11-23-05, 8:37 am
In the wake of the Summit of the Americas in Argentina on Nov. 4-5, relations between Mexico and Venezuela have deteriorated to the point where both countries have withdrawn their ambassadors. Mexican President Vicente Fox is clearly worried; he has less than a year before elections on July 2, 2006, decide whether the country will continue along the path of economic integration with the U.S. begun by the PRI and continued by his pro-business National Action Party, or whether it will try to change course and adopt more nationalist and populist policies under the leadership of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD. Hugo Chávez is hoping the latter will happen.
Mexican pundits are commenting that Fox went to the summit looking for a fight with Chávez as a way of indirectly attacking his nemesis, PRD presidential frontrunner Andrés Manuel López Obrador. In the same way, Chávez’s insults are directed at both the former Coca Cola executive and Washington, calling him a “puppy of the empire,” and indirectly endorsing López Obrador’s candidacy.
On Saturday, Nov. 19, Chávez called a march to support him and the Mexican people, going so far as to don a wide-brimmed hat and sing with a mariachi group. In Korea, Fox tried to imply that it was not only him but the people of Mexico who were being insulted, saying through his spokesman, “Mexico will defend at all times the dignity of the people and the government.” But the duel is not personal but political, and it is over far-reaching economic issues.
Fox set off the dispute in Mar del Plata when he insisted that discussion of the FTAA be added to the agenda, which put the summit’s host, President Kirchner, in a bind. All involved are aware that the issue goes beyond a mere trade agreement. Like a Trojan horse, U.S.-contrived free trade agreements (FTAs) are secretly loaded up with provisions enshrining the rights of corporations over national sovereignty, such as “investor-to-state” dispute resolution, which allows corporations to sue countries over profits lost to safety or environmental regulations. FTAs also prohibit countries from favoring national businesses in the procurement of goods and some services, forcing them to open bidding to U.S. companies and possibly paving the way for the privatization of services.
The agreements ignore workers’ rights, environmental degradation and social and cultural issues. For example, in addition to imports from the U.S., Mexico is importing a lot of cheap manufactured goods from China, which has put Mexican factories and artisans out of business. This has lead to the absurdity of “Mexican” handicrafts being sold in Mexico which have “Made in China” stamped on the bottom.
Another fundamental flaw with FTAs is that they don’t address asymmetries, which means that they make the powerful and the powerless compete by the same rules. In Mexico under the PRI and the PAN there has been no assistance given to sectors negatively affected by NAFTA, and this has had two consequences. First, the divide between the rich and the poor in Mexico has widened; second, NAFTA has left the Mexican countryside in ruins.
Mexican farmers not only have had to face subsidized U.S. commodities flooding the country and lowering prices, but policies by the PRI government that put them at a greater disadvantage. Between 1982 and 1988, reports La Jornada, guaranteed prices fell precipitously while the prices of inputs rose. After that authorities withdrew farm credits and changed the law protecting small farms from foreclosure. By the time NAFTA was implemented in 1994 they didn’t stand a chance.
“NAFTA-required changes have resulted in literally millions of Mexican peasant farmers leaving their small farms and their livelihoods and being forced to migrate,” says a report by Public Citizen. “The land redistribution program established in the Mexican Constitution at the time of the Mexican Revolution was changed to meet NAFTA's foreign investor protection requirements-- meaning that, for the first time in 80, years small farmers could lose their land to bad debt. Projections range up to 15 million displaced Mexican small farmers because of NAFTA's agriculture provisions.” -- Public Citizen, “Down on the Farm: NAFTA's Seven-Years War on Farmers and Ranchers in the U.S., Canada and Mexico,” 2001.
If farmers were destined to be the losers in this game it’s not clear that urban workers were the winners. According to Gray Newman, economist at Morgan Stanley, Mexico is going through a manufacturing slump due to a slowing of exports to the U.S.--again because of competition from China. On Nov. 20, La Opinion reported Newman peddling the same “service economy” story they gave U.S. workers in the ‘80s and ‘90s:
“The loss of market with respect to China is not so sudden and dramatic a phenomenon as some believe and it is also explained in part by Mexico’s transition from a manufacturing export economy to one more geared around services.”Not much of a consolation to 15 million rural people turned into refugees, or to unemployed urban workers, but Fox pushes on. Maybe he fears his legacy is in danger or that his five years of sacrificing his people on the altar of progress will be for naught. Guided more by ideology than reality, he just can’t admit he was wrong.
--Diana Barahona is a freelance writer living in Southern California. She can be reached at
