Carrol
On 5/22/2011 3:49 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
> At 01:40 PM 5/22/2011, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>
>> 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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