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By Root 485 0

had set up factories in the dozen or so border cities—on the Mexican side of the border. Some of these American facilities were barely five hundred feet outside of the United States. It was just like being at home—except you paid your workers forty cents an hour, made them work ten hours a day, and made sure they had no rights. Seventy percent of the Mexican workers in these plants were women, often under twenty-one and sometimes as young as thirteen or fourteen. U.S. corporations did not want to hire male heads-of-households, as they were more likely to unionize or demand a bathroom break. The young women were more pliable. The only real problem with them was that they, like young women everywhere, were prone to getting pregnant. They were also malnourished and hungry. So GM and the others did something nice: they handed out free birth control to stem the high turnover rate, and they provided a free breakfast (because fainting on the assembly line caused things like windshields to miss the front of the car).

Al Cisneros, of the Texas Economic Development Commission, spoke glowingly of General Motors’ plans to become “Mexico’s number one employer.”

“They are going to have a total of twenty-nine factories in Mexico,” he told me. “They are opening twelve in the coming year alone!”

He told me that the chairman of General Motors, a man by the name of Roger Smith, had recently said that “moving to Mexico is a matter of survival.”

I thought about this for a moment and wondered, what planet was this guy Smith on? “Survival?” In the previous year, 1985, General Motors had posted a profit just shy of four billion dollars. In the year before that, they broke their all-time record with a profit of $4.5 billion. They were the number one corporation in the world. And yet they were constantly talking about how they were “struggling” to survive. It was all a con game to somehow convince the public that if they didn’t move some of their production to Mexico, they might go under—and then the economy would collapse with them. It was a Big Lie, but at least the Reagan administration bought it and was here selling it. They were selling it because Reagan, the former union leader, wanted to crush unions. He won the presidency by getting a lot of white union workers to vote for him. Appealing to their fears—of Iranian hostage takers, of black people, of the government—he rode a wave that would eventually drown the very people who put him into office.

Of course, I could say none of this to Mr. Cisneros—partly because I did not know the future then, and mostly because I would definitely blow my cover. I worried that even the look on my face was such that every word of that last paragraph was written all over me.

“Absolutely,” I responded. “GM has to remain competitive. If it doesn’t cut costs, it… it…” I struggled to find the end of that sentence. I should have practiced my lines better. “Well, all hell’s gonna break loose.”

“Indeed,” Mr. Cisneros agreed (to what, I’m not sure).

Cisneros had another concern: Communism. He was worried that if corporate America did not get down to Mexico and establish a capitalist foothold, Mexico could easily go the way of Castro or the Sandinistas.

“Free enterprise is the only thing that’s going to save Mexico from a Communist revolution,” he said. “If we don’t help Mexico develop, we’re going to have another Nicaragua at our doorstep.”

Ha! Of course. How else could the Reaganites rationalize and sell the exporting of American jobs to Mexico? Because we have to save Mexico from the commies! By raising the standard of living of every Mexican by having them work for us, they will not want socialism because they will be enjoying the middle class life.

“I expect in less than fifteen years, these Mexican border towns are going to look like American suburbs,” Cisneros added.9

Paul D. Taylor, Reagan’s deputy assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, earlier that year had stated that if we began to build American factories in Mexico, it could help stem the Red Tide on our southern border. U.S.