|
National Radio Project1714 Franklin Street #100-251 • Oakland, CA 94612 • 510-251-1332ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. For permission to reproduce and/or reprint, please contact us. |
MAKING CONTACT Transcript: #24-99 Free for Whom? NAFTA and Mexican Labor Phillip Babich: This week on Making Contact- Bertha Luján (via translator): They are financing the exports and they are financing the national production via subhuman social conditions. Gustavo Castro (via translator): When there’s less consensus you have more repression. If you can’t convince with a good argument, it must be by force. Phillip Babich: It's been more than five years now since the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, took effect. Throughout this same time period, the Mexican government has stepped up military operations against indigenous guerrilla groups, and an atmosphere of intimidation has stifled independent union organizing. NAFTA supporters, who are looking to expand the treaty's provisions into the rest of Latin America, say the trade deal has been a success. But what's the real story? On this program, you'll hear from labor leaders and community activists in Mexico and what they have to say about so-called free trade. I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas, and important information. The richest fifteen families in Mexico have increased their wealth during the past two years by more than $10 billion dollars. According to La Jornada, Mexico City's daily progressive newspaper, the families' total wealth grew from $16.4 billion dollars to $27 billion dollars. At the same time, almost 80 percent of Mexico's population is poor and more than half are in extreme poverty. Bertha Luján, a member of the National Coordination Committee of the Authentic Workers Front, says that neoliberal economic policies -- policies that allow for unimpeded foreign investment, such as NAFTA -- have given rise to a new super-class of elites. Bertha Luján (via translator): This so-called "neoliberal" economic model has brought a historically new situation to the country. Never in the history of Mexico has there been such a concentration of wealth and such widespread poverty. This model has created such a concentration that, for example, 300 large corporations control 80% of all Mexican exports. And a group of about 500 families have in their hands the principal economic sectors, strategic businesses, and dominate the country economically. Along with the unmeasured enrichment of some people and families in this country, we have grown in extreme poverty. The middle class has been shrinking and those that were previously considered middle class have joined the ranks of the poor. Unemployment has been increasing over the years ever since the Mexican government signed the free trade agreement with the US and Canada. Mexico needs 1.2 million new jobs each year to cover the growth of the economically active population. They are only creating about 500 thousand or 600 thousand jobs each year, at best. Phillip Babich: Hilda Salazar, a member of Mexico's Environmental Commission, a branch of the Mexican Network Against Free Trade, says that this job deficit has had a major impact in rural areas. Men must leave their families in search of work. And the women stay behind, doing what they can to support their families, mostly fishing or working in agriculture. But changes in the economy have made subsistence farming tough-going. Meanwhile, the oil industry has polluted fishing areas. Now, says Salazar, even the women are having to migrate to find work. In some cases, they go to the United States. Hilda Salazar (via translator): Women are being contracted, married women with children are leaving, taken out to work for six months in a factory in North Carolina. They are "hooked" by groups of forty with an interpreter; they do not learn the language. They are taken to places that are like barracks. Places where they are not allowed to leave, and they have to work earnestly, without any benefits. They ignore the labor conditions in the United States. They spend six months practically isolated, then they return, with 6,000 pesos, which is about $600. They go because they need the money, but the impact that it has on the families, on the communities is of great consequence. Why do women leave like that and go to those places? Well, because the income of the fishermen in the areas that I mention have collapsed. There are no more fish, the impact of the oil industry is deadly-- in ‘93 it was brutal, wiping out the oyster population in the lake. And the women are forced to enter the activities of production. So, the women leave. But what has the environment to do with these women? The results? The oil production activity and its impact in fisheries forces the women and children out, and men have to look for alternatives. In terms of the structure of the family, it has a brutal impact. Phillip Babich: Indigenous life in Mexico has also been hit hard. Onésimo Hidalgo, a sociologist with the Center for Economic and Political Research for Community Action in the southern