[lbo-talk] drug war news

[123hop at comcast.net]

...which is what I said, but not using so many words. Having been to Mexico many times over the last thirty years, I seriously doubt U.S. produce was better. But it was definitely cheaper.

I was missing the piece about how NAFTA also made the cross-border trafficking  much easier....but otherwise ....I was not so far off the mark.

Joanna

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dennis Claxton" <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>

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.

[...]

___________________________________
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk