfer of resources from the salaried workforce to the owners and controllers of capital, and from public control and accountability to a small number of private elite, has proven the "trickle up" rather than trickle down reality. Over the past decade the preexisting gap between rich and poor in Mexico has continued to widen:
| Receipt of National Income1 |
| | 1984 | 1992 |
| Richest 20% | 48.4% | 54.2% |
| Poorest 20% | 5% | 4.3% |
Under President Salinas (1988-1994) the number of billionaires rose from 2 to 24, while nearly 20% of the population (over 17 million people) subsisted on less than the equivalent of $350 per person per year. The assets of one of the richest men in Mexico ($6 billion) actually totals more than the annual income of the poorest 17 million people combined.2
Half of Mexico's 93 million people continue to live at or below the poverty level.3
Malnutrition now afflicts from 40-65% of the population, with the worst cases generally found in the impoverished Indigenous communities, where it approaches 85%. Infant deaths due to malnutrition tripled during the period of economic restructuring, 1980-l992.4
The diet of 50% of all of Mexico's inhabitants falls below the minimum daily nutritional standard (2,340 calories) established by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Each year 158,000 Mexican children under 5 years of age die from diseases related to malnutrition. This means that 433 children die every day in Mexico for lack of nutritious food.5
Meanwhile about 20-25% of the Mexican population comprise the business oriented, western thinking residents, living in an extension of the U.S. economy. This aspect of the population, some 18-23 million people, thrive on the NAFTA-driven economy. This suggests that the remaining 70-75 million Mexicans are either below poverty or in a marginal zone.6
As stated above, the number of billionaires under President Salinas rose from 2 to 24. But 20 of the world's richest 100 people now live in Mexico,7 even though Mexico has but 1.5% of the world's population. Twenty-four of the wealthiest Mexicans in 1994 together had more wealth than the poorest 25 million.8
The state of Chiapas has a population of about 3.5 million living in 111 municipalities. About 1 million are considered Indigenous. Half do not have potable water. Two thirds have no sewage. Seventy two of every 100 children do not finish the first grade. Demographically, Chiapas is considered the poorest of all of Mexico's 31 states.9 However a mere 20 of Chiapas' families own 18.4 million acres while the majority of Indigenous campesinos own less than 2 acres each.10
However, in terms of resources, Chiapas is considered by many to be the richest of Mexico's states. Mexico's national oil company, PEMEX, has nearly 100 wells in Chiapas and has expectations that the vast reserves of natural gas under Chiapas soil will provide Mexico a cleaner fossil fuel future. More than half of all hydroelectric power comes from Chiapas while only a third of the local houses have electricity. Thirty five percent of Mexico's coffee and significant amounts of beef, wood, honey, corn, and sorghum also come from Chiapas.11
Aggravation by NAFTA and Neoliberal Economics
Religion of Neoliberalism and Corporate Colonialism 12
The recent passages of the Uruguay Round of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) with its associated WTO (World Trade Organization), and of NAFTA, are being celebrated by most of the world's political leaders and all transborder corporations as a kind of global religious (profits as never before) rebirth. This rising tide of mandated global development (cp. colonialism or imperialism) is literally controlled by the efforts of a small group of private financial institutional decision makers. Their goal is to make money in massive quantities, no matter that it is accomplished at the expense of most people, all cultures, other species, and the viability of the planet's ecosystem for human habitability.
It is corporate colonialism that enforces total financial invasion and total surrender of local sovereignty. "Third World" countries are under obligation to accept virtually all investments from abroad, offer "national" treatment to any foreign corporation that establishes itself within its borders, eliminate tariffs and import quotas on all goods, especially agricultural produce, and abolish all nontariff barriers to "free" trade such as regulations designed to protect health, labor or the environment, but which might increase corporate costs. This is neoliberal economics. It simply intensifies capitalist ideologies such as the primacy of economic growth and the necessary "free" market. Voracious consumerism is virtually a patriotic requirement assured by an aggressive advocacy of a uniform, homogenous worldwide development model faithfully reflecting the western materialist vision. One of the principles includes the idea that all countries, no matter their historical and cultural uniquenesses and diversities, must sign on to the same global economic model and praise it in unison. Monoculture or global homogenization is the net result, along with escalated depletion of the planet's finite resources and toxification of the planet's ecology.
