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Report Of The Ecumenical Church Leaders Delegation To Mexico
March 28 –– April 6, 2001
Contents
From March 28 to April 6, 2001, five Canadian church leaders travelled
to Mexico as part of an ecumenical fact-finding delegation organized
by the Inter-Church Committee on Human Rights in Latin America (ICCHRLA).
The delegation was made up of: Rev. Glen Davis, Moderator of the
Presbyterian Church of Canada; Mgr. Jean Gagnon, Auxiliary Bishop
of Quebec City; Archbishop Thomas Morgan, Anglican Diocese of Saskatoon;
the Very Rev. Robert Smith, former Moderator of the United Church
of Canada; Sr. Priscilla Solomon, Canadian Religious Conference;
Suzanne Rumsey and Kathy Price, Inter-Church Committee on Human
Rights in Latin America.
The delegation’’s mission was to explore the impact
of the North American Free Trade Agreement –– along
with free trade policies and legislative changes that were implemented
prior to 1994 in order to make Mexico "NAFTA-ready" ––
on human rights.
The delegation’’s time in Mexico focused on three
areas: visits with indigenous and non-indigenous communities in
the Sierra Tarahumara; visits with communities of small farmers
in Central Chihuahua; visits with workers and migrants in the Special
Border Zone of Ciudad Juarez.
In the southern mountain region of the state of Chihuahua, known
as the Sierra Tarahumara, our delegation visited indigenous communities
where we heard how privatization of state Forestry Services and
the lifting of controls over logging –– policies implemented
in the lead up to the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement
-- have coincided with the arrival of transnational forestry companies
and intensive, largely unregulated logging. This has resulted in
the denuding of forests that once provided edible plants, medicinal
herbs and a livelihood to the Tepahuane, Raramuri and Huichol indigenous
peoples, along with growing desertification, depletion of soils
and shrinking of agricultural harvests. Meanwhile, we were told
that NAFTA has enabled cheap wood imports to enter Mexico from countries
such as the United States, Chile, Brazil and even Russia (via the
U.S.), driving down the price that indigenous communities can obtain
for the timber resources on their land, contributing to growing
poverty as well as pressure to cut down more and more trees in order
to make a living.
"We want the impoverishment of our people to end," states
a simple yet eloquent letter we were given, signed by 73 members
of the indigenous community of San Alonso, who asked us to pass
it on to you. We have attached their letter to ours and ask you
to read its urgent plea for controls to stop the degradation of
their environment by the rapacious operations of multinational corporations.
Efforts by communities to halt these practices have been largely
ignored, or worse still, met with threats and violence.
The Catholic Diocese of the Tarahumara told us in unequivocal
terms that NAFTA is to blame for the increased clearcutting by multinational
companies that are destroying the region’’s forests.
Indeed, the Diocese told us they have brought a complaint to the
Commission for Environmental Cooperation in Montreal citing violations
of Articles 14 and 15 of the NAFTA side agreement but to no avail.
In "Our Word About the Destruction of the Forest" the
Diocese states: "Laws have been imposed that favour companies
from other countries...These laws have enabled much wealth to leave
the Sierra, leaving behind growing poverty...Exploitation of the
forests has brought no benefits to the majority of the inhabitants
of the Sierra ……If we do not halt the destruction, we
are heading for death."
In the community of Baborigame, we heard how 48 percent of children
die before the age of five from preventable diseases that result
from poverty-induced chronic malnutrition. We personally witnessed
the desperation of a mother whose baby would have died, had the
Carmelite sisters, who run a small dispensary, not taken him to
the nearest hospital, three hours away. The Carmelite sisters also
told us that the situation is worsening; indigenous people who once
ate corn and beans, now often can only afford to eat a soup of ground
corn and lately they have witnessed a new cause of death, previously
unheard of in indigenous communities: suicides due to sheer hopelessness.
In such a context, many indigenous inhabitants feel they have
little option but to choose between two terrible alternatives: abandon
their land and migrate north in search of work (a process that is
causing family, community and cultural disintegration) or turn to
cultivating drugs like marijuana and poppies, illicit crops which
unlike others, fetch a price that enables them to feed their families.
Drug trafficking is present throughout the Sierra because there
is no work, we were told by the Diocese of Tarahumara. "The
people need to survive in this impoverished mountain region."
We were outraged at the price these people are paying for their
survival.
We also heard from the respected, church-based Commission for
Solidarity and the Defence of Human Rights (COSYDDHAC) how instead
of providing solutions to the hard economic realities and growing
poverty that have forced some into drug cultivation, the Mexican
government has militarized the region. COSYDDHAC has documented
arbitrary detentions, torture, disappearances and assassinations
committed by the police and military, who justify their actions
in the name of the "war on drugs". In a joint letter to
the Mexican government that was shared with us, Bishop Jose Luis
Dibildox and 28 priests, religious and lay workers stated: "The
methods used by the army create a doubt in the minds of the public
as to what is the real aim of their actions, which in some instances
seem to be responding to other interests, such as the militarization
of Mexico, especially in indigenous regions."
