In April, US President Barack Obama visited Mexico where he announced that the US needed to take some responsibility for Mexico's ongoing Drug War. He also declared his support for a continuation and strengthening of free trade policies between the two countries. According to Miguel Tinker-Salas, it is the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the massive economic transition it precipitated, that has created such fertile ground for the drug economy. The result is that the Mexican government finds itself facing a decreasing level of control over entire regions of the country as the cartels provide the services that the central government no longer does.
BioMiguel Tinker-Salas is a professor of History and Latin American studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He is co-author of Venezuela: Hugo Chavez and the Decline of an Exceptional Democracy and author of Under the Shadow of the Eagles . And his latest book is entitled The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela.
Comments from Registered Members | (Register or log in to make your comment.) | SergeiRostov 2009-05-12
[Comment continues from below - SAR]
So it wasnt NAFTA's fault, but in fact *the lack of the implementation of **all** of NAFTA provisions* by the Mexican government and the lack of effort on the part of the Mexican goverment *to do what it was constituted for in the first place* , which is to blame.
| SergeiRostov 2009-05-12
The Mexican goverment is responsible for the welfare of its own people; no treaty or agreement can supercede this or enable it to opt out of this responsibility. Further, as I recall, under NAFTA the Mexican government was *required* to do what goverments are obligated to do in any case - build and maintain an infrastructure that enables the creating and sustaining of sufficient good jobs for its people - and it wasn't (and isn't) doing that.
Tinker-Salas admits here that the Mexican government abandoned its obligations, but then says it couldn't have maintained them. Well, the fact is, it was *required* to, both by its being the goverment of Mexico, *and* by the agreement, and therefore it was *empowered to do whatever was legal and necessary* to make sure this occurred. So it wasnt NAFTA's fault, but in fact *the lack of the implementation of **all** of NAFTA provisions* by the Mexican government and the lack of effort on the part of the Mexican goverment *to do what i | Freaser 2009-05-03
This is the 21 first century way of fighting the NWO they have for over 50 years been starving the peoples of the world to take over and control the world.
Well, right back at them! We can if we to this world wide STARVE the Corporations out of business.
O-they will fight back creating laws to benefit them, but WE are the World, the poor people; we just keep a comin.
| Freaser 2009-05-03
Want to help stop this and other acts of genocide around the globe by these and others countries Corporate Terrorists? Stop buying from the Corporate farms, buy from locally grown smaller farmers. Buy from road side food stands, start your on garden and can and freeze your own food supplies. Stop buying the foreign goods all together, work with your unemployed neighbors start making clothes and products you need everyday from YOUR recycled waste. Hell you may even make a living doing it.
It’s either that or get use to being ruled by the World Corporations and kept poor!
| Freaser 2009-05-03
Of course Obama and the US Corporate terrorists want free trade with Mexico. After passing a free trade act under Bill Clinton (first proposed by Papa Bush) Mexican farmers lost the ability to compete with US Corporate Criminals. Thus losing their farms/ livelihood and lands and being forced to migrate to either bigger cities in Mexico or illegally enter into the United States where they are forced to work for below living wages without insurance and forcing the American public to pay for their healthcare.
Once the US Corporations have the Mexican economy under their rule then they will be free to import their cheap products into America using the cheap labor of the Mexicans to undermine the American workers. Why is America car companies broke and filing for bankruptcy when they had 20 years of record breaking sales? Because they are counting the cost of building brand new factories in Mexico into their total expenses as losses!
