Calderon: The Region 4 Bush

For those of us of American descent living in Mexico or naturalized as citizens, the most depressing thing about having to live under the Calderon junta is that, well, we have seen it all before. We have seen it all exactly before. In fact, Mexico's current agonizing descent into chaos is such a precise replay of what Americans have - with heroic stoicism (to be fair) or resigned passivity (to not be) - had to endure since 2000 that one can only wish that the world was such that we would be able to qualify for an exemption the second time around. Or that, as with DVDs, what plays in Region 1 wouldn't work in Region 4. Unfortunately, it looks like we were all fed a pirate version that plays on all machines, however jerky the image or shrill the sound (jerky and shrill: the modern right in a nutshell, ha!).

So here's the script: Bush and Calderón, both mediocre men piggybacking to prominence on the shoulders of their famous fathers (Bush Sr., himself son of a senator*, head of the CIA and one-term president; and Papa Calderón, one of the founders of the PAN, the political party set up in 1939 by oil interests in order to - yep, oppose the nationalization of the oil industry by Lazaro Cardenas). Both boasting of Ivy League degrees of more-than-questionable value (see my post: So Where Did You Go to College, Presidente?). Both rising to power through fradulent elections, using voter-roll manipulation (Florida and the Hildebrando connection in Mexico), vote-rigging (Ohio and the IFE), and the complicity of the judicial branch (the US Supreme Court on one side and the Federal Electoral Tribunal here on the other), beneficiaries of smear campaigns based on exploiting fear and dividing the population (Swift-Boating, for example, vs. 'Peligro para Mexico'). Both, to be blunt, installed in office by energy interests, for energy interests and of energy interests (through the invasion of Iraq and privatization of its oil, and, in reverse order, the privatization of Mexican oil followed by potential US invasion through the Plan Mexico to safeguard its future new holdings), each coming personally from a background replete with energy interests personally (Bush, failed oil man bailed out time and again by the Saudis, Calderón, failed Energy Secretary bailing out family members with contracts). Both the puppets (peleles) of far stronger men (Cheney) and women (Elba Ester) behind the throne. Both, in their puppet/pelele status, serving the interests of counter-revolutionary right-wing movements who see no positive role government can play in society except that of lining their pockets and those with 'preferred partner status' (Haliburton, Repsol...), using free-trade ideology as a convenient smoke screen to cover the construction of ever-more corporatist states (a highway bailout here, a Bear Stearns bailout there; some institutions are just "too important to fail..:"). Both, boxed in by that very ideology, criminally negligent when it comes to situations where government is indeed necessary (Bush in New Orleans, Calderon in the Tabasco flooding). Both flaunting their essentially-fundamentalist religiousness for political gain. Both kept in power through the complicity of a compliant corporatist media. Both presiding over the lower-growth, higher-inflation economic decline of their respective countries. Both benefiting the rich (tax cuts for the rich and tax breaks for the oil industry in the States, tax exemptions and enormous give-backs to individuals and corporations in Mexico) at the expense of the poor (an ever-more regressive tax structure, higher unemployment and price increases on staple goods). Both masking with tough rhetoric the increasing insecurity of their countries (in Mexico, the obvious rise of drug killings and kidnappings; in the US, the long-term, largely-ignored deterioration of its urban areas). Both subject to impeachment, if the ineffectual Congresses supposedly keeping checks on them would ever fulfill their respective Constitutional roles.

Region 1 Bush; Region 4 Calderón. Aren't we lucky to have one foot on both sides?

*Clarification: In my original post, I referred to Bush Sr. as son of a "censured senator", this in reference to his father, Prescott Bush. Prescott Bush was never, in fact, censured by the Senate in the manner of Joseph McCarthy. The controversy swirling around his legacy - and the reason he is often referred to as having been "censured" - is that four of his business interests, the Union Banking Corp, Holland-American Trading Corporation, Seamless Steel Equipment Corp, and Silesian-American Corp, were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Brown Brothers Harriman, for which Prescott Bush was a managing director, was the principal US banking partner for Fritz Thyssen, the top Nazi banker, and continued to do business with the regime even after the United States' post-Pearl Harbor declaration of war. Bush was never charged - the war was on and there were other priorities - but it remains an embarrassing black mark that the family has never fully been able to expunge.