state of Chiapas, says that privatization has eroded communal rights. Land that was once protected under an article in Mexico's constitution can now be bought and sold, jeopardizing the livelihoods of indigenous and rural families that depend on collectively-held land for farming. Also, says Hidalgo, the federal government has reduced subsidies for domestic agriculture. Onécimo Hidalgo (via translator): Take the case of Chiapas: Chiapas occupied the second place nationally in corn production. Today, it occupies sixth place -- because the policies have been to reduce support for the production of basic grains, in favor of importing these grains from the US. I believe there has also been a process of increasing degradation of indigenous life, of peasant life. In response to the policies of tax collection, I believe more and more peasants are taking the opportunity to sell their land, and the effect is in a way counter-productive for the US because now all these people that we find from Zacatecas, Oaxaca, Chiapas, are the states with the greatest number of undocumented people in the US. The crisis generated by the free trade agreement has been politically counter-productive because I believe other sectors, which cannot compete, are being affected, or national sectors that compete with the big transnationals are failing. Phillip Babich: This failure, says Gustavo Castro, also with the Center for Economic and Political Research for Community Action, has contributed to a gaping budget deficit. Budget shortfalls, pressure to make loan re-payments to international lending institutions, and economic priorities, have led the Mexican government to cut back drastically on social spending. Gustavo Castro (via translator): The government now doesn’t have money for education, health and so on. It comes from oil revenue -- oil that was $15 a barrel now costs 6. So, how are we going to get out of this deficit? Where are we going to get the money? So, it proposes an increase in telephone service and telephone taxes, which is obviously opposed by business. So, in place of this, it eliminates the tortilla subsidy, for example, which is the country’s staple food, right? This, in a way, would favor the phasing out of corn production in Mexico, and the purchase, obviously, of these grains from the US. The cycle just repeats, right? There’s no money, so the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank end up subsidizing projects in education, health, and reproductive health in indigenous zones, for example, in small productive projects, etcetera. But these are loans! The very programs which combat poverty are a bottomless pit, and have to come back to us one day, but when? It's not something that goes and doesn’t return. This ridiculous and absurd process of indebtedness just continues increasing, cyclically. Hilda Salazar (via translator): It has been shown that this type of free trade treaty is not necessarily geared to improve living conditions in the country, especially those of the workers. There is a kind of blackmail going on, economic in nature, which reflects asymmetry in wages and environmental conditions. The possibility of enforcing the laws and workers organizing on both sides of the border. Phillip Babich: Hilda Salazar. Hilda Salazar (via translator): Then they fight to reach a result; a job which affects your health, which is unsafe to the women. The crimes in Ciudad Juarez have been tremendous. The women are afraid and the bosses do nothing to insure the safety to workers who get off at midnight. Let’s say, the choice of having work in a process of economic integration should not be like that. Work should not be a choice between dying of hunger or dying of other causes precipitated by work. Or having nothing at all. I think it is a wrong premise. The real struggle is to improve the working conditions on both sides of the border. Phillip Babich: Another issue that Mexican labor and community activists are addressing is U.S. immigration policy. According to Bertha Luján, Mexico forfeited its chance to negotiate immigration issues during the NAFTA talks. Bertha Luján (via translator): Now what has happened is that the anti-immigrant policies in the U.S. have intensified. The rights of migrant workers are not considered as human rights, and the matter is increasingly criminalized. Mexico lost the opportunity to negotiate anything about migration. This point also relates to the renegotiation of the treaty. If the relations are growing between our countries in this region, the migration issue should be a central one. It’s an explosive issue. Its an explosive problem that can blow up in their faces. To think that the migration problem has only a criminal or social dimension is to ignore the gravity and much broader dimension of the migration problem. Why did they leave this out of the negotiations? Well, obviously because migrant labor is cheap labor, it’s extremely exploitable labor. Mexican workers go to the U.S. to work under terms that are much weaker and in worse conditions than those who are considered to be legally working in the U.S.. They are