Five Years After Mayan Uprising:

Five Years After Mayan Uprising:
Time to Review US - Mexico Policy
Saul Landau
op-ed, 25 December 1998

In 1999, Congress should review our partnership with
Mexico. It's long overdue. January 1, 1999 marks the fifth
anniversary of the Mayan uprising in Chiapas, Mexico's
southeastern state. When thousands of masked and armed
Indians seized eight Chiapas municipalities, they dramatized
for the world the stark realities of Mexican life, but they
also called attention to the new free trade arrangements.
Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesman for the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation, said that 'January 1 marked the onset of
NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement between the United
States, Canada and Mexico - the new partner). For Indian
people, NAFTA is a death sentence'.

The revolt touched a chord of sympathy for indigenous
people, but most did not see the links between the Chiapas
revolt and US policy toward Mexico. Yet, the uprising came on
the heels of a veritable free trade celebration, when
luminaries had painted a picture of our southern neighbour as
a developing democracy, whose citizens enjoyed a rising
standard of living. NAFTA promoters, like George Bush and
Bill Clinton, praised the Mexican government maturity. In
1993, Henry Kissinger wrote a syndicated column hailing then
President Carlos Salinas de Gortari as a miracle maker for
having almost single-handedly abolished corruption.

Aside from a statement that should have won the award for
the most exaggerated statement of the year - Salinas'
brother is in prison on charges of murder and extortion;
Salinas himself is the subject of major inquiries over
financial hanky panky - Kissinger underplayed Mexico's
institutionalized violence, a system that links Mexico's
police, military and political class to drug dealers and
other nefarious special interests.

The eager NAFTA missionaries also minimized the
connection between the causes for the Chiapas revolt and the
causes of poverty and oppression throughout Mexico.

The violence of the Chiapas uprising, the Zapatistas
claimed, only reflected the violence felt every day by
indigenous and other poor people, who were victims of their
own government's policies that consistently aided the rich to
the detriment of the poor.

Above and beyond the daily injustice that desperately
poor Mexicans ingested, Marcos warned, NAFTA meant that
Mexico had entered the globalization process. To prepare
Mexico for the massive entrance of foreign capital, President
Salinas had revised an article in Mexico's constitution that
protected communal lands from sale, rent or lease. He also
ended the possibility of indigenous people acquiring
additional land as their families grew, thus preventing Mayan
and other Indian nations from reproducing their families and
cultures on their sacred land.

They revolted so as to be a shot heard round the world,
to alert people of sensibility to the threat posed to all
indigenous and peasant societies by the controllers of
globalized agriculture, industry and commerce. The Zapatista
rebellion burst the 'happy Mexico' bubble spun by promoters
of NAFTA. But it did not redress the income gap between the
handful of very rich and the 60 plus million very poor; nor
did it lessen injustice in Chiapas. Indeed, the plight of
millions of indigenous people has arguably worsened.
Agri-business continues to acquire more land; the ongoing
flow of rural people to urban, industrial centers
continues.

The Mexican government has not met the basic demands of
its people. It has responded to issues of land, education,
access to medical care, justice and democracy, by stationing
a 60,000 man occupation army in the pro Zapatista zones. A
daily convoy of some 40 vehicles roars along the dirt road
that connects tiny villages of barefoot, sick and hungry
people. The laser guided cannons, the heavy caliber machine
guns and armed soldiers on armoured personnel carriers
dramatize the government's response to its poorest people.
The Mexican government expends hundreds of millions on a
military force - with US made weapons and machines included,
supposedly for use in the drug war - instead of investing in
basic needs.

By waging this counterinsurgency war and occupying part
of its own territory, the Mexican government is forcing
Indians to flee their ancient lands, pushing them out of
peasant life and into the vast world labour force. This is
NAFTA in action, just as Marcos warned.

Worse, the army has helped equip and train para-military
gangs. On December 22, 1997 such a group entered the village
of Acteal in Chiapas' highlands and systematically
slaughtered 45 people, mostly women and children.

Investigations carried out by Catholic Church and other
reputable organizations linked the killings to the highest
levels of Chiapas' state government. In turn, those ruling
party officials had links to Mexico's national PRI, Mexico's
ruling party for almost 70 years. The punishment meted out to
the high officials who abetted the massacre: barred from
holding public office for up to ten years.

It's time to face facts. Neither US policy nor the much
heralded Mexican economic model have worked for the common
good.

**The joint US-Mexico effort to wage war on drugs is
failing as high Mexican officials are revealed to be in
league with narco-traffickers.

**The Mexican banking system, which neared collapse was
bailed out when the government twisted enough arms in
Mexico's legislature to foist billions of dollars in bad debt
onto the public.

**The income gap widens between rich and poor.

**In the newly industrialized border cities and in Mexico
City itself, the environment reaches intolerable levels.

Congress should face the fact that NAFTA was an accord
between governments that did not share common values on
labour or environment, whose people had drastically different
standards of living. As indigenous people leave their land
and enter already crowded urban centers as low wage factory
workers, they change identity: from people with an ancient
and sacred culture, they become producers and consumers, part
of the fodder that fuels uncontrolled industrial growth in
Mexican border cities. Indigenous people now make up part of
the some 2 million people in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez.
Mexican authorities have not built a proper infrastructure to
sustain them.

In short, the fears the NAFTA critics, like Subcomandante
Marcos, warned about have come to pass. Congress must examine
them and not continue to rubber stamp a dangerous so-called
free trade policy based on myths spun over five years ago.
The costs to human life and the threats to environment are
too great.