The Rupture

The Calderon regime is in the early stages of advanced decomposition. Incapable of governing, haunted Hamlet-like by the ghosts of his electoral illegitimacy, propped up only by the US, Spain and Televisa, little Lipe and his band of incomptent blunderers reel from one issue to the next, turning everything they touch into dross, and converting the nation in the process into an economic wasteland, kidnapper's paradise, and drug-traffic battlefield strewn with the cadavers of a dozen dead a day. And every day, with every assassination, social restiveness gets ratcheted up one step further. "There does not exist one single measure taken by the current government nor an agreement made among all of the political forces that will diminish these pressures," writes José Agustín Ortíz Pinchetti. "On the contrary, a series of crises are converging at once: crime is on the increase and the security apparatus is crumbling. No response has been given to the agricultural deficit. We are entering into a recession. Inflation is increasing and growth decreasing. Every social and economic indicator is on a downward slope. The oil reform touted in such an irresponsible manner has thrown the whole country up in the air."

Calderón makes cosmetic changes in his cabinet by replacing his Finance Minister, a Fox lackey (Eduardo Sojo) with a lackey of his own (Gerardo Ruiz Mateos) who, incidentally, has no experience in the field whatsoever. But who needs experience when you can just improvise? Meanwhile, prices soar on practically everything that has a price to soar with. Gasoline is up, for the second time this month alone, to 7.32 pesos for a liter of Magna and 9.13 for Premium. Diesel is up eight centavos on the liter. Gas LP, used by 80% of Mexican homes for heating hot water and for stoves, is up 7 cents in August - a little 20 kilo tank now rounds out at just about 200 pesos. Electricity is up ten percent since this time last year. And these are all prices controlled by the federal government, mind you (now I thought the surplus produced by high oil prices was supposed to be subsidizing the price of imported gasoline, which is why there supposedly wasn't a surplus at all, but now that gasoline's going up too, what happened to those subsidies after all? Where did the FUCKING SURPLUS GO, CARSTENS, YOU FAT FUCK? Sorry, sometimes it just escapes me.). Food prices, of course, are up globally, and Mexico - ever more dependent on imports to compensate for its NAFTA-induced agricultural crisis - is in no way an exception. According to the Bank of Mexico, any salary gains won by workers in 2007 were completely wiped out by the price increases in April, May and June of 2008 alone, and are now lagging behind. Running faster just to stay two steps back, that is (see:.http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2008/08/01/index.php?section=economia&article=029n1eco). The only figure that is headed down, besides economic growth, is remittences from Mexicans living in the United States.

Here we see the travesty of the neo-liberal economic model at work. In the name of keeping inflation under control (thus protecting the value of the financial assets of the haves), genuine, broad-based economic growth is hamstrung and worker salaries are eviscerated. This of course, knocks the engine out of things, because poor people can't buy anything, except on credit. So flood the market with credit cards and keep people buying - for a while. Meanwhile, inflation goes up anyway for reasons - energy and food, primarily - that have nothing to do with worker salaries, but in Mexico at least, everything to do with poorly-timed tax increases and handing over of national economic sovereignty to the globalization taskmasker. And who gets nailed again by the consequent higher interest rates used to fight this inflation? Yes - the workers! Higher inflation, lower purchasing power, no credit (except those credit cards at 60% interest). Mexico, not dissimilar to the United States, is settling into a worst-of-both-worlds situation: deflating economy with inflation to boot. And situations like that, once mired into, become very hard to get out of.

I don't suppose Calderón has much time to really grapple with this, however, because he is too busy simply trying to save his scalp. "Before I thought the rupture was possible," writes Ortiz Pinchetti, "now I think it's probable. It is impossible, however, to predict how close it is. Years may pass before it arises, or it may strike in the near future, around the symbolically-charged elections of 2009-2010. We also can't discard the possibility that things, and the country, will just keep stumbling along in agonizing decadence. The deterioration has no limits."

Oaxaca: Corruption and Impunity Without Limits (translation)

Instead of writing a piece of my own today, I'm including here my own translation of an op-ed piece by Gustavo Esteva in today's Jornada that describes recent events in Oaxaca better than I could have. For all of you living in Mexico, please join in the nationwide boycott of all Chedraui stores. I know that all corporations are doing something, and if we boycotted all of them we wouldn't be able to shop anywhere, etc...but what happened last week in the Colonia Reforma is happening now, under our noses - the late-night rape of a hectare of woodland, with the full collusion of the municipal government, that the neighborhood was trying to get converted into an ecological park. Read on...


