Globalization, Justice, and Coffee

Nell Newman With Fair Trade Organic Coffee Farmers

2009-06-21T12:10:00.002-04:00

Video by Green Mountain Coffee
This video was produced by the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Foundation for educational purposes. In this video: Nell Newman of Newman’s Own Organics travels to coffee growing regions with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters to see how the coffee is grown and harvested, as well as how the Fair Trade and Organic certifications provide a fair price allowing growers to reinvest in their farm and their community.

Sin Nombre

2009-05-21T10:19:00.006-04:00

Movie Review from the Sundance Film Festival

It’s almost impossible to believe that Sin Nombre is Cary Joji Fukunaga’s feature debut; its storytelling is so accomplished, its visual style so crisp, and its heightened naturalism and performances so textured. A social-political thriller in the tradition of American film noir, Sin Nombre is set on the border, where Mexico becomes the crucible and the fearsome gangs of today’s Mexican countryside, the gauntlet, to freedom. The stories of Sayra, a teenager living in Honduras and hungering for a brighter future, and teen gang members Smiley and Casper, for whom the Mara Salvatrucha is nearly their entire universe, become interlaced on the train to the border, a journey that will determine the future of their lives. Young Casper is already a wary veteran of the "Mara," and his new recruit is the 12-year-old Smiley, full of bravado and looking for status. The two run afoul of the everyday violence that penetrates their world and find themselves fellow passengers with Sayra on a States-bound freight, hugging the rooftop as their precarious journey unfolds. At once a love story and a chase film, a thrill ride and a vision of an apocalyptic hell, Sin Nombre demonstrates Fukunaga's skill; he envelops us in a nightmare that is all too real for its inhabitants. Sin Nombre is a portrait of hope and desperation and announces the launching of a shining new filmmaking career.

Recipient of the Directing Award: U.S. Dramatic, and the Excellence in Cinematography Award: U.S. Dramatic.

CAST
Paulina Gaitan, Edgar Flores, Kristyan Ferrer, Tenoch Huerta Mejía, Diana García, Héctor Jiménez.

2009-05-15T08:52:00.003-04:00

Migration from a Chiapas Perspective

Miguel Pickard - 16-september-2006 - num.519
CIEPAC, San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas

Summary

How much do we know about migrants from the state of Chiapas who are leaving in droves for other parts of Mexico or the United States? The intent of this CIEPAC bulletin is to collect information from journalistic, academic and civil society sources and begin filling in the mosaic. [An earlier version of this article was presented in the "Conversation on Migration" held by Project Counselling Services in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, on Sept. 8, 2006].

Introduction
Every day, some 165 people lose hope and leave Chiapas. They leave due to lack of employment or the starvation wages paid at most jobs. Emigration is relatively new in Chiapas, compared to the traditional "expelling" states in the center of Mexico (Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Jalisco, Michoacán), which have hemorrhaged migrant labor to the United States since the end of the 19th century. The exodus of Chiapanecos started as a trickle some 15 years ago, but now people are pouring out.

The sudden increase in out migration from Chiapas has observers scrambling to describe what's happening and why. Emigration as a topic of academic concern in Chiapas began only when remittances from the US suddenly took on an important place in the state's economy. Years previous though, in rural indigenous communities, migration had been tearing down customs, ways of thinking and acting, and provoking fear over the slow but steady erosion of indigenous culture. But academic papers from barely six years ago rarely mention emigration from Chiapas. The diocese of San Cristóbal started responding to the plight of migrants in an organized way as late as 2004. Even now, civil organizations have barely responded. In spite of appalling human rights abuses committed in Chiapas against migrants, especially Central Americans, there is just one human rights office, the Fray Matías de Córdova Center in Tapachula, with a long-standing migrant outreach program. Society's slow moving responses contrast with the urgency of what one writer has called "an exodus of biblical proportions".⁽¹⁾

Chiapas obviously cannot free itself from the national context. Much of what we know in general regarding the movement of Mexican migrants applies to Chiapas. The motives for migrating are certainly the same: either man-made disasters, such as misguided economic policies applied since the mid-80s and buttressed in 1994 through NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Or "natural" disasters, such as hurricane Stan in 2005, whose destructive rage also highlighted the folly of human economic activity. But our task here is not to review the structural or circumstantial reasons for migration. [This has already been addressed in a previous Ciepac Bulletin. See http://www.ciepac.org/boletines/chiapas_en.php?id=505] Our sole intent is to answer basic questions regarding the migratory phenomenon in Chiapas to the extent possible given available sources.

Who is leaving?

According to COESPO (Chiapas' state population council), migrants from Chiapas are mostly 15 to 35 years old, and 65% are peasants and indigenous. One surprising fact: 79% of those leaving Chiapas never return. Another characteristic that mirrors tendencies throughout Mexico, migrants are increasingly from the urban sector and now include young university graduates and professionals.⁽²⁾

Studies confirm the increasing education among Mexican migrants to the US, whether or not they possess legal documents. In fact, migrants now have a higher educational level than Mexicans in Mexico.⁽³⁾ Recent tendencies show that migrants have increasingly numbers of women and children. In addition, migrants who reach the US are no longer working principally in agriculture but rather in construction, manufacturing or in services within the urban sector. And Mexican migrants are staying longer in the US than in previous decades.⁽⁴⁾

How many are leaving?

Getting official figures on how many Chiapanecos are leaving is difficult. COESPO, which should know, isn't saying. A study by the World Bank⁽⁵⁾ says [the gap between the few rich and the many poor is] "such that states such as Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca are generating enormous emigration that has dropped their population by 2% in barely five years". But simple arithmetic shows that the World Bank is underestimating the outflow, at least for Chiapas. Applying 2% to the population of Chiapas of some 4 million, the result is some 80,000 Chiapanecos. For the WB, then, this is the number of people who have left the state in five years, or 16,000 per year, or some 44 per day.

Hardly. More are leaving. This enormous migration can be measured in other ways, more anecdotal perhaps, but probably more exact. Startling evidence comes from the municipality of Frontera Comalapa, where Sergio González, owner of a make-shift travel agency selling bus tickets to the northern border, says that, after hurricane Stan, migration became "a whole industry". Hundreds of Chiapanecos are leaving their communities, most of them small coffee growers who lost everything when Stan struck. González says that every week some 40 buses, each loaded with at least 40 Chiapanecos, leave for the inhospitable Altar desert or Tijuana. All set on crossing "the line".⁽⁶⁾ Although travel agencies require customers to show Mexican identification before selling tickets, undoubtedly quite a few migrants hopping on buses in Frontera Comalapa, bordering Guatemala, come from Central America.

Some journalists say that the yearly outflow is 30,000, some academics, 60,000.⁽⁷⁾ But they are enough, perhaps now some 500,000 in total outside of Chiapas, for COESPO to admit that all middle class and poor Chiapanecos have a close relative living in the US or on Mexico's northern border.⁽⁸⁾

The numbers are numbing. Recently, the UN's Population Fund (UNFPA) granted a dubious first place to Mexico as the world's leader in migrant expulsion, ahead of China and India, according to Alfonso Sandoval, UNFPA representative in Mexico. Yet this distinction is based on conservative figures, 400,000 expelled Mexicans every year according to the Fund.⁽⁹⁾ The Mexican government's figures are even higher:

Based on [...] adjustments, omitted from both the written report and the supplements that accompany the sixth and last "state of the nation" report [by President Fox], specialists found that over the past six years more than 3.2 million people emigrated from Mexico to escape poverty and the lack of opportunities for overcoming it. New figures state that in each of the past six years, an average of 575,336 Mexicans emigrated, mainly to the United States or Canada. New official estimates for 2006 put the figure at 582,613 Mexicans who will emigrate, the highest in the history of Mexico as a politically independent country.⁽¹⁰⁾

If we accept the higher figure of 60,000 people leaving Chiapas every year, then one of ten Mexican migrants is a Chiapaneco, from a state with less than 4% of Mexico's population. The need to migrate is so pressing that some sources state-at first glance contradictorily-that the only people who are not migrating are in extreme poverty. There are people mired in such poverty that they simply cannot pay the coyote or the bus fare out. In some municipalities of Chiapas, such as Santiago el Pinar in the Altos region, some socioeconomic indicators are below what they are in Sierra Leone, one of the most impoverished countries in the world.⁽¹¹⁾ In Santiago el Pinar people aren't leaving because they lack the funds to even think about leaving.

Overall, those who can migrate, leave, or at least help to send a relative abroad. For distinct historic reasons Chiapas hadn't ranked high amongst expelling states. Up to recently, it was ranked 28 among Mexico's 32 states. Now it's number 11, according to COESPO, though other sources says it's in 7th place.⁽¹²⁾

Newspaper accounts fill in anecdotal details of how migration is affecting Chiapas. For example, in the city of Chilón, municipal authorities and teachers from High School Campus 34 say that over a period of 12 months, 70% of their graduates went to the USA.⁽¹³⁾ In another municipality, La Grandeza, along the Guatemalan border, half of the students in grade school have parents or a close relative "up North", and every year two students leave to join them.⁽¹⁴⁾

While multitudes leave daily, others come back in pine boxes. In 2004, the state's interior secretary processed the shipping of the remains of 43 migrants. Yet the figure is not for Chiapas as a whole. That's just one municipality's share of the dead from "up North", La Independencia. Another 30 remains were shipped to Las Margaritas.⁽¹⁵⁾ The interior secretary undoubtedly has the figure for all 119 municipalities, under lock and key. The figure won't be posted soon on Governor Pablo Salazar's website, brimming in the final months of his mandate with upbeat news on "promises fulfilled" by the Governor.

Where are they heading?

For many Chiapaneco migrants, the first option is not a beeline to the northern border. Many young people, especially from municipalities with a large indigenous population, try their luck first in Mexico's glitzy tourist resorts. Cancún and Playa del Carmen are frequent destinations. Yet the few jobs available pay miserable salaries, some US$54 per week for bricklaying or cleaning hotels. For indigenous communities back in Chiapas, the wage is a lot of money, but those who earn it must survive with their US$9 a day in Mexico's most expensive resort areas. Sooner or later young people also succumb to the need to migrate north.

An interesting aspect of Chiapanecos' migration is that it appears to belie at least one theory of how Mexican migrants are spreading throughout the United State since the mid-80s. It is a fact that Mexican migrants (and Central Americans) in the US have left their strongholds, mainly urban centers in California, Texas and Chicago. Outside these areas, there were relatively few Mexicans. This is no longer true. Today, there are Mexicans throughout the US, even in the so-called "non traditional areas of Mexican migration", such as the Eastern coast, New York City, the Southeast (Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida), and now, with the ongoing reconstruction of the damage by Katrina, in Louisiana, in addition to small and mid-sized cities throughout the US.

One theory regarding Mexican dispersion in the US has to do with the so-called "amnesty" granted by the Reagan administration to undocumented migrants in 1986 through IRCA (Immigration Reform and Control Act). After legalization by IRCA, millions of Latin Americans (mostly Mexicans) were able to travel out of their "urban ghettos" of Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, etc. where they had taken refuge as undocumented migrants, "camouflaged" in cities with large Latino populations. After 1986 legalized Mexicans left urban areas and moved wherever higher paying jobs existed, or wherever their personal desires dictated.

Chiapaneco migration casts doubt on this hypothesis. Given that migration from Chiapas is recent, Chiapaneco migrants have not gone through the process described, i.e., initial "refuge" as undocumented migrants in big cities, later dispersion after the IRCA legalization. Further, anecdotal information places Chiapanecos in 2006 both in non-traditional and traditional migration areas. In other words, Chiapanecos, without having benefited from IRCA, are nonetheless dispersing throughout the US in a way similar to documented migrants. The particulars of how this is happening have yet to be explained.

How much are migrants remitting to Chiapas?
Migration today is truly "a whole industry". But more than an industry, it is a fundamental part of the economy of Chiapas. Although precise information regarding how many Chiapanecos are leaving is hard to obtain, the Mexican government compiles records on money entering the country yearly as remittances through commercial channels (banks, exchange houses and money-transfer companies). For the past seven years, both in Mexico and Chiapas, total remittances have broken the record set the year before. In 2004, remittances to Chiapas totaled US$500 million, in 2005 they rose to US$655 million, and a similar amount, or slightly greater, is expected in 2006. Presently Chiapas is receiving US$1,755,000 a day, an amount greater than what is remitted to Zacatecas,⁽¹⁶⁾ one of Mexico's traditional "expelling" states. Nationally, remittances in 2006 may exceed US$24 billion, surpassing India's remittances, with a startling increase in one year of 20%.⁽¹⁷⁾ The figure does not include funds that enter Mexico in migrants' pockets when they return or visit relatives.

Interestingly though, recent studies by the College of the Northern Border (Colef) have questioned the Mexican government's figures, not in terms of the amount flowing into the country but rather the recipients. The Mexican government maintains that billions of dollars are reaching migrants' homes. But scholars at Colef attribute the surprising yearly increases in remittances to money laundering by narcotics traffickers. "Money exchange and fund-transfer companies based in the United States with branches in Mexico are often used by narcotics traffickers to send money", according to Colef. A report by several US government agencies states that "an important amount of laundering goes on with small quantities of money, since the only control of these systems is the detailed registration of transfers that exceed three thousand dollars".⁽¹⁸⁾ For this reason, the president of Colef, Jorge Santibáñez, sees no accountability within the Bank of Mexico:

Incredible as it may seem in a country that calls itself democratic and is proud of being an example to the world in matters of official information transparency [...], the Bank of Mexico is not even willing to discuss the matter on a technical level, e.g., all that money is reaching homes in Mexico and period; take it or leave it...It's difficult to understand why the Bank of Mexico opposes serious, responsible, institutional and technical discussion of a such an important topic and its relevant political implications. We're not taking about discussing whether the money is entering the country or not, rather if it is reaching homes, and what are its true impacts...until this debate settles on some conclusions, every time new data, or new records, are reported, a shadow of a doubt will continue to emerge.⁽¹⁹⁾

So while narcotics traffickers are transferring billions of dollars, laundered of sins and guilt, migrants are losing billions through outrageously high and hidden commissions that commercial firms are unscrupulously charging to transfer funds. Migrants lose billions unjustly, since modern technology makes financial transfers overseas too easy to justify gouging the public.

What about women migrants?

In general less is known about women migrants. Data from the Mexican government are not segregated according to sex. Undoubtedly more women have been migrating in recent years, both in absolute and relative numbers, as is true of other categories, such as children and the elderly. The Center for Women's Human Rights in San Cristóbal de Las Casas has recent information regarding women and children being entrapped in narcotics networks as drug runners. Tzotzil and Tseltal women are under detention in the Cancun penitentiary accused of drug trafficking. Indigenous women also leave for the tourist resorts but fall prey to prostitution or drug-trafficking rings. Those who find work in the formal sectors send remittances home much like the men, but typically in greater amounts, even though they are generally paid less than their male colleagues.⁽²⁰⁾

Even when they don't migrate, women remaining in rural communities suffer ill treatment. Alone at home they are often sexually harassed or their lands are taken away. Current laws in general do not back women's rights to land.

A recent study undertaken by Project Counselling Service says of Guatemalan women who arrive in Chiapas:

They generally integrate as paid domestic labor in cities such as Tapachula where 90% of the maids are Guatemalans, although there are some Hondurans and Nicaraguans. Many of them are underage (between 12-13 years old) and work six days a week with a very long workday. Their salary varies between US$27-81 [per month!] and they rarely receive medical attention when they become ill. Discrimination of these women occurs on multiple levels, as foreigners, undocumented, poor, indigenous and peasants. Their lack of human rights is evident.⁽²¹⁾

Chiapas and Mexico: journey to hell for Central Americans

The Mexican government is currently applying migratory policies designed in the United States which call for using the narrow straight of Tehuantepec as a seal to detain and deport Central American migrants. Some analysts believe that Mexico willingly accepted the assignment from the US, in the belief that there would be an implicit, if not explicit, quid pro quo, e.g., Mexico would do the dirty work of keeping Central Americans from traveling north, in exchange for US acquiescence in letting in a greater number of legal Mexican migrants.

The strategy was destined to fail for several reasons:

· United States accepts quid pro quos from no country, much less a weak country like Mexico.

· US migratory policy is decided unilaterally through agreements worked out among domestic, not foreign, interests.

· All of Mexico's police forces are too corrupt for effective control of Central Americans to be exercised in a manner suitable to the US.

At the start of his administration, Vicente Fox implemented Plan South in order to carry out the control the US was seeking over Mexico's southern border. Shortly afterwards, however, the name Plan South officially disappeared, but its programs, operations and militarization of Mexico's southern border were kept intact. This subterfuge might have to do with the sullied image that Plan South created vis-à-vis the Central American governments in particular, at a time when Fox was traveling about the region in an effort to sell the supposed virtues of the Plan Puebla-Panama to Central American leaders.

The upshot is that greater control of Mexico's southern border has meant "open season" for hunting down Central American migrants by Mexican authorities. With one hand Mexican authorities detain and rob Central Americans of everything of value, while simultaneously, with the other hand, they receive generous bribes from polleros or coyotes to allow the human traffic to flow on roads, railroads, through airports and along ocean routes. Human trafficking is the second most lucrative illicit activity in Mexico, after drug smuggling.

