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LA PRENSA (
NAFTA Awakens the Ghost of Pancho Villa
By Kent Paterson, Editor
Center for Latin American and Border Studies New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico
On a day when the giant Mexican flag that usually flutters in the breeze
over Ciudad Juarez’s Chamizal Park was oddly absent, images of the Aztec
eagle were still prominent among the Chihuahua farmers and their
supporters who assembled across the street. Defying a fatally-frigid
cold front that’s left a slew of victims dead from hypothermia and
carbon monoxide poisoning in the borderlands, a hardy group gathered on
the morning of January 18 to begin a trac-torcade to Mexico City.
Organized as the Francisco Villa Campesino Resistance Movement (MRCFV),
the northern-ers are moving south with a firm message for the
administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderon: renegotiate the
agricultural section of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
to shield corn and beans from foreign competition.
“From Chamizal, a piece of national territory recuperated for the
integrity and sovereignty of our country, we make a call to the nation,
from the Mexican countryside and from the No Corn, No Country National
Campaign, for the rescue of the nation, for the recuperation and clear
exercise of our independence and popular and national sovereignty, and
for the construction of a truly social, democratic and lawful state,”
proclaimed the MRCFV in a declaration.
“The government of Felipe Calderon has refused to protect corn and
beans, basic foods for Mexicans and sources of employment, survival and
cultural reproduction of three million farmers and their families as
well as 56 ethnic groups in the country.”
Convened two years before the 100th anniversary of the 1910 Mexican
Revolution and the 200th anniversary of the 1810 War for Independence,
Mexico’s latest farmer protest is now gathering force with strong
historical and political overtones.
Farmers intend to follow the same route that Pancho Villa took on his
1914 march into Mexico City, and on which an anti-NAFTA protest was
conducted by protestors on horseback in 1999. Along the journey more
farmers and tractors are expected to join the final push into the
national capital for a massive anti-NAFTA demonstration. From the four
directions of the old Aztec Empire, thousands of farmers plan to stream
into Mexico City’s Zocalo square on January 31.
“This action is historic...,” said Victor Suarez, president of the
National Agricultural Products Marketers Association. “Just like 100
years ago when the farmer organizations of Chihuahua played an important
role in the Mexican Revolution with the Villistas and the Villista
cavalry that went from the north to the south to liberate Mexico from
the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Today, the motorized cavalry departs
to play a role in the liberation of Mexico from a right-wing government
at the service of the monopolies.”
Immediately galvanizing the modern farmers’ revolt was the New Year’s
Day lifting of the remaining Mexican tariffs on corn, beans, powdered
milk and sugar under the provisions of NAFTA. New Year’s Day was marked
by anti-NAFTA border protests in Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana.
Recognizing the extreme disparities in agricultural development among
the three future NAFTA states, the trade accord’s negotiators gave
Mexican growers of sensitive products like corn 15 years to achieve
competitive status. But as the old Ford and John Deere tractors
collected for the trac-torcade made clear, Mexican farmers are still
decades behind their counterparts in the US and Canada who use the
latest, costly models to work their farms. Surveying the scene, Carlos
Marentes, the veteran leader of El Paso’s Border Agricultural Workers
Union and the Bracero Project, said the aging tractors on display were
the cream of the crop in a countryside where oxen and mules still leave
grooves in the land.
“If you go deep, south in Mexico, you will see that the situation is
even worse,” Marentes said. “Here we are talking about some of the
ejiditarios, campesinos and producers who at least by working in the US
were able to make a little bit of money to buy their machinery.” Despite
their efforts, small farmers are still left out in the cold by
agricultural policies in the three NAFTA that benefit “the big entities
involved in large-scale, industrial, commercial agricultural
production,” Marentes contended.
Many farmers consider the January 1 tariff elimination the final curtain
on their livelihoods. A recent report by Ana de Ita published by the
Center for International Policy’s Americas Program, documented how
Mexican corn farmers have been subjected to lower prices and US-grown
corn imports well above NAFTA quotas almost every year since the
implementation of the treaty in 1994. According to de Ita, many
US-produced corn imports are encouraged by long-term “soft” loans from
the US Commodity Credit Corporation
As the clock approached high noon on January 18, the MR-CFV and its
supporters march-ed from the edge of Chamizal Park to the Bridge of
Americas between Ciudad Juarez and neighboring El Paso, Texas. Forming a
“human wall,” the demonstrators briefly stopped most traffic returning
from the United States. Amid chants of “No Corn, No Country,” signs were
hoisted that denounced NAFTA and opposed the importation of
genetically-modified corn
After a final ceremony at the Mexican eagle statue that guards the
entrance to the Bridge of Americas, an advance contingent of 14 old
tractors entered the mid-day traffic of Ciudad Juarez and soon passed by
the strip malls, fast food restaurants and maquila-doras built on lands
which once marked by fields where world-famous cotton was planted.
NAFTA Boils
The northern tractorcade is just one hot piece of the NAF-TA pressure
cooker building up in Mexico. In recent weeks, the Mexican press has
carried numerous stories on the growing nationwide controversy around
free trade. Many of the country’s main political actors are speaking out
for or against revisiting the free trade agreement.