Oaxaca: Corruption and Impunity Without Limits
by Gustavo Esteva, La Jornada July 14th, 2008
Translation by Kurt Hackbarth

“Yesterday at three in the morning, an army of para-police from the Chedrahui company, protected by actual police, entered into the Predio Sarmiento in the heart of the Colonia Reforma in Oaxaca City and destroyed, without the required permits but with the complicity of the PRIista [from the political party PRI] municipal authorities, an enormous ecosystem home to thousands of birds and squirrels. The destruction covered over a hectare of trees, including three, hundred-year-old huanacastles, dozens of jacarandas, pirules, willows, oaks and date palms. The clandestine tree-cutters chased out and macheted to death hundreds of squirrels – a truly pathetic image. Only the intervention of hundreds of neighbors managed to put a halt to the barbarity, but it was already too late to save this small urban woodland. The environmental damage caused is incalculable.”

I take this quote from the manifesto of the organization “Pueblo Jaguar” which, together with others, has been circulating through Oaxaca this week to denounce last Wednesday’s aggression, the goal of which, obviously, was to prevent the consolidation of a citizens’ movement that for weeks has been working to prevent the building of a shopping center on the site, seeking instead to turn the forest into an ecological park. And clearly, the action [taken by Chedraui] has proven counterproductive. The movement has taken on an uncommon strength, working to organize a national boycott against Chedraui, as well as demanding punishment for the guilty parties and a stop to the construction. It will surely spread to other regions. After the destruction of the most beautiful of squares, the Plaza de la República, which lost some of its own hundred-year-old trees in a “modernization” project that sought to turn it into a sort of subway station, the Alameda de León, adjacent to the Plaza, is next on the list for being torn apart.

This is the state of things. On July 2nd, the local leader of the Employer’s Confederation of Mexico described the prevailing climate in Oaxaca: “Here they can kill two young indigenous radio announcers, and nothing happens; they can kidnap, and nothing happens; they can break into a house and rob it, and nothing happens; they can commit any offense, and nothing happens.”

No one should be surprised. When the Mexican Supreme Court discussed how to contribute to reestablishing constitutional order in Oaxaca, creating an investigative commission for this purpose, it stated: “We cannot allow arbitrary detentions and tortures of prisoners to become ordinary and normal in our country…The Oaxacans have lived through, and are perhaps still living through, a state of emotional and legal uncertainty…It is logical that people are living in anxiety when faced with authorities that make limitless use of public force, to the point of ignoring the human rights that our legal framework recognizes (La Jornada, 14/6/07)”.

While the Court continues with its apparently interminable investigations, the arbitrary detentions and torture of prisoners have become ordinary and normal in our country. In León, the police receive training in torture practices…so as to refine them. In the first six months of 2008, the Attorney General’s Office for Human Rights in Guanajuato has opened fourteen cases for torture and degrading and inhuman acts. The secretary for human rights for the United Nations recently indicated that respect for human rights is not a priority of the Mexican government. The unlimited and illegal use of public force is a daily practice throughout the nation. For the president of Mexico City’s Human Rights Commission, in national public security policy and in the administration of justice “no controls are placed on the action of the police, and the message is sent that everything goes in order to fight crime” (Proceso 1652, 19/6/08). And it is a crime, for the authorities, to participate in social movements. Not only the Oaxacans are currently living through emotional and legal uncertainty.

The leader of Coparmex reacted in Oaxaca to the kidnapping of one his own, a prominent Spanish businessman, which provoked the local leader of the National Chamber of Small Commerce into making the elegant expression: “That’s a load of crap!” The leader of the National Chamber of Transformative Industry said: “We want zero tolerance for those who disrupt the peace of Oaxaca!” Legislators from the PAN party, for their part, demanded the immediate intervention of the army and federal police in order to apply a remedy clearly worse than the disease, as the Oaxacan experience demonstrates, one which has begun to spread throughout the entire country.