According to father Eiman Vázquez Medina, who runs a migrants' refuge home in Arriaga, Chiapas:

The first invisible wall is found in southern Mexico; it's a wall more dangerous than the one in the United States, made up of robbers of migrants, whose members come from the law-enforcement agencies and the National Migratory Institute.⁽²²⁾

Not even Grupo Beta escapes charges of corruption and abuse, in spite of its mission to "protect and help" migrants. [For additional information and analysis on Grupo Beta, please see http://www.ciepac.org/boletines/chiapas_en.php?id=157] . The "Fray Matías de Córdova" Human Rights Center in Tapachula says it has

Very serious documented accusations of abuse by Grupo Beta, for example, accusations that migrants have been robbed of their belongings...supposedly they [Grupo Beta] now have trained and sensitive personnel but it's a fact that abuse continues to this day.⁽²³⁾

Corruption is so prevalent among authorities in Mexico that some undocumented migrants enter the country "through the main gate", e.g., the Mexico City International Airport (MCIA). Fortuna magazine reports that

[Migrants'] passage to a third country is guaranteed thanks to the stream of greenbacks that they unleash to the human traffickers as they exit their home country. The money benefits the mafia that operates in the MCIA, in other words domestic and international delinquents. They are joined by "forgetful" Migration agents, judicial police and private security guards, and also the security details that are assigned to foreigners in the MCIA, all of which is denied by Mexican authorities.⁽²⁴⁾

Salary differentials

Lastly we explore salaries in Mexico as a reason for emigrating, keeping in mind that salaries in Chiapas are lower than the Mexican average. Academic studies undertaken in the United States commonly overlook the catastrophe caused in Mexico by free-trade policies as the main reason behind emigration. It seems to be a taboo subject in the US, given the dearth of academics willing to explore it and its implications. US academics prefer to look at other possible reasons. One of the more intuitive motives for migrating is the salary differential between Mexico and the US. Historically the difference between the minimum wage has been a factor of 10 or more in favor of the US, and 7 to 8 times for similar jobs in the industrial sector.

One way of looking at the lag in salaries in Mexico is to recall that on January 5, 1914, Henry Ford decreed new working conditions in his automobile factories, considered "revolutionary" for the time. Ford shortened the working day from 9 hours to 8, reduced the work week from 6 days to 5, and more than doubled the minimum wage from $2.34 to $5 a day. Ford was criticized by certain elite groups in the US for paying "so much", but he defended the measure, the legend goes, because he wanted workers in his factories to afford to buy the cars they were building. Sadly, 92 years later, most workers in Mexico would relish the conditions that Ford decreed in 1914 if they could find them. The minimum salary in Mexico in 2006 is still lower than US$5 per day. With luck, the minimum wage in Mexico may reach US$5 before the 100th anniversary of Ford's decree.

Returning to modern times, salaries in Mexico and the United States have not behaved as some politicians and researchers predicted when in the early 90s they were hawking the supposed virtues of NAFTA to skeptical audiences. They forecasts called for the salary gap to begin to close. Now, almost 13 years into NAFTA, the result has been the opposite, since Mexican salaries have fallen further behind those in the US. In a detailed study, "NAFTA's Promise and Reality", the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace maintains that "real wages for most Mexicans today are lower than when NAFTA took effect [and...] Mexican wages are also diverging from, rather than converging with, U.S. wages".⁽²⁵⁾

In any event, rightly or wrongly, US researchers focus on derisory wages in Mexico and conclude an initially self-evident truth: Mexicans emigrate because they aspire to earn more. Yet an intuitive truism presents researchers with an unresolved contradiction. A study on Mexican migration undertaken by the University of California related salary differentials and emigration of Mexico over several decades and could not explain, if salary differentials between the two countries are abysmal and continue to widen, why Mexicans are not migrating in even greater numbers. ⁽²⁶⁾ In other words, the study finds that Mexican emigration should be higher than it already is, a concern that should be shared on both sides of the border.

Worse, the final stake has yet to be driven into the heart of the Mexican countryside. NAFTA decrees the removal in 2008 of the remaining Mexican duties on sensitive agricultural products (corn, beans, powdered milk). Also slated for elimination are the paltry subsidies to peasants still maintained by the Mexican government via programs such as Procampo. Maybe more of us should be packing our bags in anticipation of 2008 or, better yet, struggling to eliminate policies that generate misery, suffering and migration.

Notes

1) Quote from Charles Borden, "Sobre migración", Sara Sefchovich, El Universal, 02/mar/06.
2) "Una de cada tres familias de Chiapas depende de las remesas", Angeles Mariscal, La Jornada, 24/dec/05.
3) "A generation of migrants: why they leave, where they end up", Leigh Binford, NACLA, aug-sep/05, Vol. 39, No.1, p.5. Binford states, "Recent Mexican migrants---many of whom come from urban areas---have more schooling than the Mexican national average, but they remain well below other U.S. Latinos."
4) Ibid and regarding children see "Se agrava situación de niños migrantes", Julieta Martínez, El Universal, 26/aug/06
5) Quote in "Sobre migración", ibid.
6) "Expulsa pobreza a chiapanecos", Fredy Martín Pérez, El Universal, 06/feb/06.
7) The lower figure is from "Migración y café en México y Centroamérica", de Luis Hernández Navarro, Special Report, Program of the Americas, New Mexico: Interhemispheric Resource Center, 3/nov/04. The higher figure is a rough estimate offered by Dr. Tim Trench, Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, Chiapas campus, private conversation.
8) "Una de cada tres familias...", Ibid.
9) "México lidera expulsión de migrantes, señala ONU, Guillermina Guillén, El Universal, 06/sep/06.
10) "BdeM: aumento anual de 22% en el ingreso de remesas en 7 meses", Juan Antonio Zúñiga, La Jornada, 05/sep/06.
11) "Chiapas: equidad olvidada", Guillermina Guillén, El Universal, 01/jul/06.
12) "La emigración de Chiapas a EU arrasa comunidades e individuos", Hermann Bellinghausen, La Jornada, 25/jan/05.
13) "Chiapas depende cada vez más de la migración", Angeles Mariscal, La Jornada, 10/feb/06.
14) "Una de cada tres familias...", Ibid.
15) "Chiapas depende...", Ibid.
16) "Chiapas económico", Daniel Villafuerte Solís, Lecturas para entender a Chiapas, Government of the state of Chiapas, 2006, p.49.
17) "Remesas, motor de la economía; respaldan consumo de mexicanos", Roberto González Amador, La Jornada, 30/ago/06.
18) "Denuncian lavador de dinero con remesas de EU a México", Jorge Morales Almada, La opinión digital, 05/mar/06.
19) "El país de las remesas: una realidad distorsionada", Jorge Santibáñez, La Jornada, 11/jul/05.
20) Information offered by the Centro de Derechos de la Mujer de Chiapas, "Conversation on migration", undertaken in San Cristóbal, Chiapas, by Project Counselling Service, Guatemala, 8/sep/06.
21) "Las viajeras invisibles: mujeres migrantes en la región centroamericana y el sur de México", Ana Silvia Monzón, Project Counselling Service, Guatemala, 2006, p. 20.
22) "'Muro delictivo' del sur, primer escollo para migrantes: Iglesia", María de Jesús Peters, El Universal, 11/jul/06.
23) Information offered by the Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Matías de Córdova, "Conversation on Migration", undertaken in San Cristóbal, Chiapas, by Project Counselling Service, 8/sep/06.
24) "Tráfico humano en el aeropuerto", Nydia Egremy, Fortuna, ago/06, págs. 46-49.
25) "NAFTA's Promise and Reality: Lessons from Mexico for the Hemisphere", Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003, p.12.
26) "Illegal migration from México to the United States", Gordon H. Hanson, Universidad de California, San Diego y National Bureau of Economic Research, 11/05, p. 42.

Peet's Coffee: In Africa, Brewing Good Works

2009-04-28T21:28:00.002-04:00

April 23, 2009, 5:00PM EST text size: T T

Peet's Coffee, with the help of a Gates Foundation-funded nonprofit, is planting seeds of commerce in Rwanda

By Steve Hamm

Kigali, Rwanda - Few food buyers can match Shirin Moayyad's willingness to take risks. As director of coffee purchasing for Peet's Coffee & Tea (PEET) in Emeryville, Calif., she often treks to remote corners of the globe in search of great coffee discoveries—and in the process endures landslides in Papua New Guinea, menacing policemen in Yemen, and army ants in Tanzania.

But over the past year, Moayyad has taken on a new type of challenge. Peet's has joined an effort to develop a vibrant coffee industry in sub-Saharan Africa. The Coffee Initiative, as it's called, is run by TechnoServe, a Norwalk (Conn.) nonprofit, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The goal: to double the income of poor coffee farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda by linking their products with coffee lovers in the developed world.

TechnoServe helps farmers improve the cultivation, processing, and marketing of gourmet coffee. Peet's is working to develop a special blend of these coffees that will be sold online and in its 191 cafés starting this summer. Moayyad says the motivation is to nurture new sources of great coffee and help farmers. "If they produce a high-quality product," she says, "we'll pay more for it." The company, which recorded $284 million in sales last year, hopes its efforts in Africa will be a brand-burnisher, too.

While executives across different industries are increasingly interested in ventures that combine profits with good works, Peet's initiative underscores the difficulties in getting them off the ground. In Rwanda, which has 450,000 family coffee farms, Peet's has had to contend with a frayed infrastructure, a shortage of money to pay for fertilizer, and suppliers who have little experience in dealing with quality control. "You have to be willing to plant some seeds and wait a few years," says Chief Executive Patrick J. O'Dea.

The Rwanda project differs from the company's usual purchasing efforts in several respects. Instead of dealing with sophisticated suppliers, it's setting up shop in a war-ravaged nation that exported just $47 million worth of coffee last year. While U.S. companies have long bought food from poor countries, few have made it a stated goal to boost the economic fortunes of producers in those markets. If Peet's is going to make the positive impact of its coffee a key selling point, it has to make sure the impact is real. TechnoServe, which is working with other roasters such as Starbucks (SBUX) and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR), expects 5 million farmers and family members will eventually benefit from its program. (Video: Rwandan President talks business)

O'Dea is determined to make it work. While the CEO laid off a handful of employees late last year, anticipating a slowdown, he hasn't backed off from the initiative. Customers increasingly care where their coffee comes from and about the fairness with which it is procured. "The return on investment is really the value of our brand, including the lifetime value of every loyal customer we have," he says.

PERILOUS JOURNEY

Doing business with African farmer cooperatives hasn't been easy. To start, there's no local market for coffee, as few Rwandans drink it. Jim Reynolds, Peet's roastmaster emeritus, spent two weeks in the country last spring visiting nine TechnoServe farmer groups. He sampled their coffee and gave them tips on how to improve quality. Some farmers had never tasted coffee and reacted as if they had bitten into a lemon. He had to teach them the hallmarks of a top bean. Last summer, back in Emeryville, Peet's buyers tried dozens of bean samples. In the end, they purchased coffee from three cooperatives.

Because of bad roads and delays at border crossings, it took 12 days for a truck with a container full of green coffee beans to travel 1,000 miles to the Kenyan port of Mombasa. The sea journey from Mombasa took nearly two months. Worse, when the shipment arrived in Oakland, Calif., in late February, a portion of the coffee was slightly damaged.

Moayyad traveled to Rwanda to cement relationships with farmer groups and gather stories about the farmers for use in marketing. With a videographer tagging along, she navigated molar-crunching roads in a four-wheel-drive pickup to remote villages and farms perched on hillsides high above Rwanda's Lake Kivu. On the roadsides, children greeted the passing truck with an excited cry of "Abazungu [white people]!" Moayyad plans to post a journal of her travels on Peet's Web site, aimed at the company's most loyal customers, called Peetniks.

Coffee companies have run into trouble in Africa in the past. Starbucks wrestled with Ethiopia over the use of the country's name on its products. But fair trade advocates say TechnoServe's partners are on the right track. "It's good corporate citizenship, but it's also enlightened self-interest. They have to bring the farmers along so they have enough quality coffee," says Seth Petchers, who ran a campaign against Starbucks for Oxfam International.

For the efforts in Rwanda to pay off, Peet's needs to see more high-quality coffee produced. Last year's purchase amounted to just 8 metric tons of beans, a mere drop in its annual consumption of beans. At Peet's headquarters, Doug Welsh, the company's vice-president for coffee, pointed to a small sample of Rwandan coffee beans that he had just tasted. "The really good news is the inherent quality of the coffee is very good," he says. "That's why it's worth developing."

Hamm is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York and author of the Globespotting blog.

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. Completes Acquisition of Tully's Brand and Wholesale Business - FOXBusiness.com

2009-03-31T14:25:00.002-04:00

WATERBURY, Vt., Mar 30, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) ----Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. (NASDAQ:GMCR) announced today that it has completed the acquisition of the Tully's Coffee(R: 28.37, 0, 0%) brand and wholesale coffee business from Tully's Coffee Corporation for the purchase price of $40.3 million.

Initially announced on September 15, 2008, the transaction was completed after receiving the required shareholders' vote and satisfaction of the required closing conditions, as set forth in the Asset Purchase Agreement previously filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company financed this purchase through its existing $225 million senior revolving credit facility.

"This acquisition hits at the intersection of our goals -- to bring an outstanding specialty coffee brand into our family of brands and to expand GMCR's West Coast presence," said Larry Blanford, President and Chief Executive Officer of GMCR. "The acquisition strengthens our leadership in specialty coffee and will support our plans to establish our proprietary Keurig Single-Cup Brewing system as the preferred way to enjoy coffee throughout North America."

Tully's retail locations will continue to operate under license and supply agreements with GMCR. The retail and international business will remain an independent company, operating under the name of TC Global, Inc., owned by its existing shareholders, and managed by its existing management team.

As previously disclosed, the Company anticipates that this transaction will be neutral to slightly accretive to its earnings per share for the first twelve months of its ownership, and accretive thereafter.

About Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. (GMCR: 48, 0, 0%)

As a leader in the specialty coffee industry, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. (NASDAQ: GMCR: 48, 0, 0%) is recognized for its award-winning coffees, innovative brewing technology, and socially responsible business practices. GMCR's operations are managed through two business units. The Specialty Coffee business unit produces coffee, tea and hot cocoa from its family of brands, including Tully's Coffee(R: 28.37, 0, 0%), Green Mountain Coffee(R: 28.37, 0, 0%) and Newman's Own(R: 28.37, 0, 0%) Organics coffee. The Keurig business unit is a pioneer and leading manufacturer of gourmet single-cup brewing systems. K-Cup(R: 28.37, 0, 0%) portion packs for Keurig(R: 28.37, 0, 0%) Single-Cup Brewers are produced by a variety of licensed roasters, including Green Mountain Coffee and Tully's Coffee. GMCR supports local and global communities by offsetting 100% of its direct greenhouse gas emissions, investing in Fair Trade Certified(TM: 63.44, 0, 0%) coffee, and donating at least five percent of its pre-tax profits to social and environmental projects. Visit www.GreenMountainCoffee.com and www.Keurig.com for more information.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained herein are not based on historical fact and are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the applicable securities laws and regulations. Owing to the uncertainties inherent in forward-looking statements, actual results could differ materially. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, the impact on sales and profitability of consumer sentiment in this difficult economic environment, the Company's success in efficiently expanding operations and capacity to meet growth, the Company's success in efficiently and effectively integrating Tully's wholesale operations and capacity into its Specialty Coffee business unit, the ability of our lenders to honor their commitments under our credit facility, competition and other business conditions in the coffee industry and food industry in general, fluctuations in availability and cost of high-quality green coffee, any other increases in costs including fuel, the unknown impact of management changes, Keurig's ability to continue to grow and build profits with its roaster partners in the office and at home markets, the impact of the loss of one or more major customers for Green Mountain Coffee or reduction in the volume of purchases by one or more major customers, delays in the timing of adding new locations with existing customers, Green Mountain Coffee's level of success in continuing to attract new customers, sales mix variances, weather and special or unusual events, as well as other risks described more fully in the Company's filings with the SEC. Forward-looking statements reflect management's analysis as of the date of this press release. The Company does not undertake to revise these statements to reflect subsequent developments, other than in its regular, quarterly earnings releases.

Equal Exchange Wins Three Awards

2009-03-31T05:52:00.001-04:00

EQUAL EXCHANGE WINS THREE AWARDS FOR ITS SOCIAL & ENVIRONMENTAL PRACTICES

WEST BRIDGEWATER, Massachusetts – March 26, 2009 - In the span of less than four weeks, Equal Exchange, the worker co-operative best known for introducing Fair Trade coffee to U.S. grocery stores, has been honored with three awards for its category-leading, socially and environmentally responsible practices, and unorthodox business model.

In early March, Equal Exchange won the Social Innovation Award
(small-to-medium size enterprise category, annual revenue $5 - $500 million) that is given out jointly by the Financial Times newspaper and JustMeans.com. The Social Innovation Awards showcase companies that are balancing the needs of shareholder and society—employees, customers and activists. In the words of the Financial Times and JustMeans, “these are the companies and individuals that are taking action and are having an impact on shaping the new world of sustainable and socially responsible enterprise.”

The awards were given out at the Financial Times’ “Responsible Business, Responsible Investing” conference in New York City on March 2. Equal Exchange was pleased to share the podium with another co-operative, REI, the outdoor equipment retailer and consumer co-op, who was a winner in the Large Enterprise category.

In mid-March Equal Exchange was excited to learn that its new eco-café, the co-operative’s first-ever full-size coffee shop, was named as a winner of the Green Business Award by the City of Boston. The café is located downtown, next to Boston’s North Station and TD Banknorth Garden, home of the Boston Celtics and Boston Bruins. In keeping with Equal Exchange’s role as a leading importer and roaster of certified organic coffee, and purveyor of certified organic tea and chocolate, the café incorporates a number of environmentally responsible practices, ranging from the use of reclaimed wood in the café’s furniture to a comprehensive recycling and composting program for both staff and patrons. Besides a heavy emphasis on organic, Fair Trade, and locally sourced products, the café also took the unusual step of refusing to sell bottled water, out of recognition of its unnecessary contribution to global warming, litter, and land-fill waste.