Compliance of Mexico with Neoliberalism -- "Structural Adjustment"
Mexico has implemented virtually all of the "structural adjustment" requirements mandated by the World Bank and the IMF in order to receive the necessary line of credit to be relieved from her debt crisis of the early 1980s: dramatic reduction in public/social expenditures such as for education and health care, elimination of internal subsidies, trade "liberalization" removing protective tariffs so as to boost imports of cheap foods from the U.S., restriction of credit, privatization of most state enterprises, abandonment of traditional assistance with marketing and distribution of locally produced and grown products, currency devaluation, removal of "barriers" to foreign investment such as workers' safety laws and environmental regulations, imposition of "competitive" wages, and "downsizing" employment.
Such a dramatic new program in Mexico has produced what is now clearly the effects of this model everywhere: jobless economic growth with development of a labor surplus of contingent workers. This has marginalized larger numbers of Mexican people into the informal economy and deeper poverty. Two thirds of the economically active population of 34.1 million live below poverty. The number living in extreme poverty rose from 14 million in 1988 to 22 million today.13
End of Land Reform in Preparation For NAFTA 14
In 1992, President Salinas formally ended the promise of land reform when he engineered amendment of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, repudiating one of the founding ideals of the Mexican Republic. In order that Mexico's national economy be acceptable to NAFTA, Mexico had to offer its resources, including land, as a playing field for greater agricultural "efficiency," especially through infusion of money from international speculators to promote export crops of the sort promised under NAFTA. Thus Article 27 was repudiated, withdrawing the main promise to and hope of campesinos for acquiring and keeping land. The result: 25 million Mexican citizens effectively disenfranchised.
Salinas' amendment to the Constitution also legalized the private sale of the ejido land--the plots that made up the communal farming system established after the Mexican Revolution. The legal possibility of transferring title is a virtual guarantee that the best ejido land will eventually be sold to the highest bidder from the wealthy, leaving the poor more desperate than ever. Prior to Salinas' amendment 70% of all Mexican farmers worked on ejido land, much of it supporting subsistence rather than commercial farming. But millions, perhaps 5 million Mexicans, still do not have any land. The cheap U.S. food now imported into Mexico benefits Mexico's solid middle class of 8 million. But the vast majority of the small farmers can neither compete with the cheap foreign food nor afford to buy it for themselves. For them the end is near. According to the National Union of Regional Autonomous Peasant Organizations (UNORCA), a Mexican campesino umbrella group, up to 80% of rural Mexican producers are now caught in this dead-end bind.15 Economists predict that as many as 10 million farmers could be displaced by the year 2004.16
Knockout Blow To Ancient Self-Sufficiency
The end result of a NAFTA-driven economy is a final knockout blow to the ancient self-sufficient, small corn farming economy of Mexico's Indigenous communities. Indigenous land, more than ever, is vulnerable to corporate and elite buy outs and foreign competition from the United States. Landless refugees everywhere!
The "inexpensive" U.S. corn freely imported is in truth heavily subsidized by farming practices that cause depleted topsoils, depleted and poisoned aquifers; practices that use herbicides and pesticides, poisoning water, soil, plants, animals, as well as humans; and practices that consume tremendous quantities of dwindling reserves of oil. On top of not being charged for the depletion and poisoning of natural resources, these farming operations receive tax breaks and financial subsidies from the U.S. government. Ironically, Mexico assists in keeping U.S. corn "inexpensive" by exporting its own dwindling reserves of oil and genetic crop variants which the U.S. requires to preserve its corn monoculture.17
As one U.S. Treasury official declared at an off-the-record briefing: "They [Mexico] gave us their financial system"18 when they agreed to NAFTA.
