The New Plantation Economy

By Stan Gotleib

Way before George Washington became a slave owner, the Spanish were using kidnapped Africans in Hispañola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and later in the Gulf Coast states of Campeche, Veracruz and Yucatan, to raise hennequen and sugar cane. This was after the local population of Mayan and other native peoples had proven to be “untrainable,” and before the slaves were freed by Spanish decree and replaced by Mexican mestizos.

The horrible circumstances of the “free” work force have been documented in many publications, including and especially those of B. Traven. Workers were nothing more than indentured slaves, flogged (literally) by their work bosses, living in hovels, denied medical care and cheated at the company store. Union organizers, when discovered, were jailed, disappeared, and left to swing from trees as an example to those who might have “rebellious” thoughts.

Eventually, the great plantations of southern Mexico disappeared, as Capital found cheaper supplies elsewhere. Some of the old Haciendas still exist, as tourist attractions and luxury hotels. Last month, the Mexican government announced plans to bring the big plantations back, and a new “law” was passed to promote and to subsidize the growing and processing of cane—for ethanol.
One can argue that the whole push for ethanol is a shuck laid on us by big petroleum and agribusiness for their own profits; that “biofuels” will not do much to improve the environment; that the use of corn for ethanol will isproportionately drive up the cost of living for the poorest among us—who do not have automobiles—due to rising prices of food; or that the whole business is a distraction meant to keep us from concentrating on replacing cars with public transportation.

All of these issues and more are worthy of an ongoing public debate. But meanwhile, the reality is that the transnational energy and agribusiness corporations that are promoting bio-fuels are going ahead with their plans to produce and market ethanol, using corn, cane and palm, among other crops, as a source; and that there are enormous quantities of money in the pipeline for those who can bring these sources on line.

While Mexico is “fortunate” to have vast cleared areas ready for planting (unlike Brazil, for example, where expansion of biofuel growth means massive clear-cutting of old-growth rainforests), it will not escape other ecological disasters that accompany ethanol production, chief among them being the overuse of water, as well as pollution of the water table with pesticides and the waste generated in the process of converting cane to ethanol. The most unfortunate part of the scheme, at least in the “short run” will be the return to the plantation economy and the part it will play in the “Plan Puebla Panama” (PPP).

PPP is the foundation for the total exploitation of Mexico’s natural resources by the transnationals. It includes a series of hydroelectric dams and wind farms, and a high-speed “railway canal” (which will destroy the majority of the last remaining rain forest in southern Oaxaca state) across the narrow Isthmus of Tehuantepec—which are displacing tens of thousands of Oaxacans from their land. The electricity generated will run the trains, and provide power for the refineries that will convert the cane to ethanol.

Given the track record of the current administration, there is little doubt that the worst excesses of the plantation system will return along with the cane fields. Felipe Calderón and his cronies are out to give away as much of the country as they can to the transnationals, and they are clearly willing to put down any opposition with massive force, as they did in Oaxaca in November.

They have already gutted the pension system for government employees, known as ISSTE in its Spanish initials, and recently passed some “reforms” to the criminal codes that will make it easier for them to arrest legitimate protesters as “terrorists” and sentence them to decades of imprisonment for “threatening commerce.”
In this new era of heightened oppression, with a vast pool of unemployed workers available in Yucatan state and little hope of organizing them, the march backward to the plantation seems inevitable.