Boston’s Green Business Awards will be given out April 16, at an 11 a.m. ceremony at the Children’s Museum in the Fort Point neighborhood.

And this week it was announced that Equal Exchange will receive the annual Aaron Feuerstein Spirituality and Business Award that is bestowed by the Symposium on Spirituality, Values, and Business. For the first time, the award is being given to an entire organization, instead of to an individual entrepreneur.

The award is granted to a business leader who embodies the values modeled by the life of Aaron Feuerstein. Mr. Feuerstein is a third generation leader of his family business, Malden Mills. When his mill burned down in a tragic fire in 1995, he not only continued to pay his employees, he also renewed his commitment to his community and his employees by rebuilding the mill at a time when most textile manufacturers were moving to other countries. Mr. Feuerstein is appropriately held up as a model for how modern entrepreneurs should lead.

The criteria for winning this award are:

A leader who has managed a socially responsible business or has successfully promoted socially responsible business practices
A person who models socially responsible values and principles and effectively integrates their core values into their business practices
A leader who actively promotes the importance of all stakeholders to a business

Past winners of this award include Jeff Swartz, CEO of Timberland, and Amy Domini, a pioneer in the field of socially responsible investing.

In its announcement, the Symposium lauded the 86 member worker co-operative both for its democratic practices within the company and for having designed its progressive policies into the structure of the enterprise:

“From the beginning, Equal Exchange has been intentional about its mission, vision, and values and has worked to integrate these ideals throughout the company and to serve as a model for what is possible in the business world.”

Rob Everts, Co-Executive Director of Equal Exchange, will receive the award on behalf of Equal Exchange and said this about the recent flurry of accolades:

“Right in the mission statement our worker-owners drafted 13 years ago, it says that we seek to ‘demonstrate, through our success, the contribution of worker co-operatives and Fair Trade to a more equitable, democratic and sustainable world’ and these awards suggest that the world is taking notice and that in the current financial climate, practices deemed idealistic just a few short years ago are, in fact, critical to a truly sustainable economy.”

The award will be presented Friday, March 27, at the eleventh annual Symposium on Spirituality, Values and Business that will be held at Babson College’s Glavin Family Chapel in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

About Equal Exchange:

A pioneer and U.S. market leader in Fair Trade since 1986, Equal Exchange is a full service provider of high quality, organic coffee, tea, chocolate and healthy snacks to retailers and food service establishments. Major customers include hundreds of consumer food co-operatives nationwide, supermarkets such as Shaw’s, Whole Foods, and Hannaford, as well as Ten Thousand Villages, restaurants, and thousands of places of worship and schools nationwide. 100% of Equal Exchange products are fairly traded, benefiting more than 40 small farmer co-operatives in 23 countries around the world. In keeping with its commitment to economic democracy, Equal Exchange is a worker co-operative, owned and democratically governed by its 86 worker-owners in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, and California.

Contact:
Rodney North
Equal Exchange
774-776-7398

rodney@equalexchange.coop

www.EqualExchange.Coop

Acteal, Chiapas, January 27, 2009

2009-02-18T19:07:00.006-05:00

In 1992 a pacifist religious organization was founded in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. They called themselves Las Abejas (“The Bees”), because they pledged to all work together (like bees) for the common goals of peace, human rights, land reform, and justice.

In 1994 the Zapatistas briefly rose up in rebellion against the government and after it was put down, the Mexican government began a policy of military control and low-level state terrorism to keep the populace from rising up again. On December 22, 1997, unknown gunmen swept into the small Abejas village of Acteal, and throughout the day and most of the night they hunted down and killed everyone they could find. Soldiers at a nearby military outpost were told of the attack, but did not intervene. The following morning, however, they did come to the village and washed blood from the walls of the church where over thirty people had died. Many believe it was to remove evidence of the crime.

The church where the worst of the killings took place is the small, wooden building in the back of the village at the end of the video.

Las Abejas, is composed of people from 48 indigenous communities throughout the highlands of Chiapas. In spite of the horrors they have encountered, they continue to work for peace and demonstrate their solidarity with other social struggles by denouncing violence and, perhaps even more importantly, through actions centered around fasting and prayer.

These slides are from a January visit sponsored by Equal Exchange, JubileeJustice of the United Church of Christ, Church of the Brethren, and Witness for Peace.

World economies play out at Lowell Church

2009-02-15T07:55:00.003-05:00

by Morgan Jarema | The Grand Rapids Press
Saturday February 14, 2009

Press Photo/Adam BirdMattie Kropf stands in front of a display of fair trade goods from Mexico, where she went on a trip to meet and learn from coffee farmers in Mexico.

LOWELL -- Mattie Kropf wants people to understand what they don't know can hurt others, even when it comes to a cup of coffee.

The Lowell High School junior recently returned from Chiapas, Mexico, where she stayed with families whose livelihoods depend upon the coffee they farm and process. She joined 18 others from congregations across the United States in a delegation that visited small-scale coffee farmers in the country's southern-most state.

The delegation -- sponsored by the United Church of Christ's Jubilee Justice Task Force and U.S. fair-trade food company Equal Exchange -- explored the impact of free-trade policies and U.S. economic policies on Mexican people.

"I can't have seen the stuff I've seen and not do anything," Kropf, 17, said. "As a Christian, you're called to care about everyone. You can't just ignore people just because they're at the bottom of the heirarchy."

Kropf, a member of Lowell's First Congregational United Church of Christ, made the trip with Shannon Hanley, the church's director of Christian education.

Delegates also met with organizations involved with human rights, grass-roots education and economic development, focusing on the struggles of small farmers for land, fair prices for their crops and the rights and support they need to develop their communities.

"We learned that a family that picks and processes coffee earns something like $60 a year," Kropf said. "To buy a 1-pound chicken to feed that family takes about seven hours' worth of wages."

The group also visited farming cooperatives and helped pick and process coffee.

Coffee is picked by hand from trees, many of which grow along steep mountainsides, Kropf said. Once it is picked, the "cherry" coating is removed and the beans are separated, peeled and dried.

"There's an art to it," she said. "You have to be very careful when you're picking because, if you get the stem, it will never grow back."

It was Hanley who pitched to the church's youth group the idea to use fair-trade coffee and sell it and other products at its year-round Global Bazaar store.

Kropf and Hanley are preparing a presentation for their church based on what they learned.

"We want people to think about the great deal they got on that cheap-o product they just bought: There's a real person who made it," Hanley said.

E-mail the author of this story: localnews@grpress.com

Fair Trade: The Story

2009-01-22T13:46:00.001-05:00

Find more videos like this on EQ CONNECT

Acteal, Chiapas, Massacre

2009-01-15T13:36:00.002-05:00

During our trip to Chiapas, we will take a day and travel out to Acteal, the site of a massacre, just over ten years ago. It will be a very moving visit, so to prepare you with a little background of what we will see, here are two videos about the killings.

The first is Damnificados de la Guerra en Chiapas ("Victims of War in Chiapas"), and the second is an ABC news piece reported by Deborah Amos.

Victims of War in Chiapas

Chiapas Massacre, December 1997, ABC News

Obama and NAFTA

2009-01-12T10:47:00.004-05:00

Laura Carlsen | January 9, 2009
Reprinted from Foreign Policy in Focus newsletter

Will he or won't he?

In the shadow of the economic crisis, a war of words rages over whether President-elect Barack Obama will hold to his campaign promise of opening up the North American Free Trade Agreement for renegotiation.

The debate isn't likely to stay in the shadows for long. Campaign attacks on NAFTA and candidate promises to renegotiate proved that demands for revision of the free-trade model have reached critical mass in U.S. politics. A post-election report from Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch heralded a net gain of 28 fair-trade members in the House and seven senators. Most of these politicians, it notes, didn't just happen to be critical of the free-trade model. They actively ran on a fair-trade platform and won partly on that stance.

The economic crisis only strengthens those demands. If international trade and investment policy is the pillar of the current economic model, its revision must be a foundation of global restructuring plans.

Why renegotiate NAFTA?

The mainstream press is wrong when it says the United States can’t "unilaterally" call for renegotiation. Not only is renegotiation permitted legally — in fact, any country can unilaterally withdraw with six months notice — but there have been many calls for renegotiation in Canada and Mexico.

Canadians have built a strong grassroots movement to protect natural resources from predatory NAFTA clauses. Broad-based citizen groups like the Council of Canadians oppose NAFTA because of the energy proportionality clause that requires Canada to export oil to the United States even in times of scarcity, the investor-state clauses that give investors the right to sue governments contained in Chapter 11, and the clause that permits bulk-water exports. Polls in the general population show that 61% favor renegotiation.

In Mexico, 100,000 people marched in the streets on two separate occasions under the banner of renegotiation to revise NAFTA’s agricultural provisions. They demanded protection of basic food production by removing corn and beans from the agreement. In 2003, former President Vicente Fox requested opening up the agreement only to be rebuffed by the U.S. government.

For the United States, the main issue is jobs. Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, cites a loss of 200,000 manufacturing jobs due to NAFTA for his state alone. The nation has lost 3.1 million manufacturing jobs since 1994, and its trade deficit with Mexico and Canada has risen to $138.5 billion in 2007 from $9.1 billion in 1993. The opposition to NAFTA within the United States goes well beyond organized labor. While job loss and insecurity under globalization were major constituency-builders in blue-collar states during the elections, polls taken before the election revealed that a national majority opposes free trade and particularly NAFTA, and that opinion increased during the campaign. A June 2008 Rasmussen nationwide poll showed 56% in favor of renegotiating NAFTA. Many people feel that NAFTA has given companies incentives to move production to where labor is cheaper, exporting jobs and eroding working conditions.

In general, U.S. opposition to the trade agreement is split between fair-trade groups that focus on jobs and the environment and a nationalist rightwing that believes NAFTA and its offspring, the Security and Prosperity Partnership, threaten U.S. sovereignty. Neither of these currents could properly be called "protectionist," and both call for more transparency in the process.

Among the differing priorities, citizen demands concur that the current agreement favors transnational companies and is unfair to citizens in all three nations.

Broadly shared priorities for renegotiation are:

Eliminate Chapter 11. Corporations shouldn’t have the right to sue governments and supersede national laws. Trade tribunals lack adequate transparency and accountability, and consistently reflect a strong, pro-corporate bias.
End the energy proportionality clause between the United States and Canada, and exclude bulk water as a commodity. Canadian national and provincial governments should be able to fulfill their responsibilities in long-term energy planning without restrictions under NAFTA.
Get NAFTA out of food and agriculture. Countries should be able to develop national agendas to assure food quality, farm livelihoods, and consumer safety and then adapt the trade agreement to those objectives rather than the reverse. NAFTA favors corporate farms and bans certain policy tools to support small farmers and consumers, including special products protections. Renegotiating the agreement’s agricultural provisions shouldn’t involve surgical incisions of specific clauses, but a deep reform and reorientation toward food sovereignty.
End the Security and Prosperity Partnership. This 2005 NAFTA extension into further trade and investment liberalization and national security has no public mandate in any of the three countries. Further negotiations on expanding integration should be reviewed and, where approved, be channeled into open, representative talks. The U.S. military aid package it spawned, the Merida Initiative, should be converted into a development aid package for the 2010 appropriations.

Citizen movements also call for national governments to have more development and social policy tools, many of which are prohibited under the competition and privatization terms of NAFTA. Some of these groups together produced a document of 10 areas that should be reviewed: energy, agriculture, role of the state, financial services, foreign investment, employment, migrants, environment, intellectual property, and dispute settlement.

Will He or Won't He?

Obama's campaign promise was explicit: "NAFTA's shortcomings were evident when signed and we must now amend the agreement to fix them." The president-elect called for enforceable labor and environmental standards in the text, an end to the ability of corporations to sue governments, and emphasizing the needs of "Main Street" over "Wall Street."

But now some Obama-watchers claim he's waffling on his trade commitments. Although these contentions in the pro-free-trade press are mostly wishful thinking, experts and activists are following the appointments closely. So far it has been a mixed message. The initial nomination of Bill Richardson, point-person for the passage of NAFTA under the Clinton administration, didn't sit well with fair-trade groups and elicited a sigh of relief among free-trade promoters, who instantly chalked up the president-elect's anti-NAFTA statements to electoral propaganda. Obama's economic advisors, led by Larry Summers, and appointee for Treasury, Timothy Geithner, at face value would also indicate a commitment to the status quo on trade. And when Ron Kirk, a former mayor of Dallas who proclaimed his city the "capital of NAFTA," accepted the nomination for U.S. Trade Representative, it reversed satisfaction among fair-traders at the initial nomination of Xavier Becerra, who turned down the job.

Pending the new Commerce designate, that leaves Hilda Solis, Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Labor, as the only real bright spot for fair-traders. A NAFTA critic, she would wield real clout since jobs will be the pivotal issue for the United States in renegotiation. As a Latina, she also has an acute understanding of the need to make NAFTA fair for all partners.

Pessimistically, it’s possible to imagine that the Obama presidency could end up merely adopting the Democratic platform on trade, which would stick side agreements in the text, add International Labor Organization core labor standards, and create an expanded U.S. jobs displacement program. Obama voted for the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement, which was modified along these lines. But the economic crisis has changed everything. Even as the Bush administration frantically — and incredibly — insists that free trade isn't the problem but the solution, most other countries are taking a second look at the model. As the crisis sets in, Europe wants more regulation and developing countries want more policy space. And Americans want more protection from the disaster that's currently befalling them.

With every appointment, Obama has insisted he'll be the one calling the shots. For the next few weeks, then, all we really have to go on for predicting trade policy is Washington's current favorite game — the psychic exploration of Obama's inner mind. A more productive activity for fair-traders is to pull out all the stops in the tri-national campaigns to renegotiate NAFTA and impose a moratorium on new free trade agreements. This is an historic opportunity to change course in crisis.

Citizens Organize for Renegotiation

Citizen organizations and legislators have called for renegotiation of NAFTA in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The collapse of the financial sector spells the need for a reconversion strategy for the "real economy;" that is, U.S. productive capacity in the United States. This strategy will require a careful and critical look at NAFTA, our blind reliance on market forces, and the promotion of outsourcing as a competition strategy.

The industrial policy that Obama outlined clashes ideologically and legally with NAFTA and other free trade agreements. It hasn't been lost on the rest of the world that the U.S. government is adopting measures such as massive subsidies and bailouts that it has sought to deny developing countries under free-trade rules. Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect refers to this as "the sin of committing industrial policy" and warns that it's only a matter of time before a trade partner registers a suit against Obama's anti-crisis measures. This would be an excellent opportunity to expose the hypocrisy of our trade policies and chart a new course.

The new fair-trade members of Congress and others outside the leadership clique will provide new allies and be far more willing to move beyond the stodgy party leadership's position on trade. Some already have. The TRADE Act, introduced into Congress in April 2008, calls for a NAFTA review and lays out fair-trade principles.

Meanwhile, poor countries need maximum room for maneuver to help those who are already living on the edge. Mexico is no exception. Although the current government isn’t likely to willingly change neoliberal policies and accept NAFTA renegotiation, the citizenry opposes NAFTA two to one. Echoing the phrase that did in John McCain's candidacy, President Felipe Calderón continues to argue that the Mexican economy will be fine even as reports of job loss, wage declines, inflation, and capital flight pour in. In Mexico, as in the United States, only energetic measures can address the deepening crisis and growing social unrest.

Renegotiation can and should be good for citizens in all three countries. With such a high degree of integration, our futures are intertwined. A recent study calculated that when Mexican wages drop 10% relative to U.S. wages, attempts to cross the border illegally rise 6%. Real wages in Mexico fell 24% from December 2006 to August 2008 and are plummeting now with the crisis; renegotiation should include a view toward job generation and retention in Mexico, and a compensation fund similar to the European Union's transition funds for less-developed countries. The current security aid in the ill-conceived Merida Initiative should be converted to this end.

Review and Redo

The first step for renegotiation must be a broad, in-depth review of NAFTA, or rather three reviews, one per country. Review bodies must be independent, representing different orientations and expertise. These should carefully define the criteria of evaluation, including social, economic, political, and cultural indicators. The U.S. TRADE Act, which also calls for a review, lists some criteria for evaluation, but we need precision. Also necessary are public consultations and other mechanisms for incorporating civil society input into the process.

The review would achieve several important goals. First, it would open up a debate that in the United States had been practically dormant between NAFTA's passage and the recent presidential campaign. It also would provide valuable information on impacts. The apples-and-oranges debate on trade policy — one side argues that NAFTA increased international trade and the other argues that international trade isn't all it's cracked up to be — is sterile and abstract. We should be able to move beyond this debate with additional data and analysis.

To convince public opinion of the case for renegotiation, at this critical moment in a process of economic integration gone awry, will require thinking about international trade and investment in the context of new economic arrangements. To do this we need to build both arguments and alliances. Renegotiation demands must be woven into comprehensive proposals for reform that have a coherent logic and go beyond NAFTA articles. Related issues include enforcing antitrust legislation, ending commodity speculation, adopting supply management mechanisms, creating grain reserves, supporting domestic food production, and building local marketing systems.

Renegotiating NAFTA should no longer be a question of "will he or won't he." To confront the crisis and establish mutual well-being in the region, the debate must move quickly now to "how and when."

