Seeking a New Globalism in Chiapas (Page 3)

For women like Maria, not to mention her children, the increased militarization does nothing about the faded promise of the maquiladoras and leaves few alternatives when they are dislocated from their traditional villages to the migrant trail. Typically, many become homeless, their families divided, begging on the streets of Mexico City (where former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is providing high-priced advice on policing them). Thousands eventually arrive at the northern border, where they encounter the misery spawned by the original maquiladoras, which were promoted as a solution to the southern poverty they are migrating to escape. I toured these border maquilas as a California official in the 1980s and remember most of all how a majority of the workers were teenagers. They came from southern rural areas and, I was told, would soon be magically transformed into progressive modern women with useful job skills. Now, two decades into that transformation, the lethal side-effects are dramatized in the body counts of young women raped, murdered, mutilated and missing. When more than 200 such murders were reported in Ciudad Juárez in 2001, a Mexican state attorney general said reports of violence against women were exaggerated because "there are many other cities where the situation is worse."

The alternative to the northern border maquilas for the Marias of Chiapas is to catch an aging bus north to places like the church at Altar near the Arizona line, then switch to trucks toward Sasabe, where they wait under moonlit trees by the hundreds, finally crossing into the deserts of Arizona or southern California. They are literally dying for work: Of four migrants who died in Arizona's southern Cochise County during one week I visited last year, three were from Chiapas. Those who survive the infernal dryness of the desert are frequently victims of vigilantes, sometimes aligned with Border Patrol officers, who target them as if the US-Mexican War had never ended. Because the intentionally cruel fences of the US "Operation Gatekeeper" push immigrants toward the most harsh and remote border regions, at least 2,000 people have died since 1994 (those who die on the Mexican side of the border are not even counted). Last June was the deadliest month in history on the southwestern border, with sixty-seven migrants perishing in the heat, most of them in the Border Patrol's Tucson sector. Fox's Bill O'Reilly recently proposed sending the US military to force these "Mexican wetbacks" back where they came from. O'Reilly should know that many migrants are children searching for their mothers who traveled north to seek work, from cleaning toilets to becoming nannies, in order to send paltry remittances back to the families they left behind. According to studies of such children, most are robbed, beaten or raped during their exodus, but they continue coming in many cases because, as the Los Angeles Times put it in a recent article, "they need to find out whether their mothers still love them." Sometimes they carry along photos of themselves cradled in their mothers' arms.

What began with the 1994 Chiapas rebellion against NAFTA has now spread to all of Mexico and Central America. I recently asked Rigoberta Menchú, the Mayan Nobel Prize winner from Guatemala, what she thought of the PPP. She rolled her eyes, threw her hands in the air and laughed with gusto. She had never been asked to participate in the decisions concerning the PPP's development projects. Communities of the indigenous are still not considered the subjects of their own history, except in cases where they are recruited to serve as paramilitaries for the armed forces. Since early 2001 there have been regional resistance meetings in Chiapas, Guatemala and Nicaragua involving thousands of delegates from 400 local organizations. Protesters have blocked roads, demonstrated at border crossings, at proposed PPP infrastructure sites and at World Bank offices; barricaded themselves in the San Salvador national cathedral; and even invaded the domed chambers of the Mexican legislature on horseback. Recently the Zapatistas have re-emerged from a long silence, marching by the tens of thousands in San Cristóbal and renewing their call for "the globalization of freedom." Protests are sure to escalate further when the World Trade Organization meets this September in Cancun, in the heart of the Mayan region targeted by the PPP, and at the FTAA summit in Miami in November.

Bush's FTAA proposal is meeting unprecedented resistance throughout Latin America. Last October Brazil, the world's ninth-largest economy, elected as president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has criticized the FTAA as "annexation" by the United States. (In an arrogant response to Lula, US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick has warned that Brazil can trade with Antarctica if it rejects Washington's terms.) Meanwhile, neighboring Argentina has fallen from the status of poster child for US-led globalization to that of a basket case. Since its government defaulted on $140 billion in public debt in January 2002, Argentina has been a scene of radical, even revolutionary, community actions, with hundreds of democratic assemblies taking responsibility for neighborhood recovery. In Buenos Aires alone, seventeen abandoned factories have been seized and reopened by dispossessed workers. Up to a million people have formed a barter-based economy to survive. The popular cry in the streets is Que se vayan todos! ("Throw them all out!") But unlike in Brazil, Argentines have no Workers' Party and no Lula, only the remnants of Peronism and the expectation of a meaningless election this April, in which thousands will cast protest votes for a cartoon character who has no hands and therefore can't steal.

And then there is Bolivia, where thirty people were killed in riots in the capital city of La Paz in February. The newly elected president was smuggled from his own palace in an ambulance to save his life. The cataclysm was caused by the International Monetary Fund's insistence that Bolivia lower its deficit to 5.5 percent of GDP. Leading the opposition in the streets was Evo Morales, an Indian and a Lula-style labor leader who did surprisingly well in the last presidential election.

On March 16 in El Salvador, the former rebels of the FMLN, campaigning against privatization of water, won elections in the capital of San Salvador and ten other cities, becoming the largest bloc in the National Assembly. And Ecuador has elected a military strongman, Lucio Gutierrez, who says the FTAA would be "suicidal" for his country. US military involvement in Colombia is deepening into a bloody quagmire. Efforts to overthrow left-wing President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, backed at least indirectly by the White House, seem to have failed. Even the US embargo of Cuba is opposed by a majority in the US House. As the Bush Administration goes to war in pursuit of empire from Iraq to Afghanistan, it is "losing" Latin America to radical nationalism.

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