 
Commentary for CBC Radio On free trade, Mexico and the need for
a people's vision of globalization
by Priscilla Solomon, csj, member of the
Ojibway First Nation and participant in an ICCHRLA-organized fact
finding delegation that visited Mexico in early April 2001
Exclusion and discrimination are not new to me. I have seen and
lived with the results of systemic injustice: poverty, oppression,
frustration, dis-empowerment, social breakdown.
Yet none of this prepared me for the anguish I witnessed in Mexico.
We were there to see first-hand how free trade has affected Indigenous
people and small farmers. Repeatedly, they told us NAFTA has made
it harder to survive.
High in the Tarahumara mountains, we met with Indigenous people
who had documented cases of intimidation, torture and murder by
the army and police -- a woman’’s son, a man’’s
brother, another woman’’s husband and others. Men cried
as they told their stories; women wept. All of them struggled with
the shame of being so vulnerable, and powerless.
These people once lived from agriculture, or from selling small
amounts of wood from the vast forests on their land. But forestry
controls were lifted under free trade. Multinational companies now
clear-cut Indigenous lands, like here in Canada. The clear-cutting
erodes soils for food crops. And the lifting of tariffs has brought
a flood of cheap imported wood, so Indigenous people can no longer
make a living from the forests.
That has forced many to make hard choices: face worsening poverty
with a diet of corn and little else. Or, grow the only crop that
earns a living wage: marijuana or poppies, for the drug traffickers.
For the military, the war on drugs has become a convenient excuse
to target Indigenous leaders and poor people.
NAFTA has coincided with the militarization of Indigenous Mexican
lands. Neither brings an improvement of economic and social conditions.
We saw malnourished children -- 48 percent die before the age of
5 -- and men and women humiliated because they can’’t
afford the food that might prevent these deaths; or stop corporations
from stealing the forest on their lands.
Free trade today, no matter what its advocates promise, puts profits
-- for multinationals and their shareholders -- above human rights,
just wages, health, education and the well-being of society’’s
most oppressed.
In Mexico, we saw how it crushes individuals, families and entire
communities.
Yet we also saw a spirit of resistance and a people’s vision
of globalization that puts human dignity, the integrity of human
relations, and care for the earth before profits. Our governments
aren’’t listening. Are we? Are you?
For Commentary, I’m Sister Priscilla Solomon in North Bay.
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