In a very short period of time, Mexico now is importing increasing amounts of its food, 33% in 1996. The National Council of Agropecuario (CNA) reported that in 1996, Mexico imported 43% of its corn, 74% of its beans, 32% of its flour, and 36% of its milk.19 This would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago.
A quick note here about the maquilization of the Mexican economy is in order. Maquilization "frees" up trade barriers while relentlessly cheapening labor power. Though maquila employment is rapidly rising it is dramatically lowering real incomes of the population. But, also, the maquila is not being integrated into the Mexican economy. Inputs bought from Mexican suppliers has declined dramatically. And the value of maquila exports over the first 8 months of 1996 included very little that was actually produced in Mexico. And the non-maquila employment has been falling, as this sector looks abroad (export-oriented) for their customers forcing the domestic market to increasingly do without.20
Conclusion
Without an income generating strategy for the poor and working class of Mexico the economy will create ever more instability for the nation as a whole. Without land and a genuine domestic productive capacity for the benefit of Mexican citizens, more and more people's lives are worsening. And without a genuine democratic system facilitating authentic participation by the people about the future policies of their country, there are no avenues open for change, short of radical dissent, whether violent or nonviolent.21
The commodification, deregulation, and privatization under the new global corporate economy is significantly impacting all aspects of planet life. Global capital that can move instantaneously by the computerized information age can bargain down virtually all parties, including nation state governments and their efforts to protect the rights and living standards of their citizens. In effect, sovereignty has come to an end. Self reliance is a threat to neoliberalism's requirement that people become totally dependent on the values of commodity accumulation, and that national economies accept the inevitable new religion of exponential economic growth and export trade rather than an economy for local needs. Corporate colonialism's only value is the maximization of profits.
The Zapatistas understand all of this. That is why they resist this model and seek to engage all of Mexico, indeed the world, in a dialogue about "neoliberalism."
Section III Endnotes
1. Carlos Heredia and Mary Purcell, "Structural Adjustment and the Polarization of Mexican Society," The Case Against the Global Economy and For A Turn Toward the Local, eds. Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), p. 283.
2. Heredia, The Case Against the Global Economy, p. 283.
3. Heredia, The Case Against the Global Economy, pp. 277, 282; La Jornada (Sept. 6, 1992); The Washington Post (Aug. 21, 1995).
4. "Chiapas: An Uprising Born of Despair," World Watch (Jan./Feb. 1997); Luis Hernandez Navarro, La Jornada (Dec. 12, 1996).
5. Victor Suarez C., La Jornada del Campo, Supplement (Aug. 1996).
6. World Watch (Jan./Feb. 1997); Jorge Castaneda, professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, quoted, The Boston Globe (Jan. 10, 1994).
7. SIPAZ Report (Jan. 1997).
8. Christian Science Monitor (Oct. 31, 1994).
9. "A Reality Tour of the Heart of Chiapas," Earth Island Journal (Spring 1994).
10. The Boston Globe (Mar. 8, 1994).
11. Earth Island Journal (Spring 1994).
12. Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, eds., The Case Against the Global Economy and For A Turn Toward the Local (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), pp. 3-19.
13. World Watch (Jan./Feb. 1997).
14. World Watch (Jan./Feb. 1997).
15. World Watch (Jan./Feb. 1997).
16. Jerry Mander, The Case Against the Global Economy, p. 126.
17. Jerry Mander, The Case Against the Global Economy, p. 126.
18. Jerry Mander, The Case Against the Global Economy, p. 126.
19. La Jornada (May 6, 1996).
20. "Why the Recovery is not a Recovery," NACLA Report on the Americas (Jan./Feb. 1997).
21. Heredia, The Case Against the Global Economy, p. 274.
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