Laura Carlsen (lcarlsen(at)ciponline.org) is director of the Americas Policy Program (www.americaspolicy.org) in Mexico City, where she has been an analyst and writer for two decades. She is also a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.

3 Die in Attack on Illegal Aliens in Southern Mexico

2009-01-11T05:24:00.001-05:00

SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, MEXICO -- Three people were killed and seven others wounded Friday when unknown assailants opened fire on a truckload of undocumented immigrants in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

Efe confirmed the presence of two bodies at the scene of the shooting, while sources at the Regional Hospital in San Cristobal de las Casas said that a third person died in an ambulance en route to the facility.

The attack place in Carmen Arcotete, a small community some 5 kilometers (3 miles) from this city.

The wounded include people from Ecuador and China as well as from Mexico's Central American neighbors, according to doctors at the Regional Hospital.

Witnesses said the shooting occurred as the migrant-laden truck was being pursued by local police, but they did not identify police as the shooters.

Residents of Carmen Arcotete said that many of the 30 or so people aboard the truck took off on foot after the attack.

Chiapas, bordering Guatemala, is the gateway for the estimated 300,000 undocumented migrants annually who enter Mexico from Central America by land with hopes of reaching the United States, many of them conducted across the border by people traffickers charging stiff fees.

Dilemmas of American Empire:

2009-01-01T21:56:00.000-05:00

Can Obama Pull Off a Game-Changer in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan?
By Gary Dorrien
June 22, 2009
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/international/1552/

Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. This article is adapted from a lecture he gave in a spring 2009 course and public forum titled “Christianity and the U.S. Crisis,” which he co-taught with Cornel West and Serene Jones at Union Theological Seminary.

Read this and send me a note. This needs to be talked about.
Stan

For Obama to steer us back to the softer side of Empire, withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan (and negotiating with Iran), he’ll have to overrule his key officials, Hillary Clinton and Dennis Ross, risk alienating Israel for its own good, and stand up to bracing public attacks. And he'll need a hand from a strong, anti-imperial religious and secular peace movement.

In the wake of the Bush administration’s disastrous neoconservative ideologies, the Obama Administration is seeking to reclaim the liberal internationalist and diplomatic way of relating to the world. The United States is going to be an aggressive imperial power no matter whom it elects as president; what is called “neoconservatism” is merely an extreme version of normal American supremacism, one that explicitly promotes and heightens the U.S.’s routine practices of empire. But it matters greatly whether the American empire tries to work cooperatively and respectfully with other nations instead of conspiring mainly to dominate them. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and the Middle East as a whole, the legacy of George W. Bush is not very good, and Obama has an overabundance of leftover crises to manage.

In Iraq the U.S. is slowly withdrawing military forces while in Afghanistan the U.S. is escalating; but in both cases the work is grinding, perilous, and ambiguous. There are no breakthroughs coming in Iraq or Afghanistan. The fix is in, and the new administration is simply trying to find a decently tolerable outcome. Iran is a different story diplomatically, where there is a real possibility of a breakthrough, but also the greatest danger.

“We hate you because you are occupiers, but we hate al Qaeda worse, and we hate the Persians even more.”

From March 2005 to April 2007 the eruption of a civil war (in the midst of an already ferocious insurgent war) in Iraq produced huge numbers of weekly attacks and casualties, averaging 2,000 attacks per month. The numbers then dropped dramatically as ethnic cleansing was completed in many areas, the “surge” of U.S. forces restricted the flow of explosives into Baghdad, the Mahdi Army suspended its attacks, and the U.S. co-opted Sunni insurgents. But violence has spiked again recently; it’s a perilous business to depend on buying off the opposition; and most importantly, the fundamental problems that fueled the insurgency and civil war still exist in Iraq. Meanwhile the U.S.’s price tag is approaching $2 trillion, as predicted by Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes back in 2006.

All of this will take decades to play out, well beyond the blink of an American news cycle. Iraq is broken into rival groups of warlords, sectarian militias, local gangs, foreign terrorists, political and ethnic factions, a struggling government, and a deeply corrupted and sectarian police force. The Sunnis are appalled that a Western invader paved the way to a Shiite government allied with Iran. They are deeply opposed to the new Constitution. They want a strong central government that distributes oil revenue from Baghdad, and they are incredulous that the U.S. has enabled Iran to become the dominant force in the Middle East. The Shiites are embittered by decades of Sunni tyranny in Iraq and centuries of Sunni dominance in the Middle East. Arab Shiites have not tasted power for centuries, and Iraqi Shiites are determined to redeem their ostensible right to rule Iraq that was denied them in 1920.

Both sides and the Kurds have militia groups that are the real powers in Iraq. The main thing that has worked in Iraq is the U.S.’s desperate gambit to co-opt the Sunni militia groups aligned with the Awakening Movement. In the counterinsurgency playbook, buying off the opposition is a last resort. The French, British, and U.S. tried it, respectively, in Algeria, Malaya, and Vietnam. In each case the weapons given to insurgents ended up being used against the forces providing them. In this case, over 100,000 Sunni fighters have been put on the U.S.’s weekly payroll. Major General Rick Lynch, commander of the Third Infantry Division, explains why it is working, so far: “They say to us, ‘We hate you because you are occupiers, but we hate al Qaeda worse, and we hate the Persians even more.’” In this lexicon, Iraqi Shiites are Persians, like the Iranians.

So the U.S. is paying and arming Sunni insurgents to kill people in the middle group, even as they profess to hating Shiites most of all. It’s not clear how the Awakening fighters will be removed from the dole, and Shiite leaders are not sympathetic to the U.S.’s predicament. The co-optive strategy has deeply enmeshed the U.S. in Iraqi tribal politics, lifting up certain tribes over others, and corrupting them. Tribes are forming their own militias and creating new leaders adept at cutting deals and getting access to money that was supposed to pay for reconstruction. The predatory corruption of government officials and connected tribal leaders is pervasive, direct, and unrelenting, which helps to explain why $200 billion of reconstruction aid has produced almost no reconstruction.

Iraq could explode again at any time, because Sunni leaders are demanding real power, the Shiite parties are determined not to yield it, and intra-sectarian resentments are boiling. Shiite and Kurdish leaders are stonewalling against integrating Sunnis into the army, and they are gathering the fingerprints, retinal scans, and home addresses of every Awakening fighter.

Despite all of this, important political gains have been made in the past year. Parliament is grappling seriously with the Baathist reconciliation problem, which requires tough political bargaining, and the recent provincial elections brought more Sunnis into the political process. Prime Minister Maliki, toughened by 24 years of brutally difficult exile in Iran and Syria as a functionary of a tiny, persecuted Islamist party—the Dawa Party—has proven to be a more resilient leader than many expected. To make a real difference, Iraq needs an oil deal, a new Constitution, a resolution over Kirkuk, and a national election that brings more Sunnis into the government. Most difficult of all, it needs to integrate large numbers of Sunni forces into the army and police force. Above all, it needs to get the U.S. Army out.

The Toxic Politics of Collaboration and Betrayal

On the latter issue, we need to be resolute and pragmatic at the same time; and by “we,” I mean our religious communities, the movements for social justice, and the Obama Administration. President Obama has significantly compromised his campaign promise to withdraw most or all U.S. troops within 16 months of taking office. His current position is that 65 percent of our force structure in Iraq will be removed by August 2010, and all our combat troops, leaving up to 50,000 troops there in non-combat roles until December 2011. He stresses that the combat mission will end at the end of next summer, more or less as he promised, and that we need to keep a heavy force in Iraq for at least 15 months beyond that. Last month the U.S. relinquished one of its largest military bases in the Green Zone, the dramatically named Forward Operating Base Freedom. But two weeks later the administration announced its plan to keep indefinitely the entire Camp Victory complex, which has five large bases in Baghdad, and Camp Prosperity and Camp Union III, which are located near the new American Embassy in the Green Zone.

There are more announcements of this sort to come. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is already saying we will need to keep some military forces in Iraq beyond December 2011, beyond simply protecting the embassy. It isn’t clear what the distinction between combat and non-combat will mean. All soldiers are trained to fight, which the Army is currently stressing in its press statements. If a civil war breaks out, will U.S. troops take action? If not, what is the rationale for 50,000 troops? It is ethically imperative for the U.S. to be careful and deliberate in extricating itself from Iraq; we must avoid the mistakes of the British in India, the French in Algeria, and the U.S. in Vietnam. Obama gets that part. What he needs to hear is that his core supporters are serious about getting out of Iraq and are not willing to be strung along for years with half-measures.

Once an empire invades, especially a self-righteous one like the U.S., there are always reasons why it thinks it cannot leave. But sooner or later, conquered peoples have to be set free to breathe on their own to regain their dignity. As long as the U.S. Army is the ultimate power in Iraq, Iraq will have no sovereignty; Shiites will be viewed in the Sunni provinces as collaborators with the invader; and Sunnis will view the Iraqi army as a creation of the invaders that puts their enemies in charge. When the occupier pulls back, the toxic politics of collaboration and betrayal will be lessened. The civil strife in Iraq is going to play itself out no matter what the U.S. does. But the U.S. set it off and we are refueling it every day we remain.

In the past two years the U.S. has, in effect, created a Sunni Army. The fate of this entity trumps a long list of daunting variables in Iraq. Sunni leaders protest constantly that the nation’s interests against Iran are not being defended. If the Sunnis and Kurds can be integrated into the Iraqi Shiite Army, which is euphemistically called the Iraq Army, Iraq has a chance of holding together as a semi-federalized state. There is no other option that averts another upsurge of death and destruction.

Advocates of breaking Iraq into three nations stress that parts of the country are already partitioned; all three of the major groups have their own military, and the Kurds have their own government and oil deal too. But the majority of Iraqi cities and provinces still have Sunni and Shiite communities living side by side. Iraq cannot break apart without igniting a horrible civil war, one that Iran, Syria, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia would not sit out. The best hope is that Iraqis will decide for integration and sovereignty, but it is up to them to decide whether they want a unitary state, a decentralized federation, three nations, or something else. I don’t want President Obama to make that decision or to commit U.S. troops to one of these outcomes. We must hold the Obama Administration to leave Iraq by a time certain, relinquish all the military bases, and support the rebuilding of a shattered society.

Wanted: An Anti-Imperialist Peace Movement

Today we have the right president to repair the terrible damage to the U.S.’s image in the world, especially the Middle East, as Obama’s eloquent speech in Cairo demonstrated. But he is escalating the war in Afghanistan, with a rationale that leads straight to more escalation and virtual occupation.

The president has already added 17,000 combat troops and 4,000 trainers to the force of 37,000 that we had in Afghanistan. He is talking about doubling that escalation, says we have to shore up the government, and he is planning to double the size of the Afghan army with U.S. taxpayer funds. What he has not done is explain how or when we will know if any of this ramping up has succeeded.

After nearly eight years of war, Afghanistan has “quagmire” written all over it. The government is corrupt from top to bottom. It barely exists outside Kabul except as an instrument of shakedowns and graft, beginning with the family of President Karzai. The Afghan army is part of the corruption plague, and opium production is expanding dramatically. More than two-thirds of the economy is centered on opium traffic.

The United States has a vital interest in preventing Al Qaeda from securing a safe haven in Afghanistan. But escalating to 60,000 troops, and warning that more may be necessary, suggests some larger objective that has not been explained or defended. If the U.S. is going to pour more troops into a country featuring a chronically dysfunctional government, treacherous terrain, a soaring narcotics trade, and a history of repelling foreign armies, it needs to spell out what, exactly, this escalation is supposed to accomplish and how the U.S. will know it has succeeded enough to get out or even to scale down.

I am more hopeful, though equally wary, about the situation in Iran, where the Bush legacy is disastrous. In 2001, Iran had a few dozen centrifuges and the government of President Mohammad Khatami helped the U.S. overthrow the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Khatami negotiated with the U.S. in the wake of 9/11, closed Iran’s border with Afghanistan, deported hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban operatives who had sought sanctuary there, and helped establish the new Afghan government. The Bush administration could have spent the succeeding years further negotiating with Iran, limiting Iran’s nuclear program, allowing it to buy a nuclear power reactor from France, and restraining it from flooding Iraq with foreign agents. Instead, Bush arbitrarily ended talks with Iran, famously consigning it to the “Axis of Evil.” Iran responded by electing an eccentric extremist, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the presidency, developing over 5,000 centrifuges, and threatening Israel. We barely averted a catastrophe in 2006, when Bush and Cheney wanted to bomb Natanz with a nuclear weapon until the Joint Chiefs rebelled against them.

Today there is a serious possibility that the Netanyahu government in Israel will carry out the bombing option. If it does, the entire region could explode into a ball of fire. That’s the apocalyptic scenario. The hopeful one is a game-changer based on two or three years of sustained diplomacy. The U.S. could declare that it recognizes the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It could acknowledge Iran’s right to security within its present borders and its right to be a geopolitical player in the region. It could accept Iran’s right to operate a limited enrichment facility with a few hundred centrifuges for peaceful purposes. It could agree to the French nuclear power reactor and support Iran’s entry into the World Trade Organization. And it could return seized Iranian assets. In return Iran could be required to cut off its assistance to Hezbollah and Hamas, help to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, maintain a limited nuclear program for peaceful ends verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency, adopt a non-recognition and non-interference approach to Israel, and improve its human rights record.

Any deal of this sort would be a dramatic breakthrough in the Middle East. It would have a positive impact on nearly every major point of conflict in the region. It would be the opposite of the Bush-neocon approach, which demonized Iran and plotted attacks against it. Obama may be the ideal president to pull off a game-changing deal with Iran. The Iranian people are remarkably inclined to pro-Americanism. The clerics that rule Iran might be willing to seize this moment, which would enhance their stature in world politics. If Obama is the president to make it happen, he will have to stand up to a firestorm of opposition in the U.S. and probably overrule his key officials in this area, Hillary Clinton and Dennis Ross. And he will have to risk offending most of Israel’s political establishment, to get something that is actually better for Israel.

Regardless of what Obama does or does not do, we need a defiantly anti-imperial peace movement that rejects the American obsession with supremacy and dominance. Forty years ago, Senator William Fulbright warned that the U.S. was well on its way to becoming an empire that exercised power for its own sake, projected to the limit of its capacity and beyond, filling every vacuum and extending U.S. force to the farthest reaches of the earth. As the power grows, he warned, it becomes an end in itself, separated from its initial motives (all the while denying it), governed by its own mystique, projecting power merely because we have it.

That’s where we are today. Now as much as ever, we need a self-consciously anti-imperial movement that seeks to scale back the military empire and opposes invading any more nations in the Middle East or Latin America or anywhere else.

Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is the author of 14 books and over 225 articles ranging over the fields of social ethics, political theory, theology, philosophy, and intellectual history. His most recent book is Social Ethics in the Making (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). This article is adapted from a lecture he gave in a spring 2009 course and public forum titled “Christianity and the U.S. Crisis,” which he co-taught with Cornel West and Serene Jones at Union Theological Seminary.

© 2009 Religion Dispatches. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/international/1552/

DOWUSA - Health Services for Chiapas' Indigenous Communities

2009-01-01T16:45:00.002-05:00

The indigenous people of Chiapas, who have suffered human rights abuses and poverty for years, have little access to health care. A dearth in prenatal health care resulted in shocking maternal and infant mortality rates. One third of children under five suffer malnutrition. Doctors of the World-USA is working to build access to health care in this rural region of Mexico. Volunteer doctors provide direct services and mentoring at the Hospital San Carlos. Our nurse auxiliary program trains indigenous women to work as midwives, providing care throughout the region and bridging the gap between indigenous communities and health care providers caused by language barriers. Our food security program improves agriculture and food supply in the region. Through capacity building and community mobilization, we are creating sustainable and lasting solutions to protect the health and human rights of the people of Chiapas.

Original post found here

Mexico's Immigration Problem Also a "Red Flag" at Home

2008-12-05T09:28:00.003-05:00

In the first two years of the Felipe Calderon administration, Mexico has become a focal point in the violation of the human rights of immigrants even as it criticizes the treatment of Mexican migrants in the United States. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants Jorge Bustamante states the problem in no uncertain terms: "We are responsible for violations of the rights of Central Americans passing through Mexico, the same or worse as those of Mexicans in the United States."

The analogy between the treatment of Central Americans by the Mexican government and Mexicans by the U.S. government is particularly relevant. President Calderon came to office with two seemingly different challenges: to find a solution to U.S. treatment of Mexican migrants on the northern border, and to deal fairly and efficiently with a burgeoning flow of immigrants and trans-migrants crossing over his southern border.

Neither challenge has been met. The contrast between the mostly rhetorical defense of Mexican migrants and the violations of migrant rights here demonstrates not only hypocrisy, but more importantly, the absence of a coherent rights-based immigration policy that would apply the standards developed in UN declarations on migrant rights, and other conventions.

Participants in the World Social Forum on Migrations designated Mexico a "red flag" zone for the violation of migrants' rights. The first reason is that it is one of the countries that produce the largest number of migrants. Migrant organizations in the United States accuse the Calderon government of a lack of results in defending their rights, and a lack of direct dialogue with the migrants. Calderon's statements that migration is inevitable, they claim, show a fatalistic resignation to the lack of options at home.