Practically a year ago, Carlos Monsiváis stated that the continuance of Ulises Ruiz in power was “a profound enigma and a very severe insult to republican logic.” Perhaps it has stopped being an enigma. The insult is now open to all: it defines national policy. In different ways and in different degrees, the entire nation is suffering the consequences of not having adequately reacted against the intolerable affront that the people of Oaxaca have suffered, and are suffering still.

The Interests Behind the Interest Rates

Two weeks ago, in the face of a slumping economy, declining remittances from the United States, and a spate of regressive tax increases that are destined to further dampen consumer spending, the Stamford-educated President of the Bank of Mexico Willy Ortíz did the only logical thing to be done under such dire circumstances: he raised interest rates a quarter point to 7.75%. The ostensible reasoning for such an ass-backwards maneuver was to fight inflation; the underlying realities of such a decision, however, tell us a good deal more about both Mexico’s incestuous political-economic system and the equally-incestuous global system it has become so openly a part of.

Without going into too much detail of the finer points of economics, high interest rates tend to help creditors, who have money to lend, as well as people who live off investment incomes, both of which categories in Mexico are restricted to an elite, wealthy strata. Conversely, lower interest rates help debtors, who pay lower interest on money they owe, and entrepreneurs who seek to borrow money to start or expand businesses. When the economy is sluggish, lowering interest rates is one way to stimulate people to borrow and spend, and thus stimulate the economy; when it is “growing too fast” and the inflation monster appears again on the horizon, raising interest rates can tamp down excessive borrowing and spending. But here, all signs point to a substantial economic slowdown in Mexico, yet interest rates go even higher. Who gains, who loses?

For a generation now, governments the world over have held the Damocles sword of inflation over workers’ heads in order to force them to accept minimal pay raises that have essentially amounted to zero in real terms. Such a threat has been particularly effective in Mexico, where the painful memories of the devaluations of 1982 and 1994 are still fresh in people’s minds, and where unions have historically acted in collusion with the government in turn, often in direct opposition to the interests of their own members. One would at least expect that the reward for all this “good behavior” on the part of the working class would be lower interest rates in order to make it easier to borrow money and get credit. In fact, the only place in Mexico where interest is low (read: non-existent) is in bank accounts; everywhere else, interest rates are, and have remained, stratospherically high, enough to make the most die-hard usurer blush with embarrassment. The great unsung tragedy of this country, in fact, is the inability of the average person to get credit on anything resembling reasonable terms. Mortgage rates routinely run three to four times what they are in the States, with mountains of up-front costs loaded on, so practically no one ever gets one and houses remain half-finished until someone in the family can scoot back across the border and send some cash back down. Credit card rates shamelessly shoot up to sixty percent or more, and now that banks are peddling credit cards like water, ever more Mexicans are going to get the chance to get caught in sickening, American-style debt spirals at several times the interest rate. Feasbile small-business and first-time-homebuyer loans are practically non-existent. What you get back, however, pales in comparison: interest on “inversiones” (COD-like investments) often runs less than a half-percent a month, even on large sums; interest on “Afores” – the individual pension accounts Bush didn’t manage to turn Social Security into but Mexico has already been experimenting with for a decade – were running around 9% annual last time I checked mine, with more than 3% of that taken out for commissions; in six years of working at a job with benefits, I’d saved up the equivalent of about six months of salary. And who’s administering my Afore? Citibank, eh, Banamex, the National Bank of Mexico.

And therein lies the rub: the American and European banks who dominate Mexico’s banking system charge high commissions on everything and lend out money at usurious rates, not because Mexicans are such a credit risk, but simply because they no one is stopping them from doing so. This makes running a bank here extremely profitable, more so than in the bank owner’s home country – look at Bancomer’s surge in profits in Mexico profits in 2007 (http://www.elperiodicodemexico.com/nota.php?sec=Nacional-Finanzas&id=165586) or Santander’s 208% leap in profits in the first trimester of 2008 (http://noticias.mx.yahoo.com/s/28042008/7/negocios-logra-santander-utilidad-neta-cuatro-mil-742-mdp-enero.html). Why else would Mexico’s banks have so quickly been gobbled up after being cleaned up at taxpayer expense (to the tune of 6,000 pesos per Mexican as of 2004, and growing) by the Fobaproa bank bailout? And the revolving door between government and bank board – witness Fox’s finance minister Gil Diaz’s quick leap to HSBC – ensures that government regulators will never lean very hard on what these banks do. Let’s face it: Citigroup, Santander, Bancomer Bilbao and HSBC are simply not interested in making sure Juan Pérez gets a home mortgage or a micro-credit to start a shoe store; as multi-national conglomerates, they’ve got much bigger fish to fry, like speculating in Asian futures and then crying to their governments of origin when they get burned. Giant, multi-national banks are not interested in making relationships with local (poor) clients or in becoming part of a (poor) community; they are much more like vultures, swooping down to suck in commissions, reap large profits and invest the money elsewhere. Meanwhile, Willy Ortiz at the B of M raises interest rates in the midst of imminent recession in order to fight the inflation caused by the government’s increasing, NAFTA-ized dependence on food imports and the rising prices for its own oil which, instead of using to its own advantage, said government is trying to sell off as fast as possible.

