NAFTA at ten years

Mario (not his real name) just put an ad in a major national newspaper: “For sale, one kidney. Donor is healthy, disease-free 32-year-old man who has never smoked or drank alcohol. Price, 200,000 pesos (about 18,000 dollars).”

I am stunned as I read this story in a local daily paper over a cappuccino in one of the sidewalk cafés around Oaxaca’s town square. Coincidentally, I have been thinking about how to approach an article I am about to write for the Pride about the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on the Mexican people.

I wish I could say that I have met Mario. I haven’t. But I can tell you what he said to the reporter who wrote the story. He is middle class, educated. He has a wife and three children; a small house in a government-subsidized development away from the center; a 10-year-old car in need of repair; and a mountain of debt. It’s not that he lives extravagantly, but rather that he has earned so little. Even so, he could make it, if he could only hang on to his job, which he expects to lose soon.

President Vicente Fox and his administration have been trying, for the last three years, to convince the Mexican congress to privatize the national oil and electrical companies, as had his predecessor, Ernesto Zedillo before him, and with the same lack of success. The reason: the Mexican people (I think, rightfully) see this move as a sell-off which will benefit government officials, their wealthy friends and foreign investors, while contributing nothing to the lives of average citizens. The anti-privatization sentiment is so strong that only a few senators and deputies outside Fox’s own party –—and not all of those inside it— had the temerity to vote for it when it came up a couple of months ago.

As well, a new sales tax on groceries and medicine which would have affected the working poor directly, failed to pass. Much as in the United States, there is a growing “tax the rich” sentiment here.

As punishment for the recalcitrance of the congress, and because the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as certain clauses of NAFTA demand it, Fox has declared that his government will impose “austerity measures” on his country, one of which is a 20 percent reduction in the civil service. Mario works for the government. Thus his motivation for selling off his body part: he would like to be debt free before he becomes unemployed.

Mexico has always had a vast underclass of illiterate and semi-literate peasants, dislocated from their villages by economic pressures and natural disasters, who end up in the cities with no skills—and often, a lack of Spanish—and form the huge itinerant labor pool that is so characteristic of Third World countries everywhere.

Under NAFTA, however, Mexico has been forced to import U.S. government-subsidized food products and fertilizers. With the advent of genetically altered corn, the conquest is virtually complete. Farmers are being forced to buy seed corn that has itself been treated to prevent it from producing viable seeds once the ears are harvested. Previously, farmers would hold back enough of their harvest for replanting. Now, pollen from imported, treated stands blows across great distances, altering gene structures in old seed corn and making seed conservation impossible.

The increase in agricultural dislocation, particularly among the small farmers of southeastern Mexico, has devastated farm communities throughout Oaxaca state, as farms are abandoned for jobs— often illusory or expensive to get to—in northern Mexico and across the Rio Bravo (Rio Grande).

Unemployment in Mexico, according to the agency responsible for such statistics, is now higher than it was at the height of the peso collapse in 1995, and increasing at an even higher rate than it did then. One estimate by an independent consulting firm late last year stated that only half this year’s college graduates will go from college to the career field of their choice. Recently, the government reported that in a country whose population is growing by a couple of million persons a year, the net number of jobs available increased by less than 100,000 during 2003.

NAFTA boosters, both here and where you live, point out that Mexico’s gross national product (the “macro” measurement of common wealth) has grown steadily over the last 10 years, except for the period immediately following the devaluation of the peso in 1995.

NAFTA critics, on the other hand, point out that the disparity in income between the wealthy and the poor has grown; that there are fewer middle class jobs than there were as a percentage of population; that the growth of the export sector, particularly the “maquiladora” assembly plants in the north, is shrinking as foreigners transfer their operations to ever cheaper labor sources in China, Honduras and elsewhere; that public services such as schools and hospitals have also been suffering, even before the present “austerity” regime. They point to the ecological and public health disaster created by the maquillas.

And here’s the saddest thing of all: NAFTA has had the same effect on the United States. The jobs that are draining away to China now, drained away from Detroit and Cleveland and Youngstown to come here.

For those who saw—and still see—NAFTA as having been a bad idea for working people on all sides of the border, there is hope. The U.S. government has virtually abandoned the plan for a “Free Trade Area of the Americas” in the face of mounting opposition from its potential “partners.” Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela have been leading the fight, and the Bush administration is back to pushing for individual free trade agreements, mostly with client states such as Chile. Mexico and Guatemala are leading an effort to form a “regional” trade zone in Central America separate from the United States, and Mexico is also involved in a push to strengthen the “Mercosur” concept. Mercosur is a combination of the words “mercado” (market) and “sur” (south), an idea that does not include its northern neighbors.

Meanwhile, life goes on, and so will Mario—minus a kidney…

Stan Gotlieb lives with his wife, the photographer Diana Ricci, in Oaxaca, Mexico. Their website, “Oaxaca, Mexico: An Expatriate Life”, can be seen at www.realoaxaca.com.