The second reason is the treatment of Central Americans in Mexico. Chiapas alone receives some 45,000 agricultural migrant workers a year and 200,000 illegal entries. Bustamante reports that migrants are "tortured, robbed, and extorted" by criminal networks comprised of corrupt members of the armed forces, police, and government officials. The Salvadorean vice consul recently affirmed that 17% of Salvadoran migrants had been assaulted when entering Mexico. Press reports and testimonies reveal the terrible conditions of overcrowding in migratory stations, extortion by security forces, and routine violations of rights in raids and return programs. It's not that the administration has entirely ignored the problem. Undocumented status was decriminalized. Discourse and training on human rights has increased within immigration agencies and services have been expanded. Special programs have been instituted to protect women and child migrants.

But even insiders admit these programs are at best Band-Aids on a hemorrhaging wound. The reason is the adoption of the security paradigm for migratory policy. Since the Vicente Fox administration, the U.S. government has pushed Mexico to control immigration over its southern border as part of stretching the U.S. security perimeter. Many of these commitments were hammered out in the context of the Security and Prosperity Partnership, or SPP, an agreement to extend NAFTA into regional security.

The Merida Initiative, developed in the SPP, will provide tens of millions of dollars to Mexico's Migration Institute to institutionalize the security approach to immigration. Although heralded by Calderon as a joint initiative to fight organized crime, it is officially called a regional cooperation initiative on counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, and border security. It intensifies conflict and aggressions against migrants by attacking "the flow of illegal goods and persons," as if migrants were contraband or terrorists.

Placing immigration within a security paradigm is what led to the construction of the wall along the U.S. border and the 5,000 deaths to date of migrants forced to cross in the most dangerous parts of the border due to U.S. surveillance and enforcement. Ironically, the emphasis on border "control" in Mexico has fed organized crime and created booming underground businesses that prey on immigrants. The UN High Commission for Refugees has pointed out this relationship, saying, "All smugglers thrive on prohibition, so stronger borders and tightened visa restrictions have helped push more people—both refugees and economic migrants—into the arms of the smugglers."

In those arms, women are forced into prostitution, migrants are kidnapped for the resources they were able to scrape together for the trip, their families are extorted, and children are forced into slave labor. All these problems have grown over the past two years, as the Calderon administration tightened border controls in the South while turning a blind eye to corruption, and has taken a weak stance on repressive measures in the North.

Illegal immigration is not a problem that will go away as long as it's considered a problem. The problem is not people looking for work—people will always look for a way to feed their families and cannot be deterred from that. It's jobs. The Calderon and Bush governments are spending millions each year on security forces, monitoring, detention, and deportation of immigrants. Many keep coming back, not because they're recidivist lawbreakers, but because they don't have options in their home countries.

Unless Mexico, the United States, and Central American countries form an effective regional employment strategy that includes a review of trade polices that lead to displacement, the human rights crisis for immigrants will continue to go from bad to worse.

Laura Carlsen (lcarlsen(a)ciponline.org) is the Mexico City-based director of the Americas Policy Program (www.americaspolicy.org) of the Center for International Policy.

To reprint this article, please contact americas@ciponline.org. The opinions expressed here are the author's and do not necessarily represent the views of the CIP Americas Policy Program or the Center for International Policy.

For More Information

Resources on Plan Mexico (Merida Initiative)
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5118

Pain and Protest on the Day of the Butterflies: Violence Persists Against Women in Mexico
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5710

The Failure of Operation Chihuahua
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5626

Expect "Rule of Law" to Rule Immigration Policy
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5696

Recent Videos of the Zapatistas in Chiapas

2008-12-04T11:40:00.000-05:00

Video One. Click below

Video two. Click below.

Video three. Click below.

Interview with John Ross, Author of Zapatistas! Making Another World Possible-Chronicles of Resistence 200-2006

New Movie

2008-12-04T09:15:00.003-05:00

Corazon Del Tiempo ("Heart of Time")
Director and Screenwriter: Alberto Cortes

One new movie offered in this year's Sundance Festival is a love affair in Chiapas.
Accordig to the listing of films: "In La Esperanza de San Pedro, Chiapas, in the midst of the Zapatista struggle, a young woman makes serious waves when she falls in love with a revolutionary fighter from the mountains."
Cast: Rocío Barrios.

Three Articles on How Neighboring Countries View Nafta

2008-11-21T12:58:00.004-05:00

Hi group,
Here are two takes (in three articles) on how our neighbors are viewing Obama's pledge to revisit some aspects of NAFTA. Read through them and let me know what you think. I'd be interested in your thoughts on the subject. Should Obama change it or leave it as it is? And if he does change it, what changes? Big ones? Cosmetic around the edges? Or what?

Next week you'll receive an extended piece that I wrote on NAFTA recently, so I'll hold off on my opinions until wee hear from all of you.

Blessings,

Stan

Mexico worries about Obama agenda

Government, business leaders unsure if he wants to change NAFTA
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle Mexico City Bureau
Nov. 20, 2008, 9:12PM

MEXICO CITY — While Brack Obama fascinates many Mexicans, government officials and business executives here are concerned about what his administration might mean for their country.

No international relationship is more important to Mexico than that with the United States, and both countries have been governed for the past eight years by conservatives who shared a common ideology, if not always national interests.

As a Texan, George W. Bush has been knowledgeable about both Mexico and border issues. But Obama, a liberal Democrat from a Northern state, remains an unknown to many here.

Mexican officials want to make sure the president-elect and his supporters understand how essential Mexico remains to the United States.

"We have to convince our citizens on both sides of the border that we are co-stakeholders in this very important relationship," Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's U.S. ambassador, told Chronicle reporters and editors during a recent visit to Houston. "If we can't do this, we'll have a very rough time."

Calderon's concerns
Mexican President Felipe Calderon met with Obama's representatives, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, while in Washington for the recent 20-nation summit on the world financial crisis.

Calderon later said he had expressed his government's concerns that a "return to protectionism would only lessen the possibilities of overcoming the current economic crisis."

In other meetings with congressional leaders, Calderon emphasized concerns about weapons smuggled from the United States that arm Mexico's drug-trafficking syndicates.

"What is going to be important is to see how fast we can have Mexico included as one of the priorities for the new administration," said Jorge Treviño, a Mexican deputy foreign minister in the 1990s.

The U.S.-Mexico relationship is complex, of course: immigration, drug trafficking and criminal violence; environmental issues and deep trade relations; a shared 2,000-mile border.

"If you look at the day-to-day impact that any country has on the security, economic well-being and prosperity of the Americans, then there is no country more important than Mexico," Saruhkan said.

Perhaps most worrying for many here is what might be Obama's intentions for the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

The agreement — which has dropped most trade barriers among the United States, Mexico and Canada — went into effect in 1994. Since then, trade has exploded to about $900 billion annually.

But NAFTA has created losers as well. Mexican farmers complain they are being destroyed by cheap grain imports from north of the Rio Grande. Labor unions in the Midwest blame NAFTA for the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs.

A slippery slope
During the Democratic primaries, Obama repeatedly criticized NAFTA, saying that the agreement has cost the U.S.

a million jobs. He promised to renegotiate the treaty.

Sarukhan said that opening the agreement to new talks would prove a slippery slope, which, he said, would wreck the deal.

Mexico and Canada would want to renegotiate issues other that those favored by the United States, he said, and legislators in all three countries would weigh in on changes. That might be particularly risky in Mexico, he said, because an opposition-controlled Congress could scuttle many of Calderon's initiatives.

"Renegotiating NAFTA is like throwing a monkey wrench into the competitiveness of America. It's a bad idea," he said. "The probable end game of that is going to be the meltdown of what we've built over these past 15 years."

But NAFTA rarely came up during the presidential campaign, and Obama softened his message on the treaty and other trade deals, said Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington think tank.

Mexican officials want to negotiate a comprehensive treaty for legalizing Mexican workers, at least temporarily, in the United States.

Former President Vicente Fox pushed hard to win such an agreement with Bush after both took office in 2001. But that effort was derailed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Like Fox, Calderon has argued that NAFTA should be "deepened" by providing for the flow of labor across the U.S. border.

"The 800-pound guerrilla in the room is labor mobility," Sarukhan said. "The fact that we have labor-intensive and capital-intensive economies living next to each other provides us with new sysnergies to be able to compete."

But Sarukhan acknowledged that an immigration deal probably couldn't be seriously discussed with Obama for a few years. "It's become too much of a toxic issue" with the American public, he said.

dudley.althaus@chron.com

----------------------------------------------

Anti-NAFTA groups prepare wish list for Obama
TheStar.com - Canada -
November 20, 2008
Tobi Cohen
THE CANADIAN PRESS

MONTREAL – Not everybody in Canada is terrified by the prospect of U.S president-elect Barack Obama reopening the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In fact, some are enthusiastically applauding the idea.

A large group of non-government organizations and union leaders is gathering in Ottawa on Friday to discuss changes they'd like to see to the landmark trade treaty in areas like the environment, labour, culture, international development and human rights.

About 40 people are expected to attend in the hopes of reaching a consensus on what amendments should be made to the Canada-U.S.-Mexico agreement once Obama takes office in January.

"He kind of threw out the renegotiation challenge, we're going to take him up on it," said Bruce Campbell, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. His group is co-hosting the event along with the Council of Canadians.

"Certainly the establishment's view is that NAFTA is great and shouldn't be reopened. That's not our view."

When Obama mused about reopening NAFTA during the presidential primaries, it was immediately cast by some political and business players as a potential crisis. After all, Canada has seen its exports to the U.S. multiply almost seven times since the first free-trade agreement took effect in 1988.

Those fears were eased somewhat by a leaked diplomatic memo, which suggested Obama's economic team had reassured Canadian officials that they would hold on to the status quo.

But Campbell and his allies hope Obama keeps his initial promise – and they're hoping to offer him some suggestions.

The groups are expected to discuss incorporating labour standards into NAFTA, scrapping energy provisions like proportional sharing and export taxes, protecting water and natural resources, and how best to protect and create manufacturing jobs.

Campbell hopes there might eventually be a meeting with the Obama administration similar to the one Canadian Council of Chief Executives president Tom d'Aquino has scheduled for next spring.

"Tom d'Aquino plans to take his 100 executives to Washington in March, maybe it's time for a delegation of NGOs from the three countries to get together," Campbell said.

Some of the participants at Friday's roundtable want to change NAFTA's controversial Chapter 11, which is designed to protect investor rights. Left-leaning groups have long argued, however, that it diminishes human rights.

The chapter allows foreign investors to circumvent local courts and sue governments before an international arbitration panel.

The Canadian Environmental Law Association, which will be at the Ottawa gathering, last week issued a letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Obama urging them to repeal or amend Chapter 11.

CELA's concerns arise from a claim by Dow AgroSciences, filed in August, that alleges the province of Quebec had breached NAFTA by banning the weed killer 2,4-D.

While other regulatory agencies have not found reason to declare the product dangerous, it has been linked to neurological impairment, reproductive problems, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer lists it as a cancer-causing carcinogen.

The maker of the herbicide is seeking $2 million in compensation, plus legal fees.

Pointing to a recent Health Canada ruling that found 2,4-D could be used safely according to label directions, the company alleges the ban has no scientific merit.

The company has 90 days to file a notice of arbitration which would continue the legal challenge. Company spokeswoman Brenda Harris said that period expires Monday and that Dow will not comment before then on whether it would pursue its claim.

But CELA executive director Theresa McClenaghan believes Dow will ultimately lose based on what's happened in similar cases, but she says the company is not motivated merely by the idea of winning a legal fight.

"My sense is that their strategic reason for doing it would be to attempt to influence other provincial jurisdictions which have been considering or have been proceeding with different kinds of regulatory actions around pesticides," she said.

"Having a challenge that's been filed and not determined allows them to say, 'We have this Chapter 11 NAFTA challenge so you shouldn't do this or we'll bring a similar challenge."'

Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia are all considering similar regulations.

McClenaghan says both the U.S. and Canadian governments have acknowledged the need to include language that clarifies that environmental, health and safety regulations are not akin to ``indirect expropriation." In fact the U.S. has already included such language, she says, in more recent trade agreements signed with Chile, Singapore and Australia.

"They simply need to take their own advice," she said. "Such provisions would preclude the type of claim that Dow AgroSciences has now filed against Canada."

There are currently 13 active Chapter 11 cases against Canada listed on the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade website.

Sanjiva Sondagar, a foreign-affairs spokeswoman, said the government maintains the view that NAFTA works well, that it lets governments regulate in the public interest, and that "Canada has no plans to pursue renegotiations."

One prominent expert on Canada-U.S. relations suggests the whole discussion remains hypothetical. James Blanchard, a U.S. ambassador to Canada under Bill Clinton, said he doesn't see Obama reopening NAFTA anytime soon.

He said that issue is among the many that will be relegated to the back-burner while Obama deals with an economic crisis.

"I don't think there's any debate here right now," Blanchard said.

"There's so many other things – the financial cirsis, the auto crisis, the economy generally."

Besides, he added, the concerns that Obama so famously expressed about NAFTA during the Ohio primary had more to do with Mexico than Canada.

He said Obama was referring more to concerns about poor wages, human rights and labour standards.

"Nobody said Canada is in that category," Blanchard said.

----------------------------------------------

Some Canadians welcoming Obama NAFTA comments
4:10pm
Edmonton / iNews880.com
11/20/2008

Not everybody in Canada is terrified by the prospect of U-S president-elect Barack Obama reopening the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In fact, some are enthusiastically applauding the idea.

Non-governmental organizations and union leaders are gathering in Ottawa tomorrow.

They'll discuss changes they'd like to see to the landmark trade treaty in areas such as the environment, labour, culture, international development and human rights.

About 40 people are expected to attend in the hopes of reaching a consensus on what amendments should be made to the Canada-U-S-Mexico agreement once Obama takes office in January.

Bruce Campbell, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives which is co-hosting the meeting, says Obama kind of threw out the renegotiation challenge, and they're going to take him up on it.
A leaked diplomatic memo suggested Obama's economic team had reassured Canadian officials they would keep the status quo.

James Blanchard, a U-S ambassador to Canada under former U-S president Bill Clinton, says he doesn't see Obama reopening NAFTA anytime soon.

(The Canadian Press)

The Readings

2008-11-14T10:10:00.001-05:00

If you have just joined, or have gotten behind, here is a list of what we have been reading so far and what is coming up. If you are behind and will never catch up, we still love you. It’s grace.
Stan

From September 29 through October 10, we'll focus on

Luttinger, Nina and Gregory Dicum The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop (New York: The New Press, 2006).

Ch. 2: Coffee's Odyssey from Crop to Cup (pages 38-70). This chapter is about how coffee is grown and processed, and the lives of the farmers who grow it.

Ch. 3: The Rise of the International Coffee Trade (pages 86-120). This chapter is about how coffee is traded, how prices are determined, and who gets your coffee dollar. The selected reading focuses on the period from the foundation of the International Coffee Organization in 1962 to the Coffee Crisis in 2001.

Ch. 4: (pages 150-173), The Specialty Coffee Boom, which set the stage for Fair Trade by increasing the demand for high quality coffee and fostered concern for where coffee comes from and who grows it. This section also talks about the Starbucks Phenomenon.

Ch. 5: (pages 176 to 210), The Sustainable Coffee Buzz, includes discussion of ethical consumerism, certification, organic coffee, shade grown coffee and Fairly Traded Coffee.

Optionally, you can also read pages 128-148 in Chapter 3, about the Mega Roasters (like Folgers’s and Maxwell House) and the decline of quality.

From October 20 through mid-November:

Especially his introduction to the history and conflicts in Chiapas. Other chapter suggestions:
Ch. 7: Migrant Labor on the Coffee Plantations: Debt, Lies, Drink, Hard Work, and the Union, 1920's-1930's
Ch. 13: Agrarian Struggles in the Central Valley: Peasant Mobilization and the OCEZ, 1980-82
Ch. 15: The Diocese's Most Radical Declaration: The Plan, San Cristobal, 1986
Ch. 16: Salinas's Form of Social Organization: Solidarity, 1988-94
Ch. 20: ENOUGH!: The Zapatista Declaration of War, January 1, 1994
Ch. 21: Revolutionary Legislation: The EZLN's New Laws, January 1994
Ch. 30: The Civil War in the Highlands: Acteal, December 22, 1997

From Mid-November to January 1

Ch. 3: Coffee: Victor and Hugo, Life and Faith and the Price of Coffee
Ch. 4: NAFTA: The Greatest Story Over Sold
Ch. 5: International Debt: Your Money or Your Life

This book, which is in pre-publication form, will be sent, free of charge, to all group participants.

The Broken Promise of NAFTA

2008-11-09T11:30:00.002-05:00

Joseph E. Stiglitz*
New York Times, January 6, 2004

The celebrations of Nafta's 10th anniversary are far more muted than those involved in its creation might have hoped. In the United States, the North American Free Trade Agreement has failed to fulfill the most dire warnings of its opponents and the most fervent expectations of its supporters. In Mexico, however, the treaty remains controversial and even harmful — as do America's efforts to liberalize trade throughout the hemisphere.

There is some good news. In America, the "giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country" that Ross Perot predicted never quite materialized. The first six years of Nafta saw unemployment in the United States fall to new lows. (Of course, to most economists there was little basis for Mr. Perot's worries in the first place. Maintaining full employment is the concern of monetary and fiscal policy, not of trade policy.) Nafta has brought some benefits to Mexico as well; it was trade with America, fueled by Nafta — not the bailout of Wall Street lenders — that was responsible for Mexico's quick recovery after the financial crisis of December 1994.

But while Mexico benefited in the early days, especially with exports from factories near the United States border, those benefits have waned, both with the weakening of the American economy and intense competition from China. Meanwhile, poor Mexican corn farmers face an uphill battle competing with highly subsidized American corn, while relatively better-off Mexican city dwellers benefit from lower corn prices. And as all but one of Mexico's major banks have been sold to foreign banks, local small and medium sized enterprises — particularly in no export sectors like small retail — worry about access to credit.