paid less and their working conditions are worse, thus they are financing production and they are financing the economy through hundreds of thousands of migrant workers that labor in precarious conditions, with much lower salaries. This is what is referred to as "social dumping." They are financing cheaper products, but at the cost of lower salaries, of terrible labor conditions, in terms of safety and hygiene. So, they are financing the exports and they are financing the national production via subhuman social conditions. Laura Livoti: You’re listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. This program can now be heard across the United States and Canada, South Africa, and around the world on Radio for Peace International short-wave. You can also hear us on the Internet. It you want more information about the subject of this week’s program please give us a call. It’s toll free: 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tape and transcript orders. That’s 800-529-5736. Phillip Babich: For those workers who do find work in Mexico, job security, adequate union representation, and decent working conditions are in short supply. Onécimo Hidalgo says that there is an increasing use of what are called "individual contracts." This means that a worker has to pass a certification process every three months. According to Hidalgo, contractualization of the worker is part of the trend toward privatization of public sectors in Mexico, including education and health care. Onésimo Hidalgo (via translator): There are no long-term contracts. Also, the process of privatizing education results in ever more private schools. And health services are increasingly becoming private. I believe that while all this is being implemented, it also generates the possibility that each of these sectors that once supported the government are now against it. And we are seeing that even the official Campesino Workers Union that belongs to the PRI, now is demanding the renegotiation of NAFTA because the soy producers, the coffee producers, the cotton, cane, and sugar producers, are going broke. And they’re asking for the renegotiation of NAFTA. Phillip Babich: A split between "official" unions and the PRI, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, are uncommon. Bertha Luján says that freedom of association is part of the Mexican constitution, but it's a "fiction." According to Luján, 90% of labor organizations are under control of the PRI. She terms the "official" unions "collaborators in the political economy," and says that independent labor organizing can be risky business. Bertha Luján (via translator): This is considered a subversive act. Why? Because in Mexico, for many decades, the system of union control has been considered an element of the policy of state security. Why? Because the PRI government, the party that has been in power nationally for more than 70 years, has imposed itself, and has maintained itself in power thanks to the control of workers and the support that it has received from the official unions. So, from there the problem of independent unions is seen as a problem of national security. Phillip Babich: As labor organizers get tagged as "threats to national security," so do political dissidents. And, says Gustavo Castro, dissent and opposition to free trade policies is growing in many sectors of Mexican society. Gustavo Castro (via translator): But what is happening with this accelerated globalization and liberalization is not only that the government no longer has the confuses of the poor, but also of businesses, businessmen, of other sectors that are also hard hit. And when there’s less consensus you have more repression. If you can’t convince with a good argument, it must be by force. So, the greatest investment is in the military, police, bringing out the military into the street to control the discontent that exists. Phillip Babich: According to independent observers, political repression in Mexico has been intensifying. This has been most obvious in the southern states of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca. In May of this year, Mexican soldiers murdered two indigenous peasants and raped two of their relatives in the Guerrero municipality, Rancho Nuevo, whose inhabitants are calling for autonomy. Elsewhere, the Mexican Army, which has become the number one client-country for training at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas in Georgia, has harassed and intimidated communities, ostensibly searching for leftist guerrillas. Margot Shrire has more... Margot Shrire: Ramiro Diaz is a Nahua Indian from the Huastecas, a dirt-poor region of central and eastern Mexico that spans several states including Veracruz and Hidalgo. Diaz’s organization, the Emiliano Zapata Democratic Front, has waged a thirty-year campaign for land and human rights. He says that economic and social conditions have worsened since NAFTA took effect. Ramiro Diaz (via translator): On a national level, the countryside is broke. Small and medium-sized businesses have been left in ruins. All this is a consequence of the free trade