In Baborigame, we witnessed the trauma and terror that repression
by state security forces is causing amongst inhabitants of the community.
We witnessed the pain of people whose relatives were shot down in
cold blood, victims who included a local indigenous leader. We share
the grave concern of the Tarahumara Diocese that "instead of
seeking ways to ease tensions, and bring about well-being and peace,
we see actions that will bring war and death."
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The Farming Region of Central Chihuahua
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In rural communities in the state of Chihuahua, we witnessed the
terrible human impact on small farmers of policies that have consciously
neglected and excluded them.
Since the implementation of policies that were entrenched in NAFTA,
communities where families once made a living from farming basic
grains for local markets and their own consumption have found it
increasingly difficult to survive. As a result, men of working age
are forced to abandon their farms and migrate north in search of
temporary jobs. Many of them work illegally in the United States,
having been unable to obtain a work visa. As a result, they are
paid exploitative wages and denied the rights and benefits accorded
to others.
The suffering caused by these realities was evident in our conversations
with inhabitants of the communities we visited. "We have become
half men because we are no longer able to provide for our families.
We can no longer be husbands to our wives, or fathers to our children,"
we were told by small farmers who must leave their communities in
search of work for 4 to 5 months at a time. This means the women,
as they told us, "are left to assume the roles of both women
and men", taking on a triple work load of caring for their
homes and families, looking after their farms, and often seeking
paid work in order to feed their children.
The exodus from the countryside, as we were told by the respected
Democratic Campesino Organization, as well as many of the farming
families we met with, is a direct result of economic policies that
were enacted to make Mexico NAFTA-ready. Unlike in the United States
-- and to a lesser extent in Canada -- where basic grains producers
continue to be subsidized for the costs of production, subsidies
to corn producers in Mexico were completely phased out in 1997,
12 years ahead of schedule, thus creating an unlevel playing field.
Moreover, since NAFTA came into effect in 1994, tariffs have been
lifted and cheap corn and beans from the U.S. have flooded the Mexican
market, making it impossible for Mexico producers to compete. In
addition, free market policies that began prior to 1994 but which
have been made permanent in NAFTA, have resulted in the elimination
of credit for small farmers, leaving them at the mercy of local
loan sharks who charge usurious interest rates.
All of these policies have had a predictable effect, one which
was impossible to ignore in the faces of those we met with: increasing
poverty and increasing desperation as families worry how they will
get by from one day to the next. As in the Sierra Tarahumara, we
heard of families reduced to a diet of cornmeal soup, and of the
existence of preventable diseases due to chronic malnutrition. It
is this situation, in which vast numbers are robbed of their very
dignity, that is forcing people to leave in search of other means
to survive, provoking family and community disintegration in the
process.
Policies associated with NAFTA have also effectively privatized
what were once communal or ejido lands, that provided rural and
indigenous communities with a guaranteed land base in perpetuity.
Unable to get a just price for their products and saddled with overwhelming
and unpayable debts, Mexican farmers are increasingly being forced
to sell those lands, leading to growing concentration of land in
few hands.
Those buying up the land or renting from farmers unable to make
a go of it, -- including multinationals like PepsiCo -- have used
vast extensions to produce potatoes for the fast food markets of
the three NAFTA countries. In an arid state where we were told that
"water is gold", PepsiCo was able to obtain access to
wells, which small farmers had been denied, and its large scale
irrigation has reduced the already alarmingly low water table. This,
together with extensive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides
has meant that arable land is being destroyed, and with it, the
means for rural Mexicans to be guaranteed the basic human right
to adequate nutrition and food security.
It is clear to us that one of the factors that is fuelling this
crisis in the countryside is that a significant proportion of Mexico’’s
gross domestic product is being used to service its foreign debt.
We wish to share with you what we were told by the Democratic Campesino
Organization, a position which we support: "Developing countries
like Mexico need to have food security and policies that guarantee
that security, because if they don’’t, the 40 million
people who live in poverty and the 20 million people who live in
extreme poverty in Mexico will continue to migrate north."
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In the border city of Ciudad Juarez -- home to 397 maquila factories
employing 281,000 workers that assemble electronics products and
car parts for export to the United States and Canada -- we saw where
many whose means of survival has been eliminated under free trade
in the Tarahumara Sierra, or the failed farms of the plains of Chihuahua,
end up. It is a reality we would not wish on anyone.