Growth in Mexico over the past 10 years has been a bleak 1 percent on a per capita basis — better than in much of the rest of Latin America, but far poorer than earlier in the century. From 1948 to 1973, Mexico grew at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent per capita. (By contrast, in the 10 years of Nafta, even with the East Asian crisis, Korean growth averaged 4.3 percent and China's 7 percent in per capita terms.)

And while the hope was that Nafta would reduce income disparities between the United States and its southern neighbor, in fact they have grown — by 10.6 percent in the last decade. Meanwhile, there has been disappointing progress in reducing poverty in Mexico, where real wages have been falling at the rate of 0.2 percent a year.
These outcomes should not have come as a surprise. Nafta does give Mexico a slight advantage over other trading partners. But with its low tax base, low investment in education and technology, and high inequality, Mexico would have a hard time competing with a dynamic China. Nafta enhanced Mexico's ability to supply American manufacturing firms with low-cost parts, but it did not make Mexico into an independently productive economy.

When President Bill Clinton first asked the Council of Economic Advisers about the economic importance of Nafta, early in his administration, our response was that potential geopolitical benefits were far more important than the economic benefits. (Similarly, the European Union, for all of the economic benefits that it has brought, is mainly a political project.)

America perhaps stood more to gain economically than Mexico, but the concrete gains were likely to be small on both sides. Tariff rates on both sides were already very low, with Mexico's tariffs being slightly higher than America's, and Nafta would not eliminate important nontariff barriers. The disparity in income across the Mexican border is among the largest anywhere, and the resulting migration pressure was enormous. Doing what little America could do to enhance growth in Mexico would be good for Mexico, and good for America; and it was the right thing to do for our neighbor to the south.

Unfortunately, much of the goodwill that the United States might have expected has been squandered. First, America attempted to use barriers to keep out Mexican products that began to make inroads in our markets — from tomatoes to avocados to trucks to brooms. Despite the impressive efforts of workers' rights groups, efforts to ease the life of immigrants have stalled. Recent moves in California to prevent illegal immigrants from receiving driver's licenses and medical care have been a depressing sign that conditions for Mexican immigrants in this country are getting worse.

Of course, Nafta was a far more modest project than the European Union. It did not envision the free movement of labor, though that would have had a far larger effect on regional output than the free movement of capital, on which it focused. It did not envision a common set of economic regulations, or even a common currency. But hidden in Nafta was a new set of rights — for business — that potentially weakened democracy throughout North America.

Under Nafta, if foreign investors believe they are being harmed by regulations (no matter how well justified), they may sue for damages in special tribunals without the transparency afforded by normal judicial proceedings. If successful, they receive direct compensation from the federal government. Environmental, health and safety regulations have been attacked and put into jeopardy. To date, suits with claims in excess of $13 billion have been filed.

While many of the cases are still pending, it is clear that there was not a full and open debate of the consequences of Nafta before passage. Conservatives have long sought to receive compensation for regulations that hurt them, and American courts and Congress have usually rejected these attempts. Now businesses may have accomplished indirectly, through treaty, what they could not get more openly through the democratic political process.

Meanwhile, those harmed by the actions of the foreign firms, for instance by what they do to the environment, do not have comparable protections of appealing to an international tribunal and receiving compensation. The concern is that Nafta will stifle regulation, no matter how important for the environment, health or safety.
All of this has important implications for the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, and for countries thinking of signing onto bilateral trade agreements with the United States. Signing a free trade agreement is neither an easy nor an assured road to prosperity. The United States has said it does not want agriculture or nontariff barriers to be on the table in these talks. But while it refuses to give in on these points, it wants Latin American countries to compromise their national sovereignties and to agree to investor "protections."

In fact, the United States has been demanding that countries fully liberalize their capital markets just as the International Monetary Fund has finally found that such liberalization promotes neither growth nor stability in developing countries. Unfortunately, many of the smaller and weaker countries will probably agree in the quixotic hope that by linking themselves to America, they will partake of America's prosperity.

In the long run, while particular special interest groups may benefit from such an unfair trade treaty, America's national interests — in having stable and prosperous neighbors — are not well served. Already, the manner in which the United States is bullying the weaker countries of Central and South America into accepting its terms is generating enormous resentment. If these trade agreements do no better for them than Nafta has done for Mexico, then both peace and prosperity in the hemisphere will be at risk.

*About the Author: Joseph E. Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University and author of "The Roaring 90's," was chief economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000. He won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/econ/2004/0106stiglitznafta.htm

A Visit with former Chiapas Bishop Samuel Ruiz

2008-10-29T15:03:00.002-04:00

By Charles Hardy

September 25, 2003

QUERE’TARO, ME’XICO; SEPTEMBER 2003: I heard my friend say over the telephone, “Tatik, Charlie just arrived on the bus. When would be the best time for us to visit you?” A few hours later at 4 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, we rang the doorbell of his home and were greeted personally by Tatik.

Tatik (meaning “father” or “elder”) is an affectionate Tzotzil title for Bishop Samuel Ruiz, the retired bishop of Chiapas, Mexico who now lives in the city of Quere’taro.

Ruiz was appointed bishop of Chiapas in 1959 at the age of 35. Soon after arriving there, he became aware of the problem of the indigenous people and started defending them. In 1993, Rome asked that he resign from his position, but dropped the request when a few thousand indigenous marched in support of him. Having reached the mandatory age for retirement (75) and after serving in Chiapas for more than forty years, he resigned in March 2000.

The purpose of my visit was an interview. I was a bit hesitant because I had read a 1998 article by Sergio Munoz in the Los Angeles Times. Munoz wrote about the bishop: “He cannot be called easy-going: He favors impassioned monologues and hates to be interrupted.” Maybe the five years since that interview have mellowed him or possibly it had something to do with the interviewer, but during the two hours we spent drinking coffee and sharing cookies at his dining room table I was visiting with a man far different from the one described by Munoz.

At 79, Ruiz was not only friendly, but also intellectually sharp and willing to listen as well as to talk.

Since I live in Venezuela, the events of the past several years there have been the focus of my attention. They have also overshadowed for me what has happened outside of Venezuela, including that of the Zapatista movement in Mexico. What little I knew of them, I had gained from international press reports.

Following are two examples of that reporting cited in a recent Narco News report by Annalena Oeffner. On August 8, an Associated Press story claimed that “most Indian people even in the Zapatistas’ jungle heartland have declined to join the movement...” Another report in the Financial Times August 10 said that the absence of Subcomandante Marcos at the August 8-10 meeting in Oventic was seen as “a sign of his declining power within the Zapatista hierarchy.”

Based on this type of reporting, I was looking for the bishop’s response to two principal questions: 1) Was the support of the Zapatistas declining? and, 2) Was the leadership of Subcommandante Marcos being replaced? By the end of the interview I would discover that both of my questions were very poorly worded.

First, the bishop was quick to point out that the Zapatistas did not represent only people in Chiapas but were an expression of what was being felt throughout all of Mexico. He then painted the political scene that gave rise to the Zapatista movement.

Ruiz said that there had been a nationwide rejection of the political maneuvering leading up to the elections that took place in July 1994, keeping the PRI party in power at that time. When the Zapatistas appeared on the scene, the dialog that followed showed clearly that their problems were felt throughout the country.

According to Ruiz, the government tried to disparage the project in four steps. First they questioned why an indigenous group should feel that they represented the whole country. Nobody had elected the Zapatistas to represent them. Secondly, they said that they didn’t even represent the indigenous poor of the country. Thirdly, that they didn’t even represent the indigenous of Chiapas, not even the people in the municipalities where they came from. And finally, the government reached the extreme of denying them even the legitimacy that they had had with the previous government saying that the movement was just the result of some “guy” (Marcos) who infiltrated Chiapas and who wears a mask and smokes a pipe, thereby denying the indigenous any ownership of the movement.

Because of the government’s version, the bishop said, “It must be said clearly that it is a movement centered in Chiapas but that has national origins.” And yet, he added, the mass media continue to spread the idea that the problem of the Zapatistas is only the problem of Chiapas.

He also said that when President Fox assumed the “throne” of Mexico, he indicated that the problem of the Zapatistas was the problem of the previous government. But the Zapatistas replied, according to Bishop Ruiz, “No, no, no, Se~or. You have a problem with us and we have a problem with you because you are sitting in the same seat as previous governments. You can’t say that the foreign debt belongs to the previous government. Equally we have a problem with you and you have a problem with us. The difference is that we want to resolve the problem through dialog and not through force.”

He emphasized that the problem of the indigenous was not just a Mexican problem but was present throughout the continent. The indigenous person is still being colonized. With few exceptions, “from Alaska in the United States to the Patagonia [in Argentina], the indigenous is on the floor under the rest of society. This would indicate that it is not by their own will that this is so but that the system itself places them on the margin of society.” But, because of the attempt to celebrate the 500 years of the conquest of America, the indigenous have risen up and now say that they want to be the subjects of their own destiny. Besides, he added, 500 years is nothing in comparison with their history.

He also noted that what was happening in Cancu’n (the World Trade Organization was meeting the day I visited him) showed that even the rest of the world is recognizing that there are problems with the system. He said that “not only is a new world possible, but it is urgent and necessary.”

My first question, in some ways therefore, had little meaning for him since he refused to focus the question on the Zapatistas. What was happening with them was only a small part of the consciousness that was rising throughout the Americas and throughout the world.

Proceeding to my second question I said that I had read in Venezuela that Subcomandante Marcos was turning over his power to others. Once again, my question was off base. The bishop was quick to reply, “That’s a bad interpretation of the situation. He never was in power. The press has tried to say that he is the movement.”

He then pointed out that Marcos is not indigenous himself and is only a “subcomandante.” He has a definite role in the security of the people, but a technical dimension. He never participated in the dialogs although he was present at the first because he was invited the night before so that he could communicate with the press what happened. He spoke better Spanish than the rest who were present.

Referring to the absence of Marcos at the Oventic meeting in August, the bishop said that what is happening is something of a self-criticism to clarify to the world that Marcos is not the movement.

When I asked him to explain what the Zapatistas meant by the terminology “govern by obeying” (mandar obedeciendo), he replied: “There’s nothing to explain. Any authority should obey his people. He is not to order but to ask, ‘What is it that the community wants?’ He shouldn’t look out for his own interests but ask what are the interests that will serve the community.”

I then shared with him a story. I was told that in Venezuela there is a group of indigenous people where the leader (li’der is the word I used) is “he who listens.” The bishop took exception to the word lider saying that it was a word from North America. Recognizing that similar words exist in Spanish, he nevertheless preferred to talk in terms of “processes” in reference to Latin America. When there are leaders the problem is, he said, “take the leader away and the process comes to an end.”

I also asked him his opinion about “participative democracy” in distinction to “representative democracy.” The term is used often in the 1999 Constitution of Venezuela. This he also placed in a worldwide context, saying that the war in Iraq had clearly shown that there was a “divorce” between the people and their elected representatives in the United States, England, Spain and even in Mexico. They had been chosen by their political parties, received their power through elections but afterwards were seeking their own interests. There were no demonstrations anywhere in the world in favor of these leaders, he noted.

He said that it was now clear that it would not be the political parties that would guide the future of the world, but rather organizations not directly connected to the government.

Concluding the conversation about the Zapatistas, I had some questions for the bishop about the situation of the Catholic Church in the world today.

One was whether or not the Theology of Liberation still existed. He replied: “Is there a theology of slavery?” For Bishop Samuel Ruiz, the only theology worth its name is that which liberates.

Following the interview I wanted to get another perspective on the Zapatista movement. I am no expert on the subject and, although I have visited Mexico several times, I have never been in Chiapas.

A friend shared a book with me entitled, Marcos, La Genial Impostura (“Marcos, the Inspired Fraud”). The book was published in 1998 and written by two authors. One was a male French correspondent for Le Monde who arrived in Mexico in 1993, Bertrand de la Grange, and the other was a female correspondent for the Spanish newspaper El Pais since 1994, Maite Rico. The book presented a picture almost totally contrary to that which Bishop Ruiz had painted.

In its 472 pages I was told the following: 1) There was nothing particularly unusual about the elections in 1994; 2) There was little support for the Zapatistas in Chiapas or elsewhere in Mexico; 3) Marcos was the leader of their every action - the indigenous had a small role to play; 4) Bishop Ruiz was at times so aligned with the Zapatistas that the Mexican secret services thought, for a while, that he was Comandante Aleman; and, 5) The Zapatistas had accomplished little for the people they supposedly represented.

The book is full of interesting interviews and information. It is also a one-sided presentation that seems to represent the government position that Ruiz had described.

A few sentences on page 282, however, especially impressed me. The authors knew what Ruiz was feeling and thinking on October 26, 1993 when he received the request from the Apostolic Delegate, Girolamo Prigione, asking him to resign. “He took the blow, but he felt dizzy. He was convinced, and he was right, that it was a settling of political accounts. He knew that the contents of the letter which he had sent to the Pope three months before, during his visit to Mexico, had irritated the government.” (The letter spoke about the political situation in Mexico and the oppression of the indigenous).

I am always amazed at foreign reporters who are not only able to do interviews and gather information, but who are able to reach so far into the depths of any situation that they even know what people are thinking and feeling.

Reading the book, I felt I was reading about Venezuela and not about Mexico. We, too, have been plagued with foreign correspondents and local reporters who sometimes make a foray into the barrios and emerge with a better knowledge of what is happening in them than those who have lived there for decades.

Whose story about the Zapatistas is correct? That of Tatik? Or, that of the government and these reporters? I am in no position to say and in a few days I will return to Venezuela where I have lived for most of the past eighteen years.

But I do worry about something: is it possible that Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico are now in Venezuela meeting with opposition leaders and preparing another book? I can see the title already, possibly chosen before going there: Cha’vez, Otra Genial Impostura (“Cha’vez, Another Inspired Fraud”).

Charles Hardy, a native of Cheyenne, Wyoming, has resided in Venezuela for most of the past eighteen years. As a Catholic missionary priest, he lived in a pressed-cardboard and tin dwelling in a barrio of Caracas from 1985 to 1993. He is a professor of the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism (first and second sessions of 2003). His editorial columns appear frequently in www.vheadline.com and can be found in English and Spanish at www.cowboyincaracas.com. Comments may be addressed to him at Charlie@cowboyincaracas.com

Mexican flood leaves 34,000 homeless

2008-10-26T15:55:00.000-04:00

October 22, 2008 4:44 pm by PNU

MEXICO CITY, Oct. 21 — The Usumacinta River, snaking through Mexico's southeast state of Tabasco, burst its banks after heavy rains, driving 34,500 people out of their homes by far, authorities reported Tuesday.

The flood, triggered by heavy rains in the nearby state of Chiapas and in Guatemala, has damaged houses and ravaged farmlands in four municipalities and 165 rural communities in the area, the Civil Protection Office of Tabasco said Tuesday.

"The most important thing is to provide refuge for affected families," said Rurico Dominguez, director of the Civil Protection Office.

He added that they have built some 20 shelters in four municipalities, which has received more than 1,000 families.

The Usumacinta River is one of the largest rivers in Mexico. The water rose above its historical level and surpassed two meters of its critical scale within 24 hours.

The state of Tabasco suffered from heavy flood in 2007, during which the Usumacinta River also swelled and left hundreds of people homeless. (PNA/Xinhua)

Women in Chiapas Coffee Co-operative Organize to Protect the Biosphere, Feed their Families, and Diversify their Incomes

2008-10-24T22:27:00.003-04:00

October 22, 2008 by Phyllis Robinson

The story of the CESMACH (Campesinos Ecológicos de la Sierra Madre de Chiapas) coffee co-operative in Mexico is a powerful example of what a group of far-sighted and tenacious farmers, with a commitment to protect the unique cloud forest in which they live, can accomplish when they set their minds to the task. Since 1995, when the co-operative was legally founded, the 270 coffee producers that live and farm within the buffer zone of the El Triunfo Biosphere, have dedicated themselves to organic farming as a way of protecting the Biosphere’s fragile resources and to create a more sustainable life for themselves and their families. Please read their story as they told it to us.

The CESMACH farmers are located in the Sierra Madre mountains in the southwestern part of the Mexican state of Chiapas. They farm within the buffer zone of El Triunfo, a U.N.- designated biosphere, rich in flora and fauna, containing many endangered and protected species. Within the nucleus of the biosphere, agricultural activities are not permitted as the area contains many endangered and protected species. Organic farming is allowed in the buffer zone, which separates the biosphere from the surrounding region, as long as it is done in accordance with a strict set of standards designed to protect the fragile environment of the rain and cloud forest.

Equal Exchange has been working with the CESMACH co-operative since 2005 when we offered to buy 10 containers of their coffee - 60% of their total production. Since that year, our relationship has been steadily growing. In 2008, we brought our first group of visitors, representatives of food co-ops across the United States, to visit the farmers. It was during this visit, that the founders of CESMACH told us the enthralling story of how they transformed themselves from individual farmers to a strong and visionary co-operative business selling high quality, organic coffee. “It’s been a very long road to get here, and when we started it was just a dream,” Victorico Velasquez Morales, a founding member and former CESMACH president told our group.

CESMACH has had tremendous success selling its members’ coffee into the specialty coffee market, thereby keeping the communities unified and raising their members’ standard of living. Still, the farmers live in highly marginalized communities and they face many critical social and economic challenges. Coffee is the only source of income for most farmers in this region and they are economically dependent on their individual plots which average only five acres.

