>O.K. That's clearly enough NAFTA. Did I also
>miss a part where police involvement in the war is explained?
I agree with you that there's much more to it than NAFTA. I'm only responding to your claim that NAFTA had little to do with it. That's as wrong as saying that NAFTA caused it, which I think is what you're arguing against. I agree that's incorrect. There are linkages though and displacement of people caused by free trade policy is one of them.
A couple years ago I was reading about a problem with finding interpreters for the LA county court system who could speak languages indigenous to Mexico. This hadn't been an issue before. This piece from NACLA sheds some light here:
Displaced People: NAFTA’s Most Important Product
Since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, the U.S. Congress has debated and passed several new bilateral trade agreements with Peru, Jordan and Chile, as well as the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Congressional debates over immigration policy have proceeded as though those trade agreements bore no relationship to the waves of displaced people migrating to the United States, looking for work. As Rufino Domínguez, former coordinator of the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB), points out, U.S. trade and immigration policy are part of a single system, and the negotiation of NAFTA was an important step in developing this system. “There are no jobs” in Mexico, he says, “and NAFTA drove the price of corn so low that it’s not economically possible to plant a crop anymore. We come to the United States to work because there’s no alternative.”
Economic crises provoked by NAFTA and other economic reforms are uprooting and displacing Mexicans in the country’s most remote areas. While California farmworkers 20 and 30 years ago came from parts of Mexico with larger Spanish-speaking populations, migrants today increasingly come from indigenous communities in states like Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero. Domínguez says there are about 500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca living in the United States, 300,000 in California alone.
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