The political leaders of this hemisphere have, on numerous occasions,
told their citizens it will take time for the benefits of free trade
to be realized and equitably shared. In Ciudad Juarez we came face
to face with what 30 years of free trade has wrought on countless
human lives. That is because the city has operated as a free trade
zone since the 1970s, when the first maquila assembly factories
were established under rules that provide generous incentives for
foreign investors, while workers are paid what can only be called
exploitative wages and denied rights which Canadian workers take
for granted. What we saw in Ciudad Juarez is nothing less than economic
slavery.
Until the recent recession in the United States, unemployment
in Ciudad Juarez stood at an astonishing 0 percent. Yet 58 percent
of those fully employed workers and their families live below the
poverty line. Of that total 18 percent live in poverty and 40 percent
live in extreme poverty. In 1976, a maquila worker earned a salary
in pesos that was the equivalent of US$11 a day, yet the value of
that salary is now as little as just US$4.50 a day, due to currency
devaluations under free trade. As one maquila worker put it, "You
have the choice to clothe yourself or to feed yourself."
What does a maquila salary buy? We visited several colonias where
maquila workers have no choice but to live and this was how one
member of our delegation described his reaction: "I stood in
the dust and saw houses pulled together, framed with packing pallets
from the maquila, and covered with cardboard. I saw the barrels
that once carried chemicals to the maquilas with their dwindling
supply of tepid, unpotable water. And you know what I discovered?
I discovered that these people are employed 10 to 16 hours a day
producing cheap microwaves, cheap TVs, cheap computers for Canada.
And our government says, ‘‘NAFTA is a good deal for
Canada!’’ Mr. Prime Minister, you have not been to this
shantytown. A day’’s work for a salary equivalent to
the cost of a jug of milk is not a good deal for anyone! If my car
is cheaper because of what I saw here, that is unacceptable."
In Juarez, we saw with our own eyes what a local priest had told
us, you can work for a Fortune 500 company and live in a cardboard
house. Indeed, we were appalled at the living conditions of thousands
upon thousands of people who exist without decent housing, and without
access to essential social services like water, sanitation, health
care, and education.
Time and again, we heard from young workers about the dehumanizing
impact of the highly controlled environment of the maquilas. Assembly
lines are often sped up by supervisors in order to meet high production
quotas, approval must be obtained for bathroom breaks, which are
carefully timed and future breaks denied if the time is exceeded.
Workers told us they are treated "like a machine, a cog in
the wheel." Exhausted young women workers, demoralized by salaries
that do not afford the means for anything more than basic survival,
added: "The maquilas have robbed us of our dreams for a better
future."
Workers also told us they are fearful about the long term effects
of being exposed to chemical solvents without adequate protection,
in denial of their right to a healthy work environment. As we heard
repeatedly: "The only right people have here is the right to
a job. But in reality that’’s nothing more than the
right to be exploited."
None of the maquila workers we spoke to in Juarez had the right
to unionize freely to defend their rights. The experience of workers
who have tried to challenge such a situation was brought home painfully
to us by the testimony we received from maquila worker, Pedro Lopez,
from the state of Tamaulipas. Mr. Lopez told us about his experience
trying to help organize an independent union at the Duro Bag Company,
a maquila where labour rights were routinely violated. The first
such initiative to occur under the new administration of President
Vicente Fox, the vote took place on March 2, in what can only be
described as conditions of fear, intimidation and violence. Workers
were locked inside the factory and had to declare their vote verbally
(rather than a secret ballot) in the presence of heavily armed men
(who the day before had entered the plant with machine guns), hired
by the "official" union affiliated with Mexico’’s
former ruling PRI party. International and Mexican observers were
not allowed to enter. Needless to say, the independent union lost
the vote. The following day, Mr. Lopez had to be hospitalized when
his vehicle was forced off the road by two others, the "accident"
leaving a scar still visible on his face.
The 3 metre high fence that runs along the border with the United
States -- a sign that desperate people from other parts of Mexico
can come to Juarez to be a source of cheap labour in the maquila
factories but are not welcome any further north -- was always visible
during our stay. Visible too was the militarized U.S. border patrol,
posted along the fence at regular intervals. Borders between Canada,
the United States and Mexico under NAFTA have been opened to the
free passage of goods and capital but not to people.
It is deeply troubling to us that a wall has been erected on the
border between the United States and Mexico under NAFTA, in contrast
to the experience of Europe, where the Berlin Wall has been dismantled
and the European Union has opened up its borders to increased movement
of workers between member countries. As we heard from social organizations
in Juarez, militarizing the border does not stop those desperate
for the means to adequately provide for their families from trying
to get across. It only makes the crossing more dangerous, as those
attempting to get into the US take greater risks, such as picking
routes that require days walking in the desert or other hazards.
A study by the University of Houston recorded over 300 deaths during
border crossings in 2000.
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