Consequently, the CESMACH farmers have decided not only to become the supplier of the highest quality, organic coffee in the region, but to create and implement a variety of social development and environmental projects which will benefit its members and the fragile Biosphere in which they live. Three years ago, the co-operative leadership began actively working with the women members and the wives of members to implement small individual patio gardens and collective chicken farms in order to both diversify their families’ diets and to generate additional income.

As part of our new campaign in support of small farmers, the food system and our planet, Equal Exchange is proud to be supporting our partners at the CESMACH co-operative to launch an exciting new Food Security, Environmental Protection and Women’s Capacity Building Project. The project includes the establishment of:

167 organic gardens using agro-ecological techniques;
279 mixed fruit-tree gardens (2000 plants of different species);
40 rustic family plant nurseries to encourage the recovery of native crops found in the Biosphere, including tomato trees and pacaya so that they will be conserved for future generations and made available for family use;
30 collective chicken coops; and
10 workshops to train participants in the management and productive aspects of the project.

Throughout the year, the women will also receive trainings and technical assistance in project management and leadership development with a focus on their roles in the co-operative as well as in the management of this project.

If you would like to support the women of CESMACH and the CESMACH co-operative in general, please buy our 12 oz. packages of Organic Love Buzz. Equal Exchange will donate 20 cents/package into our Small Farmers Green Planet Fund to support this project and others like it. (see side panel) You can also make a tax-deductible contribution by clicking here, or by sending a check to Equal Exchange, 50 United Drive, West Bridgewater, MA 02379. Please make the check out to Grassroots International and be sure to write SFGP Fund on the memo line. 100% of the donations will go directly to our farmer partners to support their efforts to protect their local eco-systems and provide food security for their families.

Visit our blog for periodic updates on these projects and other issues that affect small farmers, the food system and the planet.

6.5 earthquake sparks panic in Chiapas

2008-10-18T06:01:00.002-04:00

TUXTLA GUTIERREZ, Mexico (AFP) — A 6.5 magnitude earthquake struck Mexico’s southern Chiapas state Thursday, near the Guatemalan border, sparking panic in the region, local officials and US scientists said.

The quake struck about 21 kilometers (13 miles) from the Mexican city of Suchiate at 2:41 pm (1941 GMT), according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Mexican officials, who estimated the strength of the temblor at 6.2 using the Richter scale, said there were no immediate reports of damage.

The US Geological Service (USGS) measured the quake at 6.5, using the more reliable Moment Magnitude scale.

The quake was felt across Chiapas, particularly in coastal areas, residents reported.
There was no destructive widespread tsunami threat, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said in a bulletin.

But it warned that “earthquakes of this size sometimes generate local tsunamis that can be destructive” along nearby coasts.

The quake struck at a depth of 75.2 kilometers (46.7 miles), just off the Pacific coast, the USGS said.

Mexico’s southwestern coast is prone to earthquakes, with several smaller shocks registered in recent days.

Chiapas: Police attack Indigenous farmers, killing six

2008-10-11T10:09:00.001-04:00

October 8, 2008

Five days ago, on October 3, 2008, federal and state police in
Chiapas, Mexico, carried out a violent operation that left six people
dead, 17 injured, and 36 more detained, almost all of whom were
inhabitants of the ejido (communally held land) of Miguel Hidalgo,
located in the municipality of La Trinitaria, Chiapas.

Leading up to the attack, on September 7th, members of the ejido
attempted to reclaim a Mayan archeological site located near the city
of Comitán, with the plan of taking over its administration. In
response, the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia y Historía (INAH,
National Institue of Anthropology and History), which had previously
been administrating the site, filed a lawsuit against those involved in
the reclamation. A series of negotiations followed, with the last one
taking place on October 2.

The International Service for Peace (SIPAZ) explains what happened the following day:

On October 3rd, approximately at 11:00 AM, the first police operation
began with the arrival of 40 members of the State Preventive Police
(PEP) and the Judicial Police (Policia Ministerial), who entered the
community in vehicles, horses, and on foot and began throwing tear gas
and breaking into a number of houses. The members of the community
blocked their entrance with rocks, shovels, and machetes, provoking the
first confrontation. [community members also rushed a number of the
officers, disarming them and locking them up.]

Around 5:30 PM, 300 agents of the Federal Preventative Police (PFP),
the Judicial Police, the Federal Investigation Agency (AFI), and the
State Preventive Police began to enter the community again, provoking
another confrontation. According to testimonies, police agents used
firearms which injured a number of people.

According to information made public by Fray Bartolome de Las Casas
Human Rights Center, Agustin Alfaro Alfaro, who lives in a nearby town,
together with his wife and one of his sons in his arms, came with his
truck to help move the injured persons to a nearby hospital. On the
road, they were intercepted by a truck of the State Preventative Police
which began to shoot at them. After getting out of their truck, the
police shot Mr. Alfaro in the chest and executed three more people on
the spot (Rigoberto López, Alfredo Hernández, and Miguel Antonio
Martínez). The wife of Mr. Alfaro, Eloisa Margarita Espinoza Morales,
and her son escaped unharmed, they witnessed these events.

Two other people (Ingacio Hernández López and Ricardo Ramírez
Ramírez), wounded by gunshots, died on the way to the Hospital of
Amparo Agua Tinta, which is in the municipality of Las Margaritas.

The 36 detained campesinos, who were transferred to San Cristóbal de
las Casas and to La Trinitaria, were liberated on October 5th in
exchange for the guns that people of the community had taken from the
police on the morning of October 3rd.

According to Fray Bartolome de Las Casas Human Rights Center, of the
17 campesinos who were wounded, 6 of which received gunshot wounds, 2
are still in critical condition. The authorities have stated that 22
were wounded: 16 police and 6 farmers.

How far will Justice go?

A slight change from the constant injustice we so often find in
Mexico, Chiapas state Governor Juan Sabines has since “promised to
punish the police who were responsible for the violence, indemnify the
victims’ families, provide scholarships to their children and pensions
to their widows, and launch productive projects in the community,” reports IPS News.

According to SIPAZ, state and federal authorities have already paid
35.000 pesos (approximately 2800 USD) to cover funeral expenses and
75.000 pesos (approximately 6000 USD) to support the families of the
victims.

Sabine also traveled to Miguel Hidalgo to apologise and offer his
condolences to the families. “The government here is not fighting with
the people; these incidents did not only happen to you, they happened
to everyone in Chiapas,” said the governor.

Even though the government has taken an “apparently different stance
this time,” Jorge Luis Hernández from the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas
Human Rights Centre (FRAYBA) says “the pattern of criminalising social protests remains in place.”

In fact, on the same day of the October 3 attack, there was another
police operation in Chiapas. SIPAZ points out that the police also
mobilized against “the communities of Antelá, Nueva Rosita y Nuevo
Hidalgo, where last September groups of indigenous people had blocked
the Lagunas de Montebello National Park. Up until then, the park had
been administered by the National Commission of Protected Areas
(CONANP).”

The Human Rights Centre has documented several more incidents of
“repression” against the people of Chiapas this year, which they blame
on “state agents,” not merely the police.

Demanding that the governor fulfill his promises, the Centre says
that at both the federal and state government must conduct an impartial
and efficient investigation into the Miguel Hidalgo attack, and then
punish everyone that was involved — even if it leads to Sabines’s
associates in the government.

They further demand the government bring an end to its policy of
criminalization, by “ensur[ing] the non repetition of the abuses and
excessive use of force by law enforcement officials.”

More Photos and information can be found at FRAYBA (Spanish)

Six Deaths by Eviction in Chiapas Ejido

2008-10-07T07:16:00.000-04:00

4 October 2008

They were attacked by state and federal police, according to an ejido representative. Ten wounded and thirty detained reported.

by Elio Henriquez, correspondent for La Jornada
translation by Kristin Bricker

Miguel Hidalgo Ejido, Chiapas. State and federal police shot and murdered six peasants from this ejido [communally owned land] in La Trinitaria county, which for almost a month has controlled the Chinkultic archaeological ruins, located three kilometers from the ejido.

Jose Velazquez, one of the ejido representatives, stated to the press that the incidents that occurred in the ejido late Friday night resulted in over ten wounded and more than thirty people detained who are recovering in a hospital in the city of Comitan.

Blood trails, scatted spent high-caliber casings, and bullet holes could be seen in the streets and in some houses.

“It seemed like the police were on drugs because they indiscriminately beat children, women, and elderly people, and that’s not right,” said Velazquez.

When the first four cadavers arrived Saturday morning, the families of the dead demanded justice “or we’ll take it into our own hands.”

The names of the dead peasants are reported to be Ricardo Ramírez Hernández, Ignacio Hernández López, Rigoberto López Vázquez, Alfredo Hernández Ramírez, Miguel Antonio Martínez, and Agustín Alfaro Calvo.

Velazquez said that when faced with the “aggression,” the residents detained and disarmed 77 police who had entered the community presumably to detain the local authorities. Six thousand people live in the community.

The community still has the police weapons in its possession.

“They came to attack us without cause, because they were already in discussions to try to resolve the ruins problem” which are located nine kilometers from the Lakes of Montebello, he said.

He noted that the residents of Miguel Hidalgo took over the ruins because the government “has left them abandoned and because it’s only right that the resources that come from the operation of the ruins stay with us.”

On Saturday there were at least eight police vehicles which were damaged by the peasants who, enraged by the death of their compañeros, went after the agents who fired their weapons, and the agents were later rescued by other officers Friday night.

Green coffee-growing practices buffer climate-change impacts

2008-10-06T09:51:00.001-04:00

Coffee berries on a branch of the coffee bush, Chiapas, Mexico
Photo: Shinsuke Uno
Click images for higher resolution

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Chalk up another environmental benefit for shade-grown Latin American coffee: University of Michigan researchers say the technique will provide a buffer against the ravages of climate change in the coming decades.

Over the last three decades, many Latin American coffee farmers have abandoned traditional shade-growing techniques, in which the plants are grown beneath a diverse canopy of trees. In an effort to increase production, much of the acreage has been converted to "sun coffee," which involves thinning or removing the canopy.

Shade-grown farms boost biodiversity by providing a haven for birds and other animals. They also require far less synthetic fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides than sun-coffee plantations.

A shade-coffee farm in Mexico
Photo: Ivette Perfecto

In the October edition of the journal BioScience, three U-M researchers say shade-growing also shields coffee plants during extreme weather events, such as droughts and severe storms. Climate models predict that extreme weather events will become increasingly common in the coming decades, as the levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas continue to mount.

The U-M scientists warn Latin American farmers of the risks tied to "coffee-intensification programs"—a package of technologies that includes the thinning of canopies and the use of high-yield coffee strains that grow best in direct sunlight—and urge them to consider the greener alternative: shade-grown coffee.

"This is a warning against the continuation of this trend toward more intensive systems," said Ivette Perfecto of the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment, one of the authors. "Shaded coffee is ideal because it will buffer the system from climate change while protecting biodiversity."

High shade farm, looks like a forest from above because of the intact canopy, Chiapas, Mexico
Photo: Brenda Lin

Perfecto has studied biodiversity in Latin American coffee plantations for 20 years. The lead author of the BioScience paper is Brenda Lin, whose 2006 U-M doctoral dissertation examined microclimate variability under different shade conditions at Mexican coffee plantations.

Lin is currently a Science and Technology Policy Fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. The other author of the BioScience paper is John Vandermeer of the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Low shade coffee system, where the rows of coffee are visible under the shade of mainly Inga sp. trees. - Chiapas, Mexico
Photo: Brenda Lin

The livelihoods of more than 100 million people worldwide are tied to coffee production. In Latin America, most coffee farms lack irrigation—relying solely on rainwater—which makes them especially vulnerable to drought and heat waves.

Shade trees help dampen the effects of drought and heat waves by maintaining a cool, moist microclimate beneath the canopy. The optimal temperature range for growing common Arabica coffee is 64 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

Shade trees also act as windbreaks during storms and help reduce runoff and erosion.

Lin's work in southern Mexico showed that shady farms have greater water availability than sunny farms, due in part to lower evaporation rates from the coffee plants and soils. More shade also reduced peak temperatures between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., when southern Mexican coffee plants experience the greatest heat stress.

"These two trends—increasing agricultural intensification and the trend toward more frequent extreme-weather events—will work in concert to increase farmer vulnerability," Lin said. "We should take advantage of the services the ecosystems naturally provide, and use them to protect farmers' livelihoods."

The study was funded by the National Security Education Program's David L. Boren Fellowship, the Lindbergh Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

6 villagers killed in clash at ruins in Chiapas, Mexico

2008-10-05T08:52:00.003-04:00

October 5, 2008

By MANUEL DE LA CRUZ – 11 hours ago

SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico (AP) — Police clashed with hundreds of villagers who seized the entrance to a Mayan archaeological site and six protesters were killed, state officials said Saturday.

Hundreds of villagers had occupied the entrance to the Chinkultic ruins for nearly a month, saying they were protesting excessive entrance fees and a lack of investment in the area.

The protesters fought police with sticks, rocks and machetes, according to the state Justice Department. Protesters managed to wrest guns away from some officers and poured gasoline on others, threatening to set them on fire, the department said.

Six protesters were killed in Friday's raid, and two dozen other people were injured, including 16 police, the department said.

Irma Trinidad, an indigenous leader who participated in the clash, said six of her comrades were shot to death by police. She said 10 other protesters had bullet wounds and 28 were arrested.

Chiapas state Justice Secretary Amador Rodriguez Lozano ordered 300 state police who participated in the raid to be detained for questioning. No charges have been filed.

Chinkultic is a Mayan archaeological site about 1,200 years old, located near the Montebello lakes near the Guatemalan border.

The villagers, most of them from the Mayan Tzeltal and Tzotzil cultures, drove administrative workers off the site on Sept. 7 with sticks, but allowed the archeologists to keep working.

The protesters charged visitors 20 pesos (US$1.80) for entrance rather than the official 35 pesos (US$3) and said they would use the money to fix roads and make other infrastructure improvements.

Tourists continued to visit the site during the takeover. At a booth outside the entrance, officials from the National Institute of Anthropology and History warned tourists about the protests but said the site was still open to visitors.

Less money going to Mexico as U.S. economy falters

2008-10-02T08:12:00.002-04:00

From the Los Angeles Times

Remittances sent home by Mexicans working in the U.S. take a dive, and families south of the border are feeling the effects.

By Tracy Wilkinson
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 2, 2008

MEXICO CITY — The money that Mexicans living in the U.S. send home, a lifeline for both the economy here and millions of families, has suffered its steepest decline on record, dragged down in large part by the American financial crisis.

The bad news, announced Wednesday by the Bank of Mexico, follows government assurances that the U.S. crisis would not have a severe effect on Mexico.

Remittances fell to $1.9 billion for August, a 12.2% drop from the same month last year, the bank said.

"In the coming months, it can be anticipated that . . . family remittances will continue to show a loss in strength," the central bank said.

Remittances are Mexico's second-largest source of foreign income, after oil exports, and have more than doubled in value in recent years, to nearly $24 billion in 2007. The money is used to pave roads, start businesses and help feed families.

But the trend began to reverse this year. The U.S. economic downturn, especially in the construction sector that employs many Mexican immigrants, and tightened controls along the U.S.-Mexican border have slowed the flow of money and people.

August's decline in remittances was the largest since authorities began keeping records 12 years ago, the bank said.

Countless Mexican towns are feeling the pinch, with small businesses failing and families struggling to make ends meet.

The bank also calculated that unemployment is running considerably higher among Mexican immigrants working in the U.S. than among the general labor force. Unemployment among Mexican immigrants was about 4.5% in March of last year and has soared to nearly 7.5% now. The U.S. jobless rate for the general workforce is 6.1%.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon said in a speech last month that his country is so free of dependence on the U.S. that financial disaster there will be but a glancing blow here.

Finance Minister Agustin Carstens later sounded less sanguine. He said in Washington this week that though Mexico is generally protected from U.S. fallout, its economy will be hurt by declines in remittances, exports of manufactured goods and tourism.

Economic analyst Rogelio Ramirez de la O warned that the government minimizes the effect of the U.S. crisis at its own peril. Although it is true that Mexican banks are not teetering on the brink of collapse, more Mexicans are sinking deeper into debt, he said. And, he added, the government is spending as though there were no tomorrow.

"The government must first understand the reality and then communicate it clearly to Congress, to business leaders and to the public," Ramirez wrote in Wednesday's El Universal newspaper. "If the government does nothing, as it has so far, it will take this country down a dead-end road."

Earthquake Notice about Chiapas, Mexico

2008-09-29T16:43:00.005-04:00

Event: Earthquake

Sender Name: U.S. Geological Survey

Headline: EQ 4.0 Las Margaritas, Chiapas,
Mexico -PRELIMINARY REPORT

Description: An earthquake with magnitude
4.0 occurred near Las Margaritas, Chiapas,
Mexico at 16:56:32.71 UTC on Sep 27,
2008. (This event has been reviewed
by a seismologist.)