As for me, I’m pulling my money out of my local multi-national bank and opening an account at the Caja Popular Mexicana. The Caja Popular is a cooperative, and by opening an account you become a member of that cooperative, not just a client, with a right to participate in the cooperative’s decision-making. Plus, the Caja Popular offers – gasp! – savings accounts that pay interest, investment opportunities, loans for people who wouldn’t otherwise get them from banks, deposit protection, and – gasp again! – no commissions. To paraphrase Hemingway, what if the big banks were still there, but nobody went to them anymore?

So Where'd You Go to College, Presidente?

Robert Lansing, former Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, wrote in 1924 that "Mexico is an extraordinarily easy country to dominate, as it necessary to control only one man: the President. We must abandon the idea of installing an American citizen in the Mexican presidency, as that would only lead us, once again, to war. The solution requires more time: we must open the doors of our universities to young, ambitious Mexicans and make the effort to educate them in the American way of life, in our values, and in respect for the leadership of the United States. Mexico will need competent administrators, and over time, these young people will come to occupy important positions and will eventually take posession of the presidency itself. And without the United States having to spend a single cent or fire a single shot, they will do what we want, and do it better and more radically than we ourselves would have done."

Lansing's counsel, directly or indirectly, was well-taken: the United States did not subsquently place a puppet onto the Mexican presidential chair, as it did with a laundry list of Mexico's Latin neighbors, and over time, it did open its doors for Mexico's political elite to come and study at its illustrious centers of higher education. A simple look at its roster of Presidents over the last twenty-five years confirms the success of Lansing's prescient vision: Miguel de la Madrid (1982-1988) - Master's in Public Administration, Harvard; Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) - Ph.D. in Economics, Harvard; Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000) - Ph.D. in Economics, Yale, currently a Yale professor of International Economics and head of the Yale Center of Globalization; Vicente Fox (2000-2006) - supposedly studied at Harvard, but definitely sold a lot of Coca-Cola; and Felipe Calderon (2006-how much longer will he hold out?) - Master's in Public Administration, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard. The year 1982, not coincidentally, marked a watershed in Mexican public policy, it being the year the country's leadership took advantage of the peso crisis to institute a neo-conservative, IMF-approved policy of economic shock therapy (see my previous post "Shocking and Awe-ing"), and has not looked back ever since. The results, as Hugo Carbajal Aguilar puts it (http://www.elregional.com.mx/?c=136&a=4376), "are on view for anyone who cares to look: rampant unemployment, drug trafficking on the increase with a consequent tsunami of insecurity, massive migration abroad - with all the risks that implies - disintegration of the family, lack of expectations for young people, students or not, deliquency in droves, ecocide..." As grandfathers around the world, eyebrows raised and brow furrowed, might ask in chorus: "What are they teaching you at that school of yours?"