Want to help stop this and other acts of genoci | Swansen 2009-05-03
You know... If mexico raised its labor laws, it would end all the corruption that US CEOs send there. Corporations wouldn't be able to do business their the way they do.. |
Free trade and Mexico's drug war Producer: Jesse FreestonJESSE FREESTON, TRNN: On Friday, Mexican President Felipe Calderón announced a five-day shutdown of all nonessential services in the country, with the goal of stemming the spread of the swine flu virus. Add while they swine flu outbreak has certainly struck fear into much of Mexico in recent weeks, it is the increasingly violent drug conflict that has been terrorizing much of the country for years. US-owned industrial pig farms, which set up shop in Mexico after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, are being fingered by many as the origin of the flu virus. Likewise, NAFTA has been identified as a central factor in the development of the drug war.MIGUEL TINKER-SALAS, LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, POMONA COLLEGE: When Mexico begins the process of integration economically with the US in terms of NAFTA, it also begins to abandon its national project. There are those who say that this is the second death of Mexican nationalism in the context of NAFTA. Mexico changes its discourse, changes its policy, its state-to-state relationship with its population. The state largely becomes now simply a manager of wealth, of trying to attract finance capital. It abandons, essentially, its nation-state project. In abandoning that position, it abandons its social policy, its social program; it deemphasizes education. Even the proponents of NAFTA realize, underscore, admitted that Mexico would go through a very difficult transition period. What they argued was that this transition period would eventually lead to growth and development after a short period of crisis, but the reality is that that crisis has been permanent. Mexican authorities—in fact, the government policy towards the rural areas has been to a largely abandon those areas. And that abandonment comes on the fact that they no longer can subsidize, no longer can support, no longer can aid many of these rural areas. And as a result, particularly since now corn is being imported from the US and other agricultural products are being imported from the US, we see the fact that cattle production, sheep production, pork production, at least from the traditional economy, corn production, has been in fact pushed aside by imported products and imported goods, except in those areas where you have actually corporate farms, like the ones in Veracruz and others that have been associated with the more recent swine flu. So the reality is that as that agricultural, agrarian economy collapses, that opens up a space for the narcotraffickers, because, after all, narcotrafficking benefits from poverty, from inequality, from the fact that people have no other option, from the fact people have no other source of income. Also, small businesses in Mexico, small ma and pa stores, are unable to compete with the new economy, with the large megastores that were coming into Mexico and competing. So there's a dislocation of traditional economic sectors that creates spaces, then, for narcotrafficking, lucrative spaces where narcotrafficking becomes an alternative for youth who can't find employment, for people who even are trained who can't find employment. FREESTON: Despite the apparent failure of the neoliberal economic vision that NAFTA embodies, Mexican President Calderón and US President Barack Obama have committed themselves to facilitating further such integration.~~~BARACK OBAMA, US PRESIDENT: Mexico is one of our largest trading partners. The amount of commerce that flows back and forth creates wealth in Mexico and it creates wealth in the United States. I have said repeatedly that I'm in favor of free trade. But I can tell you that President Calderón and I are entirely on the same page in believing that we can create greater opportunities for trade and strengthen our commercial relationships between our two countries.~~~FELIPE CALDERÓN, MEXICAN PRESIDENT (VOICEOVER TRANSLATION): We must protect trade. And the best way of doing so is to allow it to flow naturally with no restrictions in order to protect free trade. I agree with President Obama: we have to go further, we have to go beyond in order to improve trade between both our countries. We do not want to restrict it.~~~FREESTON: This continued emphasis on free trade may play right into the hand of the drug cartels.TINKER-SALAS: And you have competition, then, between the traditional state and, increasingly, these drug organizations that assume not only the position of illicit drug traffickers, but also increasingly become in some ways social organization, reaching out to the populace, reaching out to the population, and begin to compete, becoming what some have described [as] a state within a state. They have weapons; they have the capacity to military inflict damage on the state. They begin to fulfill social functions, doing celebrations for Day of the Child, day of the—Mother's Day, other such activities. FREESTON: Here's an example of a children's day event unabashedly sponsored by Gulf cartel leader Osiel Cárdenas Guillen from a home in his US prison. This practice isn't new. Here is an invitation to 2006's Children's Day party. At that time Osiel was occupying a Mexican prison cell.TINKER-SALAS: They become social heroes, social Robin Hoods. Despite their death and destruction that they're causing on the population, they assume an important position. FREESTON: It is believed that over 10,000 people have been killed in the last two years in violent conflict between the cartels and the state authorities, or amongst the cartels themselves.TINKER-SALAS: Drug cartels in Mexico are in Michoacán; they're in Sinaloa; they're in Baja California; they're in Sierra Juárez; they are in the Tamaulipas area; they're in the Golfo area. So there's this tremendous potential for violence throughout Mexico. What it means is that they have acquired weaponry. Some of that weaponry has come from the US. Some of it has been weaponry that was left behind by the US in Central America as a result of the wars in Central America. Some of it has been as a result of the fact that 100,000 Mexican soldiers have defected in the last five years—and they take the weapons with them. So they have become very powerful organizations that can inflict violence. They can organize in a very structured fashion. And in many municipalities, in many districts that are poor, that have been ravaged by immigration, that have been ravaged by poverty, where the state has abandoned, literally, a policy in the countryside, we see at least 300 municipalities that Mexican news sources point to as being controlled directly or indirectly by narcotraficantes. It goes to such an extent that one of these druglords, Chapo Guzmán, from the Sinaloa cartel, is supposed to have staged his wedding in the state of Durango, in which he lands in a plane with his own soldiers, with a priest in tow, with municipal authorities from the PAN in tow, stages a wedding and is able to celebrate for several days before he leaves on his honeymoon. That's the extent to which there's been a space created by the narcotraffickers. Part of that is popular lore, but part of that is also reality in terms of what the state has collapsed in those areas [sic].DISCLAIMER:Please note that TRNN transcripts are typed from a recording of the program; The Real News Network cannot guarantee their complete accuracy. |
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