Key federal senators and deputies from the PRI and PRD parties verbally
support the call by the MRCFV and its allies to renegotiate NAFTA’S
agricultural clauses. Resolutions in support of farmers’ demands have
passed the Guerrero and Veracruz state legislatures, while a split has
developed in the powerful Roman Catholic Church over the free trade
treaty. Although the nine bishops of the Mexican Episcopal Conference
urge a thorough reexamination of NAFTA’s agricultural sections, Mexico
City Cardinal Norberto Rivera is against reopening a trade agreement he
says is reaping benefits for his country. The old National Campesino
Confederation (CNC), at one time the most influential force in the
countryside, gave its blessing to NAFTA when it was approved during the
Salinas de Gortari years but is now demanding the trade pact’s revision.
On the legal front, farmers in Guanajuato and other states are pursuing
challenges against NAFTA on the basis that the accord violates sections
of the Mexican Constitution which protect the economic well-being of
citizens. Mexico’s Supreme Court, which has ruled that international
agreements cannot supersede the nation’s Constitution, could wind up
reviewing the constitutionality of NAFTA.
Calderon’s Counter-offensive
Until now, the Calderon administration has remained steadfast in its
stance that NAFTA will not be touched. While defending NAFTA, the
Calderon administration is rolling out a rural development strategy that
combines subsidies, technical assistance, yield improvement and crop
substitution to create a “winning” countryside that’s firmly integrated
into the global market. Far from viewing NAFTA as a drawback, the
Mexican government sees the accord as an opportunity for entrepreneurial
spirits to meet national and foreign demands for food and fiber. In
comments to the press, federal government representatives stress how
NAFTA has made Mexico the top supplier of winter fruit and vegetables to
the United States.
In 2008, the Calderon administration plans to subsidize almost three
million corn, bean, sugarcane and milk producers to the tune of about $2
billion. “The programs and resources are designed to benefit those who
have the least, and they are for those producers with the greatest needs
of support,” insisted Mexican Agriculture Minister Alberto Cardenas in a
statement. US corn producers, who will benefit from the Mexican tariff
tear-down, currently receive on average about $20,000 per grower in
subsidies. Mexican farmers, whose yields are almost four times less than
those of US producers, each get about $770 in subsidies.
CONSUCC Director Guada-lupe Martinez Cruz recently defended the Calderon
administration from criticisms by long-standing agricultural
organizations like the CNC.
“Those of us who have me-mories know that they did not know how to
construct a better future for Mexicans,” Martinez said, “but our
organization nevertheless figures that we have to continue making a call
to all the farmer organizations that are truly interested in
transforming the countryside and rural families.”
The Other Rural Mexico and Beyond
Free trade’s opponents paint a vastly different picture of NAFTA and its
consequences on rural Mexico. Among the speakers at the January 18
Ciudad Juarez demonstration was Lucha Castro, a prominent Chihuahua City
attorney and women’s activist. Castro read off a litany of disasters she
pinned on the free trade model.
Castro charged that NAFTA and related government policies are
responsible for expelling five million people from Mexico’s countryside.
Merely two percent of Mexico’s agricultural production units benefit
from the treaty, while eighty percent of Mexican farm exports are
controlled by foreign capital, Castro said. Now a net importer of food,
Mexico is in serious danger of losing its food sovereignty, she added.
“To compete with the United States all these years, the forests and
soils have been devastated, and our aquifers have been over-exploited,”
Castro continued. “Mexican consumers haven’t benefited from better
prices. In 1994, you could buy 20 kilos of tortillas and 8 kilos of
beans with a minimum wage salary. Nowadays, you can only buy 6 kilos of
tortillas and 3 kilos of beans.”
Farm labor activist Carlos Marentes slammed NAFTA for having adverse
effects in the United States as well. According to Marentes, the average
yearly earnings of chile pickers in New Mexico slid to about $5,500 by
2006. Up against a wave of chile imports from Mexico and other
countries, US growers are mechanizing the cultivation and harvest of
crops and leaving workers without jobs, Marentes said. Many small farmer
and other rural organizations in the US and Canada support the Mexican
anti-NAFTA protest, he added.
Rambling south on the Pan-American Highway atop their old tractors, the
northern farmers are already attracting significant support from labor
groups, non-governmental organizations and ordinary citizens. Prior to
the tractorcade’s departure from the border, Oscar Enriquez, director of
the Ciudad Juarez’s Paso del Norte Human Rights Center, lauded the
contributions of farmers and rural communities to Mexican life. Enriquez
predicted that the Pancho Villa tractorcade will sow the long road south
with seeds of dignity as well as with love for the family, land and
countryside.
“I think the march is a way of defending the culture of the men and
women of the countryside. I also think that it has another dimension,”
Enriquez said. “When the farmers, the planters, are the transmitters of
the right to food, the right to human dignity, the right to culture, the
right to own land, it should be clear that the government has the
obligation to protect these rights, to respect these rights and
guarantee that they are complied with.”
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