Actually, that question is not at all hard to answer. Just as the proliferation of universities through the land-grant system were key in "winning the west" and just as the explosion of Latin-American studies programs in the 1960's was an instutional response to fears that we were "losing Latin America," US colleges and universities take in and groom future foreign leaders, no less than in Lansing's time, in "the American way of life, our values, and respect for the leadership of the United States." Said values entail massive privatizations, the scaling back of essential government services in the name of budgetary discpline, a hard-money, inflation-busting policy (note the Bank of Mexico raising interest rates lasty Friday in the face of a clearly-slowing economy) and the "opening" of the nation to foreign "investment" (or dumping, as the case may be). Anyone who opposes such obvious - and academically-tested measures - is a "protectionist," or worse, a "nationalist," as opposed to an internationist, cosmopolitan, English-speaking member of the trilateral world elite come home to be big fish. Father knows best: just check the framed diplomas on his wall. Whereas would-be dictators without an academic pedigree are simply sent to the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia to learn how to torture; those with 'more of a head on their shoulders' are sent to Harvard or Yale and taught to do regression analyses that demonstrate how cutting taxes raises revenues and other such - dare I say? - white man voodoo. The process is the same: the pimping of institutions to power. An austerity plan is one thing; an austerity plan by a Harvard-trained Ph.D. in a country which has been taught to fear and loathe itself is quite another. Didn't we learned from Kennedy's best-and-brightest Harvard-boy disasters in Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs not to trust those places once and for all?

Of course, educating the Latin-American elite is not all. Once their term of office is expired, or once the ignorant masses of their countries throw them out, the Ivy-League graduates usually wind up gravitating like magnets back to the source of their force. In a perverse form of retro-alimentation, Harvard, Yale and Stamford happily bestow their venerable names on the Salinises, Zedillos and Calderons, send them home to wreak havoc, and then welcome them back with open arms, padding out their faculty lists with an impressive line-up of former presidents and finance ministers to show off to the Alumni Board. Zedillo, as previously mentioned, schlepped right back to Yale to pimp globalization. Salinas and Calderon have been back to visit and gave stately talks. And most recently, Doctor Luis Carlos Ugalde (Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia), fresh from doctoring the 2006 election as head of Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute and finding himself out of work ahead of time (wonder why....) found a comfortable sinecure in the Government deparement teaching Latin American Politics at Harvard. How a hack like that can lie into the camera before millions of Mexicans who saw their decades-postponed hopes of a genuine democratic transition dashed before their eyes, only to be allowed to lope across the lawns in professorial robes in Cambridge, Mass. is enough to make any honest person's blood boil. Lansing, however, would be proud: without spending a single cent or firing a single shot, America is getting what it wants out of Mexico, and then some.

Free for Whom? (part 2)

An article by David Bacon entitled "How Do You Say Justice in Mixteco?" that appeared this week on the Truthout news site (http://www.truthout.org/article/how-do-you-say-justice-mixteco) begins by discussing the case of several Mixteco farmworkers living in California who were evicted from their trailers at the butt of a forklift, which lifted the trailers into the air and tipped them over, possessions still inside. One of the farmworkers, Erasto Vasquez, had lived in the trailer for seventeen years and raised his family there. Though the workers eventually won a settlement thanks to the efforts of the California Rural Legal Assitance (CRLA), the case is emblematic of the new wave of Mexican immigration into the United States and the dangers that new wave of immigrants faces. Bacon writes: "While farmworkers 20 and 30 years ago came from parts of Mexico with a larger Spanish presence, migrants today come increasingly from indigenous communities...[E]conomic changes like NAFTA are now uprooting and displacing Mexicans in Mexico's most remote areas, where people still speak languages that were old when Columbus arrived in the Americas." According to the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, 500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca alone are currently living in the United States, 300,000 of them in California.

In another piece on the Truthout site (http://www.truthout.org/article/plan-mexico), Maya Schenwar considers the implications of the Plan Mexico, which is at the point of being tucked into the - note - Global War on Terror supplemental spending bill and approved, to the tune of $1.1 billion dollars over the next three years. After objections from Mexican lawmakers that they didn't want any strings attached to the funding, the American Congress (how nice of them to have listened!) dutifully took all the teeth out of the accountability and human rights provisions. Senator Chris Dodd, after first warning that the United States doesn't write "blank checks," later stated that the US would drop any provision that "smacks of certifcation." Yes, Chris: sounds like the only smacking that's going to be done is US-bought weaponry on the backs of protestors' heads.

