>But NAFTA's only role was making smuggling
>easier, not in its impact on rural Mexico.
I see you didn't read (or listen to) the rest of the interview:
LIVESEY: One thing that occurred with NAFTA was it allowed American produce, you know, especially, you know, agricultural produce, into the Mexican market. And essentially the Americans, their produce was cheaper and better than the Mexicans'. So essentially what that did is it wiped out the Mexican agricultural sector to a great extent. So a lot of the small farmers in central Mexico who were just, you know, barely getting by suddenly were out of work, and they essentially migrated north to cities like Juárez where factories had been set up, in the maquiladoras, and to take advantage of, you know, free trade, essentially to exploit Mexican workers and produce goods for the American market. And so you saw Juárez in the sort of late '90s, early 2000s actually become a prosperous cityyou know, a lot more investment there and a large growth in population. Well, then a couple of things happened. One is that a lot of those jobs vanished when suddenly China and India became the place to be, to send your manufacturing. So you had now this displaced population in northern Mexico who couldn't go back to the land to make a living because they couldn't compete with American produce, and increasingly their only economic opportunity was the drug trade. This was essentially dealing in narcotics. So they became employees of the drug cartels. And thatso now you have a significant portion of the Mexican population that is involved somehow, either directly or indirectly involved, in the drug trade. It is now considered the second biggest export and industry in Mexico is the drug trade, after oil production.
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