Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

The maquilas do not constitute any economic
development for Mexico. They are just labor-intensive intrusions
of U.S. manufacturing. It isn't just the profits
that go to the U.S. oppressor nation. The U.S. receives
both the super-profits and the consumer products
themselves, while retaining all the white-collar managerial,
professional, clerical, technical and distributive jobs made
possible by the production. Even in this form - of giving
Mexican women employment at wages five times the usual
rate in the rural areas - the imperialist looting has a
destructive effect on the social fabric. The border maquilas
gather women from all over the unoccupied zone, while
helping to force jobless men north across the artificial
border.
So this export of production is often a Trojan
horse to the Third World. Even worse is the parasitic trend
of looting the Third World for foodstuffs, shifting
agricultural production for U.S. consumption in part to
the oppressed nations. The entire imperialist block is joining
in on this. In 1980 the Far East Economic Review noted
that in poor Asian nations "the new export-oriented luxury
food agribusiness is undoubtedly the fastest growing
agriculture sector. Fruit, vegetables, seafood and poultry
are filling European, American and, above all, Japanese
supermarket shelves. " (19)
Similarly, according to official figures, more basic grains
are consumed for animal forage than by 20 million
peasants." (20)
We should note here that the peculiar chemicalmechanized
U.S. agriculture is itself highly specialized,
primarily oriented around the subsidized mass production
of feed grains. Two-thirds of all U.S. agricultural exports
are feed grains used in raising livestock. Most of these exports
are to the industrial powers - Europe, Japan and
the USSR - while much of the $16 billion in foodstuffs
the U.S. imports each year is from the Third World. In
Mexico the neo-colonial economy imports grain from the
U.S. to raise meat for the upper and middle classes, while
exporting significant amounts of its own food productivity.
(21)
So all over the Third World the oppressed not only
supply U.S. imperialism with raw materials, but increasingly
labor in both the factories and "the factories in the
fields" to send the U.S. a growing stream of consumer and
industrial products, and even foodstuffs. The world plantation
is still very real in the age of the computer. We say
that the first makes the second possible.
In Mexico this has reached grotesque proportions.
Within the unoccupied zone the area of Western Sinaloa
alone supplies some 50% of all winter vegetables consumed
in the U.S. (16) Thousands of peasants have been
displaced, driven off traditional lands to make way for the
large plantations (and their gunmen) that are neo-colonial
agents for the U.S. supermarket chains. The land is Mexican~;
the labor is Mexicano. Only the profits and consumption
are Euro-Amerikan. There is nothing too subtle
about this. White Amerika is parasitic on the Mexicano nation,
taking food from the starving to help fill up the fabled
Amerikan supermarket. A report from Mexico in the
New York Times tells the price paid by that oppressed nation
for involuntarily maintaining the "American Way of
Life:"
"Reliable statistics on nutrition levels do not exist,
although the 1970 census concluded that 30 percent of the
population, then over 60 million, were undernourished,
another 30 percent suffered malnutrition and at least 20
per cent were obese because of poorly balanced diets.. .
"The first-indicator is when we see infant mortality
rising again,' said Dr. Adolfo Chavez, head of nutrition
in the National Nutrition Institute. 'In some really depressed
rural communities few children born since I974 have
survived. We have what we call generational holes. But infant
mortality is also growing in slum areas of the cities ...
More than 100,000 children die here each year because of
the relationship between malnutrition and transmittable
diseases,' he said, 'and of the two million or so born each
year at least 1.5 million will not adequately develop their
mental, physical and social functions.'
"As in many developing countries, agricultural
priorities are, first, food for export, second, food for industrial
processing, and only third, food for the population
at large. While winter vegetables, strawberries,
tomatoes and coffee are being produced for export, for example,
the government must import corn and beans.
Hi-Tech & the Third World
This trend now accelerates. As early as 1970 the
U.S. electrical equipment industry had one-third of its
total workforce outside the U.S. borders. Ford Motor Co.,
which already takes over 50% of its profits overseas, has
announcd plans to shq-~lv increase. foreign production.
Already investing $1 billion each year in foreign plants,
Ford's spokesman emphasized: "We plan to spend at an
even higher rate ..." Even Hewlett-Packard, thc colnpuier
giant that is one of the largest California "hi-tech"
employers, is building its newest major plants in Mexico
and the U.K. Hewlett-Packard has said that its future production
growth will be outside the U.S. (22)
Paradoxically, the uproar over the Atari Corporation's
decision to close out U.S. production itself verifies
this trend. While radicals denounce this move "to shift
manufacturing of its video names and home commters . --
from the ~ .~.-to Hong ~ongand Taiwan," Atari production
has always been in the Third World. Its game cartridges
are made in Puerto Rico, its Asian plants were
established years ago, and its U.S. production employees
primarily Chicano-Mexicano and Asian immigrant
women. It was only a question for Atari of which Third
World workers to lay off. (23)
Decadence is revealed anew in unexpected ways.
Everyone has heard that "hi-tech" is the industrial future.
These are the new industries based on sophisticated products
that keep rapidly changing, keeping on the "cutting
edge of technology," rather than just stamping out standard
products year after year. In other words, instead of
steel bars and diesel engines, computer chips or biogenetics
140 or robotics. These "hi-tech" industries today, by their very