The circle at work here is so elementary, yet so effective: free trade aggravates poverty, increasing immigration - US employers benefit from low-wage labor - increasing poverty aggravates social conflicts in Mexico - US contractors benefit from the sales of weapons used to crack down on the restive populace. Schenwar references a Mexican government study which concluded that 90% of the illegal guns seized in Mexico come from the United States (not to mention what the government acquires: a friend of mine, during the Oaxaca conflict of 2006, found and photographed tear gas cannisters from Pennsylvania among the debris left behind by the crackdown here - having breathed in said gas, I can attest to their effectiveness). As she further points out, much of the Plan Mexico money will never leave the States, but will go to buy "Bell Helicopters, CASA maritime patrol planes, surveillance software, and other goods and services provided by private US defense contractors." The drug trade, of course, will not be stopped - the Mexican government and military is far too complicit in it and demand from the US is certain not to fall off anytime soon. Not to worry: the militarization model is "easily and inevitably adapted to fighting internal dissidence." Gives 'em something else to do, you know.

Needless to say, the US is not alone in benefiting both coming and going from this most vicious of circles: the Mexican political elite do quite fine by the process themselves, thank you very much. It has often been said that immigration functions as an "escape valve" for the Mexican economic structure, siphoning off workers the system can't provide jobs for and getting back money in turn in the form of remittances the immigrants send back to their families from the States. This is doubtlessly true: with the twin pillars of remittances and oil money, a rigid, corrupt and hierarchical system has propped itself up for decades without ever having to face the need for a fundamental housecleaning. Less often mentioned, however, is how this "escape valve" functions in a political sense, siphoning off potential dissent. Forced immigration breaks up families, breaks up communities, and it is a no-brainer that communities that are less cohesive, less united, are easier to control and keep down. There are entire pueblos in Oaxaca where there is hardly an able-bodied man to be found, leaving behind women and the elderly to run the roost. Mixteco, for example, is the language spoken by the majority of those indigenous farmworkers in California, and it is in fact the case that the Mixtecs who have stayed behind are not, as a whole, as politically active in the state of Oaxaca as the Zapotecs of the coast (where the first ever socialist government was elected a generation ago and which is still a hotbed of activism) or the Trique or Mixe, groups who, not coincidentally, have also been more active on the linguistic front, preserving and promoting their languages. This is hardly the Mixtecs' fault - the loss of their forests years and years ago have led to their arid territory in the northwest part of the state becoming amongst the most eroded landscapes in the world - but rather a commentary on how displacement fosters passivity. The United States knew this very well in places like Vietnam, Guatemala and El Salvador: to control a nation, civic and religious groups must be broken up and ethnicites split up and moved. What the ancient Scandanavians called landnama - claiming the land you inhabit by naming it and ideally becoming one with it - must be reversed to make for rootless, disoriented peoples, whose only goal is to survive, both psychologically and culturally. And mass immigration from Mexico to the United States does this work for those in power without their having to lift a finger. Escape valve, indeed.

For me, one of the most telling parts of the documentary Fraude by filmmaker Luis Mandoki, which documents the fraudulent Presidential election in Mexico in 2006, was the part of the interview with Andrés Manuel López Obrador where he recalls receving the results of a national poll in his tent in Mexico's Zocalo, where he lived for a month-and-a-half along with his fellow protestors. The poll, taken by the respected Mexican polling firm Mitofsky to gauge the political climate in Mexico at that moment, found that a full 10% of those polled were willing to take up arms against the government. Projected onto a nation of over 100 million, that makes for fully 10 million potential citizens in open revolt. And even if many, or even a majority of those polled wouldn't actually go through with it, the fact that they felt strongly enough to say so to Mitofsky should indicate to somebody who's listening that even the escape valve won't be able to let off enough pressure to keep the tottering old system in place forever. López Obrador, to his credit, has eschewed the route of violence, opting for non-violent civil resistance. Provoke enough more people with American arms through the Plan Mexico, however, and it may become harder and harder, if not impossible, to convince people with nothing to lose that the path of non-violence is the most appropriate one to take.

Free for Whom?

As the speculation-fueled global food crisis aggravates Mexico's already-dire economic situation, now is a good time to shake a stick at the free-trade Santa Claus and see if the gifts he has promised to produce from his magic sack have actually made their way into any little boys' or girls' hands.

