The Death of Ramon Gonzalez and the 21st Century Dilemma

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This rather bleak assessment does not deny the importance of many countertrends operating at every level of society. I will write about some of these hopeful trends throughout this essay. However, it would be wrong and dangerous to conclude that we have set society firmly on the right path to healthy communities and ecosystems. The first step in solving serious problems is to recognize their nature and severity. NAFTA, the Land, Pesticides, Migration, and Democracy Rebellion, the land, the forests, and emigration On January 1, 1994, two closely related events occurred that did much to define the issues Mexico has struggled with over the last two decades. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect, and an organization of mostly indigenous people in the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas took up arms to call attention to the exploitation they had suffered for centuries. They called themselves Zapatistas in honor of the Mexican revolutionary peasant leader, Emiliano Zapata, assassinated in 1919. The rebels believed that NAFTA would make it even easier than before for others to rob them of land and resources essential to their survival and intensify the problems caused by their subjugation to corrupt politicians. They were concerned not only about their own future but also about that of all poor Mexicans. The Zapatistas briefly seized the highland city of San Cristobal de las Casas (named after the Spanish priest who had fought against exploitation of indigenous people four centuries before) and a few other sizable towns. After about a month, the Zapatistas withdrew to defensible villages. There they have continued to build their organization. For more than a decade now, they have insistently put forward their thesis that fundamental political and economic change is necessary in Mexico as a whole in order to
address the dire situation of their communities. They have made extremely able use of the media and of the Internet to ensure that this message was heard regionally, nationally, and internationally. They have helped form national coalitions of indigenous and peasant groups. The Zapatistas have initiated or inspired various official and unofficial forms of national dialog on the plight of Mexican indigenous people in particular and on the situation of the Mexican poor and of Mexican society in general. They have used many highly creative means that vastly amplified the strength of their voice and avoided their obliteration by the Mexican army and paramilitary groups. These included widely supported and publicized marches to Mexico City coordinated with an unofficial national referendum that made specific demands on the national government. v Were the Zapatistas right about NAFTA Ten years after its implementation, it is possible to see with some clarity the main effects, though sometimes it is difficult to sort out the effects of other factors in an analysis of Mexican economic development. Here we concentrate on those factors most relevant to rural people and agriculture. NAFTA was designed to reduce or eliminate barriers to investment and trade between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The key provisions of interest to those in the U.S. who were most active in supporting NAFTA were more about investment than trade. The main attraction of NAFTA for corporations and investors regarding Mexico was the reduction of legal barriers to U.S. and Canadian firms who wanted to invest more heavily in land, resources, banks, and other financial services. Such investment had previously been restricted by nationalistic measures in such areas as patent law, land law, banking regulations, and profit repatriation, measures meant to favor Mexican entrepreneurs and protect Mexico from excessive control by foreign investors and their
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The Death of Ramon Gonzalez and the 21st Century Dilemma

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