agreement, which has been in effect for more than four years and has resulted in a government austerity policy. Constitutional reforms, such as the one that was made to Article Twenty-Seven of the Mexican Constitution -- which had previously guaranteed collectively-held social property -- have violated the rights of Mexicans and the country’s sovereignty. What’s guaranteed now is the loss of land. Margot Shrire: Diaz says that during the last thirty years, as many as 800 people have been slain in the Huastecas over land conflicts. And since 1996, the Mexican army had carried out periodic incursions in the region searching for guerrilla groups. What’s happening in the Huastecas is also happening across the country in the Pacific coast state of Oaxaca. Estela Garcia Ramirez is a Zapotec Indian from Oaxaca’s southern Sierra Madres. She charges that on the evening of April 24, 1997, dozens of State Judicial Police broke into her home as part of a counterinsurgency campaign against the Popular Revolutionary Army. They struck her and beat and kicked members of her family before whisking her husband off into the night. She never saw him alive again. Estela Garcia (via translator): The State Judicial Police and the District Attorney later said my husband, Zelerino was dead, that he had been killed in an armed confrontation with the State Judicial Police, who repelled the aggression. This is a total lie, because we were sound asleep and naked when the police came. My husband was only allowed to put his pants on. That’s how he was taken away. But, the District Attorney claims it was an armed confrontation. Margot Shrire: Garcia denies any connection to the Popular Revolutionary Army. Such purging is reminiscent of counterinsurgency activity in the 1970’s, in the neighboring state of Guerrero. Citizens there remember several hundred people who were missing when a government military campaign defeated a guerrilla movement led by Lucio Cabañas. Residents say that the Mexican Army and police burned villages, starved captives in caves, dropped detainees down a deep pit, and tossed victims into the sea from helicopters -- their bones washing up on beaches not far from the tourist resort of Acapulco. Hilda Navarette, a human rights activist with the independent group, The Voice of the Voiceless, was visited by soldiers in the municipality of Coyuca de Benitez. Hilda Navarette (via translator): On September 29, 1974, the Mexican Army forced us out of our home. The commander of this group of soldiers appeared to be a North American. We could not speak to him, but he looked like a gringo. We demanded that they leave us alone -- my mother, myself, and my oldest child, who was two years old at the time. But, they brought us to the public plaza, burned all our books and ripped apart our mattresses because they were looking for arms and drugs that we supposedly had, in league with the guerrillas. We never knew Professor Cabañas and we weren’t involved with the guerrillas. But, we were direct victims of this persecution. Similar to our experience, there were many entire families that disappeared. There wasn’t a citizen’s movement capable of denouncing these atrocities. And we also kept quiet about the violation we suffered. This is why we’re here thirty years later, organizing to make sure that this will never happen again in the state of Guerrero. Margot Shrire: But in recent years, state repression has revisited Guerrero. Following the massacre of seventeen unarmed protesters by Guerrero police in 1996, new armed rebel movements publicly appeared in the state. So did counterinsurgency measures. Hilario Mesino is a founder of The Peasant Organization of the Southern Sierra Madres, a legal group authorities have tried to link with the rebel Popular Revolutionary Army (E.P.R.). Mesino says that, since 1995, thirty-six members of the organization have been murdered. Mesino himself was released from prison in 1998, after being locked up for one year. He says cases of torture and harassment are on the rise. Hilario Mesino (via translator): When people have been tortured, they’ve seen captors who aren’t from here. We think they’re from the United States, Israel, Spain, or South America. They’re people who don’t have any scruples about killing and dismembering. The torturers paint their faces. Margot Shrire: Currently, the Mexican government is reviewing a report issued by the United Nations’ Special Human Rights Investigator for Guerrero, who compiled scores of recent complaints filed against the Mexican military and police. In spite of the violence, opposition political parties are gathering steam in Guerrero. In many cases, they’ve won local, state, and federal offices. However, this year’s gubernatorial election ended in protest when the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution accused the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party of resorting to fraud in order to stay in power. Further conflicts are on the immediate horizon. Maribel Gutierrez is an award-winning author and journalist in Guerrero for the newspapers La Jornada and El Sur. Maribel