Santa's promise in the North America Free Trade Agreement of 1993 (the Tratado de Libre Comerico, or TLC, in Spanish - as noted before, in Mexico, it is a treaty whereas in the States it is merely an Agreement) was the same as the one perenially made by free-trade economic theory: by eliminating tarriffs and other hidden costs, free trade lowers prices for consumers while at the same time, by providing greater choice, it stimulates healthy competition between domestic and foreign producers, thus improving quality and efficiency. And like most economic theories out of a textbook, it looks good on paper, but depends on a heavy dose of naivité regarding how the world really works. Anybody who's ever been to a schoolyard knows that artificially leveling the playing field between unequal opponents (or in economic jargon, "trading partners") means essentially throwing the game to the stronger. That distinction is particularly bald in the case of Mexico vs. the United States, where Mexican producers are forced to compete against giant, multinational corporations who not only benefit from the obvious economies of scale, but are also the happy beneficiaries of all kinds of governmental largesse, from tax breaks (the oil companies) to subsidies (agro-business) to fat contracts (defense contractors) that the Mexican government, even if it weren't leaking millions by the minute in corruption, could hardly compete with (and if they did, would be lambasted by the World Bank, IMF and WTO). Not only, then, is the big kid on the schoolyard allowed to beat the puniest into a pulp in a "fair fight", the principal's office is paying for his membership at the gym and talking his teachers into letting him out of class early and getting him out of having to do his homework in order to give him time to go and lift weights, all the while humilliating the puny kid in front of his classmates for his inability to stand up for himself like a man.

No problem, say free trade advocates. Every country has a "comparative advantage" in something, and if each side can only exploit that advantage, both stand to benefit. Unfortunately, the miniscule benefit Mexico has gained in exploiting the comparative advantage of its low-wage labor pool is mostly located along a small strip of maquiladora factories located along the border, where workers slave away at the five-dollar a day wages that have hardly risen since NAFTA's infancy, with the cold comfort that they are making slightly more there than the even-worse pay they might get elsewhere in the country. Meanwhile, the American companies located along the border revel in tax concessions and freedom from pesky safety, health and union regulations - those that are on the books are hardly being enforced by the gang-that-couldn't shoot-straight currently in power. The devastation of the Mexican countryside, caused by farmers' inability to compete ("like a man") with their lavishly-subsidized neighbors to the north, along with NAFTA's recent removal of the last protections against bean and rice imports, means that there will always be a limitless army of unemployed refugees from the countryside willing to work for that little, or if not, to cross the desert in search of work in the US in a hellish odyssey across the desert that makes Dante's Inferno seem like an amusement-park funhouse, and which allows US companies to benefit from the human arbitrage opportunities showing up, hungry and desperate, right on their doorsteps.

At least in the late nineteenth century, when American imperialists like John Cabot Lodge were prying open markets for American overproduction at the butt of a gun, they were more forthright about they were up to. "Gunboat diplomacy" was just that. But the current feeble treacle of free-trade pap is supposed to make the losers not only accept getting reamed in the exact same way as before, but feel thankful for now being the glorified dishwashers of the global village. To be fair, prices for some consumer goods - cars, electronics - have come down for the average Mexican consumer over the last several years. But the questionable benefit of that boost to the consumerist lifestyle pales in comparison to the stagnant wages, dribbly economic growth, crippling monopolies, and massive immigration of family and friends that the average Mexican grapples with daily, not to mention - to return to the beginning of this post - the skyrocketing prices in staple food items. Meanwhile, Walmart has become Mexico's number-one private-sector employer, and was an active campaigner amongst its staff and customers for Felipe Calderón in 2006. Poorer countries, you see, have to accept that free trade means the domination of its economy by foreign multinationals. The policy that the US has the luxury of calling "stimulating domestic production" is scoffed at in the Latin American sphere as the "import substitution," as if the natural state of affair for our Latin amigos is to depend on somebody else making everything for them but letting them, at least, be the ones to sell it to their brothers and sisters.

In the final analysis, as I believe only Noam Chomsky has consistenly pointed out, NAFTA is not really a free-trade agreement at all - it is, in his words, an "investors' rights" agreement allowing multinational companies to shift production and profits in a shell game in and around their international subsidiaries for labor and tax advantages. The lion's share of the much-vaunted post-NAFTA increase in trade between the US and Mexico, in fact, has been just that - internal shifting around of goods within corporations with one foot on both side of the fence, straddling it for that good old comparative advantage. Have the American engineer design it, have the Mexican line worker assemble it, declare the profits in the Cayman Islands or the losses in the States, and each movement of the good from subsidiary to subsidiary counts as trade. Magic. We're all better off. Haven't you noticed?