250,000 Mexican campesinos and supporters march against NAFTA expansion and U.S. corn dumping

BY JOHNNY HAZARD

The abolition of tariffs on corn in Mexico gives U.S. corporations an easy place to do “corn dumping,” as it’s called.

On Thursday, Jan. 31, a coalition of farm, union, and political organizations held a march whose attendance organizers estimated at 250,000. The estimate seems to be correct, given that the rear contingents were still arriving to the end of the three-mile trek more than three hours after the march began (and when all the speakers had finished).

While the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect 14 years ago, and while its miraculous effects—the loss of millions of jobs in all three of the affected countries—are now well-known, the final “liberalization” began on Jan. 1 of this year: the abolition of any tariffs on corn, beans and a few other crops. This permits U.S. agrocorporations to dump these products in Mexico.
Max Correa, director of the Central Campesino Cardenista (CCC), alluded to the likely results of this phase when he began his speech with “a salute to the 5 million rural Mexicans who have had to migrate to the United States” since NAFTA began to take effect. Five million Mexicans who were neither at the march, nor in the fields; they were in your neighborhood restaurant, washing dishes, or at your local meatpacking plant.

The general demand of the march was the renegotiation of NAFTA, known as TLC (Tratado de Libre Comercio) in Mexico, but various groups advocated its complete abrogation; others invoked 2010, an allusion to the revolutions that have occurred in the tenth year of the past two centuries and the suggestion that it will be time for another.

Women made their presence felt in two different ways: Contingents of young urban women reminded us that feminism once had something to do with sexual freedom, as they danced and propagandized in favor of making abortion free and legal in the rest of the country (it is in Mexico City since last year) and making all contraceptives free and freely available. More traditional women marched in campesina contingents of several hundred—from various states. Does this reflect the increasing activism of rural women? Or does it simply tell us that they come from ghost towns, as far as one gender is concerned? In many parts of Michoacán, Puebla, Guanajuato and other states, most of the men have emigrated.

There were marchers from all 31 states and from the urban and rural parts of Mexico City. (Fifty nine percent of the land in Mexico City is still officially considered rural.) There were bands from Xochimilco and several dozen white horses from Milpa Alta, a mountainous area in the southeastern part of the city where Emiliano Zapata made his headquarters briefly on the way to taking downtown during the last revolution. From Zapata’s home state, Morelos, just south of Mexico City (known for its capital, Cuernavaca) there were thousands of marchers, including brass bands and chinelo dancers. From Texcoco, a small city to the east of Mexico City, there were about 300 students from Chapingo, an agricultural university. Ominously, some of these students carried a banner demanding the release of “our political prisoners”—five, from a school of only a few thousand students. The number of political prisoners and disappeared in Mexico is one of Latin America’s great censored stories.

Though most of the campesinos came from nearby states, there were several busses from Nayarit, about a 24-hour-drive from the city. (I know this because I saw them waiting after the march, about a mile away, in the red zone near my house. The area was full of bus depots years ago, and rural bus drivers still pick up and drop off there.) Also about 24 hours away is Ciudad Juárez, from which a caravan of tractors started several weeks before the march, picking up adherents in other states along the way, like Zacatecas and Querétaro.

The revival of the rural movement, and its easy coalition with urban activists, is the worst nightmare of Felipe Calderón, the “official president” who took office 13 months ago amid allegations of electoral fraud. The price of tortillas, staple of the Mexican diet, has increased about 150 percent since then, and Calderón’s government has resorted to an expensive public relations campaign to convince the public that NAFTA brings more benefits than harm and that, in spite of the tortilla price increase and similar price hikes in other basic items, the overall inflation rate is a miraculously low and neoliberally reasonable three percent.