Gutierrez (via translator): As you know, we’re talking about Guerrero as being the poorest state in Mexico, in which the per capita income is the lowest of all the states in the country. This situation creates a favorable climate for the population to sympathize with solutions that represent change, whether they are peaceful or non-peaceful, as we’ve seen with the armed groups. I don’t think there’s just one scenario on the horizon. In a press conference last August, the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People challenged the next governor of Guerrero to take away the causes of the armed struggle. How? -By resolving the problems of the population. Margot Shrire: Journalist and author, Maribel Gutierrez, speaking about the current political situation in Guerrero, Mexico. I’m Margot Shrire. Phillip Babich: Meanwhile, community organizers are developing alternatives to the free trade model. Gustavo Castro says that one idea being discussed at the grassroots level is the cancellation of foreign debt. But, says Soto, the question at hand is how to build a democratic opposition to neoliberalism. Gustavo Castro (via translator): The democratic process is at this point one of the worst enemies of the neoliberal system. This democratic process is essentially contradictory to the neoliberal project. I think that the alternative, among others, is to make them understand---not only this government, but the big businesses, the IMF, the World Bank, the biggest, richest countries -- that if they don’t realize with sufficient time the accelerated pace with which this project is creating poverty, the consequences are not going to be in just one country or another, but there’s going to be a very serious global crisis, surrounded by increasingly horrific marginalization. And the fact, also, that the President doesn’t want to accept indigenous rights and culture is not just a political whim of the President. That the recognition of the use of and the right to benefit from the natural resources by the indigenous, the recognition of autonomy, the recognition of the right of free communication, and so forth, threatens the major interests. It threatens the investment opportunities that the government wants to give to other businesses. So, the indigenous are just one more form of competition. Phillip Babich: At the forefront of this quest for an alternative economic model has been the Zapatista movement. The Zapatista National Liberation Army initiated a 12-day armed rebellion on January 1, 1994, NAFTA's first official day. Amado Avendaño is known as the Governor in Rebellion of Chiapas, a title he acquired after running for governor of Chiapas in 1994, as an opposition party candidate for the PRD -- Party of the Democratic Revolution. During his campaign, a suspicious accident occurred. Several people were killed and Avendaño was seriously injured. He says the Zapatista movement is a sign of hope for the rest of the world. Amado Avendaño (via translator): I think the Zapatistas are like a life boat. Why is Zapatismo against neoliberalism? Because, in different parts of the world, humanity had lost hope when communism and socialism collapsed, when European and American interests succeeded in suppressing dissent in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and in several African countries and elsewhere. Thus, I think that dissident groups around the world had lost hope. But, then the Zapatistas appeared in Chiapas, Mexico, addressing the roots of this disaster that affects all humanity. It was like a new beacon and it attracted the admiration of the whole world. The Zapatistas are the vanguard that summons all dissidents and revives them, gives them new energy to fight on. Everybody has noticed this new group in México, a group that does not seek power; it seeks change. It’s a movement in good faith, that attracts admiration. For this reason, I think Zapatismo is a kind of leader against neoliberalism, against that brutal system that seeks to sacrifice the weaker economies of the world, as, in fact, is happening now. Phillip Babich: That's it for this edition of Making Contact, a look at NAFTA and workers in Mexico. Thanks for listening. And, special thanks this week to Rich Plevin for interviews and production assistance. Stephanie Welch, Eric Hamako and Margot Shrire also helped with production. We had voice-overs from Citlali Saenz, Beatriz Florez, Luis Esparza, Antonio Prieto, and Francisco Santos. Laura Livoti is our managing director. Peggy Law is executive director. Our production assistant is Shereen Meraji. Norman Solomon is senior advisor. Our national producer is David Barsamian. And I'm your host and managing producer Phillip Babich. If you want more information about the subject of this week’s program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts. That’s 800-529-5736. Making Contact is an independent production. We’re committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. If you have suggestions for future programs, we’d like to hear from you. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter Trio. ‘Bye for now. |