Web: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2008xlbs.php

Contact: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsUS/contacts.htm#us

EventTime=2008-09-27T16:56:32+00:00

Magnitude=4.0

Depth=291.7 km (181.3 miles)

Description: 48 miles (77 km) E of Las Margaritas, Chiapas, Mexico;
57 miles (92 km) E of Comitan, Chiapas, Mexico; 62 miles (100 km)
NNE of Huehuetenango, Huehuetenango, Guatemala; 95 miles (154 km)
N of Quezaltenango, Guatemala; 119 miles (192 km) NNW of
GUATEMALA CITY, GuatemalaCircle:16.197,-91.274 0.0

Growing Pains: Keeping fair trade fair

2008-09-13T21:11:00.002-04:00

Sojourners Magazine reprint

Ask the nearly 600 members of the CIRSA coffee cooperative in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico, how things are going and they’ll tell you, “Little by little, we’re moving forward.” Considering that a couple of decades ago the parents of these indigenous farmers worked in slavery-like conditions on large coffee plantations in the region, and that their region has been ignored and marginalized throughout its history, their progress is tremendous.

The Indigenous Communities of the Simojovel de Allende Region (CIRSA in Spanish) shipped 235 tons of fair trade coffee last year to the United States and Europe. Through the fair trade certification system, the small farmers of CIRSA and similar cooperatives throughout Latin America are guaranteed a minimum price for their coffee. This provides stability to small farmers, who live in some of the world’s poorest regions—and who are especially vulnerable to the volatile market that dictates world coffee prices. This is why, on our weekly trip to the grocery store, many of us fork over some extra change for fair trade coffee.

Twenty years after its birth, the fair trade movement is suffering some growing pains. No longer a fringe movement, fair trade boasted $2.2 billion dollars in global sales during 2006, and debates rage from within about whether rapid expansion may be compromising the movement’s core principles.

One key debate focuses on the difference between small farmer cooperatives and large plantations. Right now, plantations can’t participate in the fair trade coffee market, but recent proposals would change that. In products such as tea and bananas, most fair trade items already come from large plantations, which win certification by ensuring higher wages, increased worker protections and greater social investments than they would otherwise provide. So what’s the problem with plantations?

It’s important to see how fair trade certification fits into the bigger picture of farmers’ struggle for a decent livelihood. Take the example of CIRSA: The coffee farmers of Simojovel de Allende struggled for years to win the land reform that enabled them to become independent smallholders. The plantations where their families had worked were a legacy of the colonial era, when a small elite controlled most political and economic structures, allowing them to sustain miserable working conditions with miniscule chances for upward mobility.

Owning their own land gave the CIRSA farmers the footing to organize as a cooperative in 1992; the higher wage they earn from fair trade certified coffee, in turn, helps them to win the constant struggle to stay organized.

CIRSA’s treasurer, Juan López, states it eloquently: “Alone, you can’t do anything. We’ve joined together to make a better life.” Phyllis Robinson, education and campaigns manager at fair trade vendor Equal Ex-change, agrees that getting organized is critical. “Small farmers in today’s agricultural markets are up against all odds. The higher, more stable price of fair trade helps keep farmers organized in co-ops, where they have an easier time accessing credit or technical capacity building.”

If the Fair Trade Labeling Organization (FLO) were to start certifying coffee plantations—an idea that has been defeated for now, but is sure to rise again—chains like Wal-Mart or Starbucks would likely make their fair trade purchases from the largest producers, to simplify their logistics. Small farmers worry this shift would take them down a slippery slope back to the dominance of the plantation model.

Another concern is whether fair trade is still providing a living wage. In 2007, FLO approved the first increase of its minimum coffee price in 18 years. The increase of five cents per pound of coffee brought the total price to $1.31 (the price for organic fair trade coffee went from $1.41 to $1.51 a pound). While higher market prices in recent years have forced fair trade buyers to pay above the minimum to guarantee their supplies, farmers pointed to increases in labor and transportation costs that still weren’t covered.

Despite the challenges, CIRSA is committed and hopeful about its future in fair trade. Last year the co-op met all its sales goals and had a surplus to sell to the Mexican market. They’ve purchased their own semitrailer for transport. Every year they pick up a dozen or so new members.

In 2004, CIRSA began receiving visits from groups of U.S. consumers. They welcomed the chance to deepen the commitment and awareness between coffee drinkers and producers, recognizing the importance of an international network of consumers who are paying attention. As Robinson points out, fair trade works best not as an end in itself, but as “a window to get you hooked in. It’s not the last thing you do.”

Patty Kupfer worked in Mexico from 2003 to 2005 as an international team member for Witness for Peace. She organized for immigration reform when this article appeared.

Growing Pains. by Patty Kupfer. Sojourners Magazine, September/October 2008 (Vol. 37, No. 9, pp. 8). Commentary.

Cross-Border Group Travels to Chiapas

2008-08-29T12:21:00.002-04:00

August 25, 2008

Zapatistas respond to questions about immigration

Richard Schaefer, associate professor, Communication & Journalism, led his UNM Cross-Border Issues Group from their base in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico, to the state of Chiapas to further their research on immigration. Schaefer’s group last year focused on Mexican immigration to the United States. This year, the perspective was expanded to include immigration from Guatemala to Mexico as well as intra-Mexico migration. The trip included crossing the Mexican-Guatemalan border seeing the difference between that international border and the muro, or wall, being erected between the U.S. and Mexico.

The group spent four days in San Cristóbal de las Casas, population 200,000, considered the cultural capital of the state of Chiapas. Located in the Sierra Madre de Chiapas Mountains, the city lives among the clouds, but the people have their feet firmly on the ground.

The X-Border Issues Group needed to understand the dynamics and reality of both city and state to understand why people leave either for other Mexican cities or for the United States.

They found San Cristóbal to be a dichotomy. The city features Spanish architecture with colorful buildings adorned with balconies erupting in vibrant pink, red and purple flowers. Plants and shrubbery line hilly, stone streets with narrow sidewalks. Although the citizens are predominately Mexican mestizo, the city also has many residents or vendors who come from the surrounding countryside. They are the descendents of the ancient Mayans who now live in Chamula, Huixtán and San Juan Larráinzar, among other places.

Their dress reflects both color and climate. The women are clothed in heavy woolen skirts topped with colorful woven and embroidered blouses. They speak to each other not in Spanish, but in Tzotzil and Tzeltal, the sounds of which waft in the air where the smells of fresh fruits and vegetables hang heavy and sweet.

San Cristóbal appears a place of wealth, but the economy in all of Chiapas is primarily agricultural with coffee, corn, vegetables and fruit with some cattle ranching and small business. Tourism, including eco- and edu-tourism, is part of the economy of the city as well as the state.

The bountiful vegetation is deceiving, as well. Chiapas possesses a variety of natural resources, but extensive exploitation has devastated areas of the bosques and forests resulting in a loss of many species of both flora and fauna.

Human Rights
The X-Border Group met with Santiago López Gomez, general coordinator for the Human Rights Committee in Ocosingo. His group works with migrants, both those from Chiapas as well as those migrating north from Guatemala, at Chiapas’ southern border. He talked about the need to provide safe passage for “nuestros hermanos,” our brothers and sisters, immigrating to escape poverty. He said they are abused at the hands of Mexican authorities. López Gomez said that many people leave when there isn’t enough land to support the family. “There is enough land, but much of it is in dispute either at the federal level or between indigenous groups,” he said.

He also spoke about what happens to a community when someone leaves. “When a countryman migrates, it changes and causes suffering for the community. It is like a body without an arm. Those who do migrate and return come back with other ideas.” He added that it is “ignorance” to believe that one culture is better than another.

Zapatistas
He also supports the work of the Zapatistas.

OventikThe Zapatistas, or Zapatista Army for National Liberation, is a Chiapas-based politico-military organization comprised predominately of indigenous people. They came into public light on January 1, 1994 when they took over various municipalities the same day NAFTA took effect. Their fight is for indigenous Mexicans whose individual and collective rights have been neglected historically. They strive for a new democratic model based on the fundamental principles of liberty and justice and have created a network of revolt and resistance against Neo-Liberalism.

The X-Border Group wanted to interview the Zapatistas. Schaefer knew Esteban López Gómez, who speaks Tzotzil and Spanish, and he helped the group gain access into Oventik, a Zapatista-controlled zone, and get an interview with the “Zetas,” or “Z’s” – the Zapatistas.

After showing passports and explaining the reason for their visit, the X-Border group was asked to provide a written list of their questions. Then they waited three hours to interview a group of six rebels, who declined to be video or audio taped. All wore the distinctive Zapatista black mask.

The Z’s took their name, one told us, in honor of Emiliano Zapata, who organized a 1906 uprising of campesinos in defense of their rights to the land in the state Morelos. His cry for “land and liberty” resonates with the Zapatistas. “Zapata’s fight was for the poor. He started a fight that we are continuing. His work lives through the Zapatistas,” one told the group.

“We have a dream of a land free of borders. We fight for the land which is necessary for the growth of the pueblo. This is our dream. One day we will be free,” one said. The Mexico “ejido” land system, which provides communal lands, but disallows individuals to sell land or use it to acquire loans.

Immigration, he said, isn’t healthy for the individual or the community. “Leaving disorients a person. When they come back, they have a different mentality.” However, another Zapatista said, in response to a question about the economic impact on the community when someone leaves, “There’s no effect when they leave, but when they come back it’s good because they have money.”

The Zapatistas are organized in five caracoles, or groups, and exist within six communities.

They created their own medical and educational systems. The Mexican education system didn’t help students hold onto their idiom or culture. Their teachers or “promotores,” “advocates,” teach for free. They also have teachers from around the world who come on their own time and dime to teach in Spanish.

Zapatista leadership includes women. The current leader in San Juan de la Libertad is female. “The Mexican government does not treat women equal to men. We have succeeded, we have our place here. Because of women’s involvement in the movement, more men take responsibility to help care for children and the animals,” a Zapatista woman said.

Because of the X-Border group’s strong interest in the Zapatistas, López Gómez wanted to expose them to the varied indigenous cultural contexts, who the people are, and how they live. “It is the only way to understand why the Zapatistas came into being,” he said.

Religious Confluence
The X-Border group then stopped to visit San Juan de Chamula a church where López Gómez explained, “There is no mass, there is no priest, although a priest does come and baptize the children on Día de San Juan.” Inside the church, the floor is covered with fresh pine needles “because the Maya tradition tells the people to be in contact directly with nature,” he said. Candles are everywhere: on tables, around the statues of the saints, and on the floor. People kneel or sit on the floor. They pray and chant. They drink “posh,” a fermented sugar cane drink. Families sit together as comfortably as if at home.

“This is a place created for Catholicism and where Catholicism still exists, but traditional Mayan religion is very obviously practiced here,” López Gómez explained when the group witnessed the sacrifice of a chicken in the church.

NAFTA’s Impact
Among advocates for the Zetas in San Cristóbal is Miguel Pickard White, director of CIEPAC, an organization that gathers political and economic information. Pickard White said that the day January 1, 1994 was both the day NAFTA went into effect and the day of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. He said, “NAFTA is one of the main reasons for the huge increase in out-migration from Mexico.”

MiguelHe said that NAFTA was the “death knell” of the indigenous people in Mexico. He said that emigration from Mexico to the U.S. has increased 300 percent in the past 15 years. “All sectors have shown increased out-migration. Whether this be the young people, women, children, the elderly, everybody’s on the move. All of those sectors of the population have picked up and moved in increasing numbers,” he said.

The young – those between 15 and 35, is the sector with the most out-migration and their exodus has the largest effect on the community.

“What this has meant for the indigenous communities is that, as the young people leave, most of them do not come back. Upwards of 80 percent do not come back, this tears apart the fabric of the indigenous community. Those that do come back, come back transformed. . . most of the time they do not want to participate in the traditional rituals of the indigenous community. They don’t want to take up the traditional posts.

“Many times they are now ill-at-ease speaking their indigenous language, participating in the religious rituals, etc. And what happens is that as the young do not reproduce the indigenous culture, that that culture is obviously subjected to the possibility that it may disappear. . . . Or that it may become part of the ‘mestizo mainstream’ here in Mexico,” Pickard White said.

The Journey Continues
Schaefer plans a third trip to study immigration. In addition to three weeks in Cuernavaca he anticipates a week’s stay in Oaxaca, which, like Chiapas has a high indigenous population.

Special Thanks
Schaefer said that the Cross-Border Issues Group program was successful because of support from the Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs, College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Communication & Journalism, University Communication & Marketing and Universidad Fray Luca Paccioli.

Media Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920; e-mail: cgonzal@unm.edu

Posted by scarr at August 25, 2008 12:13 PM

Immigrant relives deportation nightmare

2008-08-18T09:40:00.004-04:00

He wasn’t supposed to be there that day.

The coin laundry at 43rd Street and Broadway in West Palm Beach was where his wife worked, but she was tired that July morning. So as a good husband and father should, Aimer David Guillén offered to help.

He would work in her place, he decided, allowing her to stay and spoil their three children with motherly love.

Guillén never came home.

He was plucked from his life at the laundry July 16 and dropped into a country he had fled nine years earlier. Like many others who dare to leave Mexico, Guillén was searching for a better life.

And he found it in America.

“The only thing I have done in this country is work and work,” says Guillén, who lived in West Palm Beach and worked in construction and landscaping jobs. “The only problem is having a Latino-looking face.”

He was arrested, deported and treated like a criminal, he says, though he does not have a record. He is now in Chiapas, Mexico, with his parents, recovering from the nightmare he lived after his arrest.

That July morning, Guillén recalls, Border Patrol agents entered, demanding to see papers to prove he was in the United States legally.

Guillén had none to give.

He and a Guatemalan man who was washing clothes at the time were shoved into a van, onlookers say, while other customers fled to a nearby church, hoping a place of worship would keep them safe.

The men were taken to a detention center in Pompano Beach.

A Border Patrol spokesman could not confirm that agents were at the laundry that day.

At the detention center, Guillén was forced to wear an orange prison jumpsuit. He says he ate only when a guard let him buy chips and soda with the money he had with him when he was detained.

“Some guards are nice people, but others are racist. If they get upset, they scream at you,” he says.

Thirteen days later, Guillén left Pompano Beach in handcuffs and shackles and headed to Krome Detention Center in Miami-Dade County. He slept in a small cell with 60 other Mexicans and was given a piece of bread, a pear and apple juice daily. He did not drink the juice, he said, because there was no bathroom nearby.

In early August, he boarded a plane in handcuffs once again, this time on his way to Texas. There he was placed on a bus and dropped in Mexico City, where he was robbed by a taxi driver while trying to get to Chiapas.

“I do not wish anybody to live what I lived through. Look how they treated me,” Guillén says. “It is not fair that they treat an immigrant like a criminal. They bring you to your homeland like a criminal.”

Nicole Navas, spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would not comment on the conditions of the detention centers but said detainees receive a list of whom to call with complaints.

Guillén did not file one, but local immigration attorney Aileen Josephs did. She alleges that Border Patrol agents used racial profiling to detain Guillén and describes the alleged raid in the complaint with the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

While Josephs fights for immigrants’ rights, Guillén is in Mexico, trying to plan his new life.

Maybe he could farm, he says, or start his own business.

He patiently awaits his wife’s arrival in December and is happy that his children are now with him.

All of the children, ages, 8, 6 and 4, are American citizens.

Their father worries about them daily and asks himself often whether he has shattered their American dream.

“You can’t sacrifice them for me being undocumented,” Guillén says.

He promises that if they ever want to return to the only place they know as home, Guillén will gladly let them.

But their father says he will not follow.

Find this article at:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2008/08/15/m1a_guillen_0816.html

Massacre in Acteal, Chiapas

2008-08-02T14:16:00.005-04:00

(Click in the space below to see video)

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

2008-06-21T11:06:00.006-04:00

Join our new delegation:

Globalization, Justice
and Coffee

The Impact of Fair Trade and Free Trade on
Small Coffee Farmers in Chiapas, Mexico
January 24 to February 3, 2009

A delegation for people of faith, sponsored by the Jubilee Justice Task Force of the United Church of Christ, Brethren Witness/Washington Office of the Church of the Brethren and the Interfaith Program of Equal Exchange

Purposes:

Learn about the economic, political, and social context of the lives of small coffee farmers in Chiapas, including:

Globalization, the coffee trade, Mexico’s debt crises, the North American Free Trade agreement and global price crises;
the history of Mexico;
the rural social structure of Chiapas and the history of exploitation and abuses against indigenous people;
Campesino resistance, including the rural land reform movements starting in the 1970s and the 1994 Zapatista uprising and its aftermath
the role of faith, church leaders and Liberation Theology; and
the role of campesino co-operatives and Fair Trade.

Visit an indigenous coffee co-operative and one of it’s member villages:

Hear about the history and organization of the co-operative;
Stay in the home of a coffee farming family;
Visit their coffee trees, and learn about the hard work of organic cultivation, harvesting and processing coffee;
Hear the testimony of small farmers, about their lives now and before land reform;
Visit an indigenous women’s artisan cooperative.

Reflect with other members of our delegation, on social and economic justice in our faith traditions and how to express these themes to members of our communities.

Commit to bringing your experience back to your communities.

Pre-delegation book group: In the months before the delegation, delegates are encouraged to participate in an online book discussion moderated by the Rev. Stan Duncan. Readings will cover the coffee trade, the Mexican economic crises of the last 30 years and the history of Chiapas. Reading materials will be provided.

Cost:
Probably around $900, plus airfare to Chiapas. Covers room, board, transportation, and Witness for Peace staff leaders.

Deadline:
We plan to recruit delegates as early as possible and precede the trip with selected readings and online discussion.

For more information contact:
Peter Buck
Interfaith Program, Equal Exchange
pbuck@equalexchange.coop
774-776-7414

Stan Duncan,
Jubilee Justice Task Force, UCC
StanDuncan@JubileeJustice.com
781-504-6875

Phil Jones
Church of the Brethren Witness/Washington Office
pjones_gb@brethren.org
202-546-3202