Long lines, carnival tents with free stuff and classrooms filled with new faces welcome us back to UNM. For those who are fresh to the scene, welcome.
We have to admit that we are students in strange times — stem cells, cloning humans and morality headaches, a president whose missing-ballot election and intellect are seriously questionable, while NAFTA, the International Monetary Fund and others are sanctioning the free slavery of our neighbors throughout the globe by U.S. corporations.
Oh, yeah, and Monday Night Football has started again. Hopefully we can learn to pay just as much attention to what is going on in this world, and in our own backyards, as we do to sports and other entertainment sound bytes.
I’ve noticed that several local businesses around campus with spray-canned words, “Fight Corporate Control.” I wonder how many people pay any thought to this or how many people even think about where the clothes on their backs and food in our stomachs come from or what our food is made of, for that matter.
Take the North American Free-Trade Agreement for example. For those who forgot, NAFTA was written into law Jan. 1, 1994 while Bill Clinton smiled about how free trade would stretch the arms of prosperity for Canada, United States and Mexico. During his visit to Albuquerque a couple of days ago, George W. Bush championed NAFTA as helping our “neighbors to the south.”
Free trade has become the new catch phrase that has taken a rightful place next to the idea of progress, which, by the way, replaced the idea of civilization and other words used to legitimize cultural and environmental destruction throughout the Americas. But has NAFTA helped our brothers to the south? Has it even helped our brothers down the street?
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If NAFTA, drafted about seven years ago, was true to its promises, why did thousands of Mexican farmers protest free trade in the country’s capital Aug. 9? They carried banners that read, “United States Out” and “Fox Means Misery.” Why did more than 100,000 protesters this past March 11 say the same thing?
I decided to search between the lines and read a book by Juan Gonzales called Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. This book describes how United States policies of intervention throughout Latin America have caused massive migration to the states. Gonzales writes, “But in the barrios and shantytowns of Latin America, 50 years of empty promises about free trade prosperity have brought only increased misery and made more people than ever desperate to escape to El Norte.”
The more I learned, the more I realized the truth in what Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesman for the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas, said the day NAFTA was signed: it is a death sentence for Mexico.
The U.S. Department of Labor has reported that between 1994 and 1998, U.S. factories laid off 214,000 as a result of U.S. companies moving south of the border.
U.S. companies move to Mexico because they can pay the workers much less, environmental and workers’ safety laws are enforced and unionizing is kept under the brutal control of bloodshed.
Because Mexico’s economy has been sacrificed to let in U.S. investments and corporations, the majority of Mexicans, except for the small herds of the wealthy, have to abandon the lands of their grandparents to work in shantytowns under horrendous conditions, all for about $5 a day.
As the hot sun follows us from classes to our homes and wherever else our feet carry us, let us remember our responsibilities to cultivate our minds and hearts and to be a critical voice for the future.
