The Death of Ramon Gonzalez and the 21st Century Dilemma

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een particularly intense in the very poor state of Guerrero. In one case, seventeen local people were massacred by police and soldiers with machine guns as they were riding on the back of a truck to attend a protest against logging operations by a U.S. firm. A video taken of the event made it impossible to deny the sheer brutality of the act. Other smaller massacres have followed, and assassinations of activists trying to protect forests have become almost routine. Digna Ochoa, the most prominent of the lawyers for the Guerrero communities fighting logging operations, was assassinated in her Mexico City office. In Guerrero, the fight over forests has become a battle cry of an armed rebel group that arose shortly after the implementation of NAFTA. Struggles over forests continue in many areas of Mexico, including Chiapas, where the Zapatistas have consistently raised the loss of community forests to logging firms as a key concern. xvi In the state of Chihuahua, an international effort to oppose a large timber operation resulted in communities stopping an exploitive scheme and initiating locally controlled and more sustainable forest practices. xvii In Oaxaca, some communities have initiated what they believe to be sustainable forest practices, including incorporation of eco-tourist ventures, which are yielding substantial new income. Most communities, however, find it hard to organize or sustain such efforts, and as more and more community members leave for the migration trail, it is more difficult to mount organized resistance to exploitation of community resources. xviii While NAFTA’s most fateful effect on Mexican agriculture has been its effect on corn producers and rural communities, its effect on the vegetable agro-export sector in Culiacan has been less dramatic. Tariffs on vegetables entering the United States were at five percent or below before NAFTA. Consumer prices were not greatly affected by tariff
eductions, and, in any case, the main advantage Culiacan vegetable growers have is not a price advantage but their ability to produce crops in months when they cannot be grown outdoors in most of the United States. Vegetable exports to the United States from Mexico have continued to grow in volume and value but more from simple market expansion than from NAFTA. However, the increasing pressure on rural communities throughout Mexico and Central America has meant that Culiacan growers have not faced any serious problems in continuing to acquire new, highly exploitable labor. (As discussed below, other international trade liberalization agreements have encouraged regions around the world to develop their own agro-export vegetable and fruit regions resembling the Culiacan Valley.) However, people from San Jeronimo Progreso and much of the rest of the Mixtec and Zapotec territories travel in fewer numbers to Culiacan now. Mixtecs and Zapotecs on both sides of the border have been more able to find their way to easier and better paid work, much of it in urban occupations. While avoiding Culiacan when possible, Mixtecs continue to make up a large share of the California and West Coast farm labor force in the United States, and have even entered the East Coast and Upper Midwest migrant streams in much greater numbers. In the early 1980’s, the Oaxacan indigenous presence was just making itself felt on the U.S. West Coast; in recent years, without any searching, I have encountered Mixtec and Zapotec groups in central Kansas, New York City, Chicago, Denver, North Carolina, and Florida. xix Ramon Gonzalez’s sisters, at last report, were settled in Tucson where they made their living buying and selling in flea markets and engaging in other urban-based activities. An intriguing new study, Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and
Page 1 and 2: AFTERWORD: The Death of Ramon Gonza
Page 3 and 4: globalization understand it as a re
Page 5 and 6: The hold of a small number of corpo
Page 7 and 8: address the dire situation of their
Page 9 and 10: on the Mexican rural economy as wel
Page 11 and 12: in the name of austerity.) The pros
Page 13 and 14: some, including myself. People boug
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Page 19 and 20: that was committed to improving the
Page 21 and 22: study strongly suggests permanent n
Page 23 and 24: the video and other materials to ed
Page 25 and 26: ANAVERSA, other industrial accident
Page 27: xvi John Ross, 2000. “Defending t

The Death of Ramon Gonzalez and the 21st Century Dilemma

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