Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [94]
Privatization brought new owners who broke unions, fired workers, and drove down wages. By decade’s end, 1,155 state businesses had shrunk to only 400. The government earned less than $2 billion from these privatizations, which went to service debts.69 At the same time, food subsidies were slashed; those for eggs, milk, cooking oil, sugar, beans, and rice were eliminated completely. The retail price of gasoline and natural gas doubled. 70 By 1986, the purchasing power of the average Mexican was about half of what it had been in 1982. 71
President José Lopez Portillo, however, retired to a $30 million mountaintop mansion, a monument to venality and arrogance that included a walk-in “refrigerator for furs,” a library with space for a million volumes, and “an astronomical observatory that is better equipped than National University’s.”72
NAFTA
Mexico’s trial by debt began the long march to the North American Free Trade Agreement. The agreement culminated a process of liberalization born of the 1982 debt crisis. Along the way, Article 27 of the 1917 constitution was eviscerated; among other things, it now allows greater foreign investment. On January 1, 1994, NAFTA took effect.73 At the same time, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, the Zapatista National Liberation Army, a group of mostly indigenous peasants, rose up against the government, calling NAFTA a death sentence for Indians. 74
According to its main booster, former Mexican president Carlos Salinas, NAFTA would empower Mexico “to export goods, not people.”75 The rural economy would be modernized, and farmers who could not adapt would find work in the expanding industrial and service sectors. 76 But what did free trade really do for Mexico? An almost quizzical article published in the New York Times in 2009 answered this as follows: “In some cases, NAFTA produced results that were exactly the opposite of what was promised. For instance, domestic industries were dismantled as multinationals imported parts from their own suppliers. Local farmers were priced out of the market by food imported tariff-free. Many Mexican farmers simply abandoned their land and headed north.”77 The piece went on to note that, although the value of Mexico’s exports had quintupled in fifteen years, almost half a million people each year were outmigrating in search of work, a disproportionate number of them from the countryside. With only one-quarter of Mexico’s total population, the countryside accounts for 44 percent of all Mexican immigrants moving to the United States.78
Under NAFTA, the government dismantled most of the agencies that offered assistance and administered subsidies to small farmers. “Lending by both government and private-sector rural credit programs declined 75% after 1994, when NAFTA took effect, while rural bankruptcies increased six-fold.”79 The reformed Article 27 now allows sale of ejido lands, which has increased landlessness.80 According to a 2010 report by Oxfam, Mexico has spent $80 billion on food imports and now has a deficit in food trade of $435 million.81 Mexican agricultural production has turned away from food for people and internal markets toward animal feed for export.82 Markets for corn, the staple food, protected by government policy until NAFTA, have been completely opened.83 Peasant organizations have demanded a renegotiation of the treaty.84
Since 1994, Mexico’s economic growth has slowed. It now averages only about 3 percent. From 1921 to 1967, annual growth averaged 5.2 percent, and for much of that period, it was over 6 percent.85 According to World Bank figures, “in 2004, 28 percent of rural dwellers were extremely poor and 57 percent moderately poor.”86
The suffering and social polarization produced by neoliberalism has fostered corruption