[694] in peace2
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Felix AuYeung)
Tue Apr 24 09:27:36 2001
From: "Felix AuYeung" <humanpotential@care2.com>
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Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 21:28:55 +0800
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same John Ross who wanted to or did visit MIT:
Foreshadowing FTAA
Lessons from Mexico
By John Ross
MEXICO CITY (April 20) – Bhopal came to Cordoba Veracruz nearly 10
years ago next month – but outside of the damaged and dying citizens
of this industrial city 150 kilometers east of Mexico City, the world
has taken little notice.
On May 21, 1991, an explosion and fire at a pesticide plant in the
thickly-populated neighborhoods around the Cordoba railroad station
sent the populous running for cover. The conflagration fused a
witch's brew of agro-chemicals (most for export fruit cropping)
warehoused at the Anaversa Formulary, and covered the city with a
black dioxin-laced pall of smoke. Firefighters who raced to the scene
had no inventory of the poisons contained on site and washed deadly
chemicals down the drain, contaminating Cordoba's water supply. In a
matter of months residents began to develop malignant cancers.
Ten years later the Association of Damnificados (victims) of the
Anaversa fire has recorded over 200 deaths associated with the
disaster. Yet, as Rosalinda Huerta, spokesperson for the victims,
bitterly observes "the explosion and what happened to us afterward is
a blank page. No one knows about it because the government pretended
that Anaversa never happened..."
The reason for the cover-up of Mexico's homegrown Bhopal: the North
American Free Trade Agreement. In May 1991 the governments of Carlos
Salinas and George Bush had just sat down to negotiate a free trade
treaty, and North American environmentalists were already complaining
about Mexico's poor environmental record. News of the Anaversa
tragedy would not have been helpful to the now-reviled Salinas who
put the clamps on the story.
As the presidents of 34 Latin American nations (Cuba is excluded)
pack their bags for the third Summit of the Americas set for Quebec
City April 20-22, a high profile trade meet that will set the
structure for expanding the dubious benefits of NAFTA from the North
Pole to Tierra del Fuego under the rubric of the Free Trade Agreement
of the Americas (FTAA, or ALCA in Spanish), those "globalphobes"
concerned that the corporate integration of the hemisphere will have
catastrophic impacts on the environment, might consider how the
globalization of resource exploitation is driving human rights,
agrarian, and ecological struggles together in Mexico.
In addition to the dioxins, the Anaversa fire fused just such a
coalescence. As a function of the NAFTA-induced cover-up, victims
were refused treatment at local government hospitals if they claimed
their medical problems were the result of the fire (those who did not
were treated). An angry Huerta led a group of damnificados up to
Mexico City and camped out on the doorstep of the National Human
Rights Commission (CNDH) insisting their human rights had been
violated by the government's refusal to treat them. The CNDH
eventually issued a scathing rebuke of the health and the agriculture
secretariats for their treatment of the Anaversa survivors. The
agriculture agency was then under the direction of agro-biz tycoon
Carlos Hank Gonzalez, a powerful political boss who Huerta claims had
a financial interest in Anaversa.
When, as usual, the CNDH's recommendations were ignored by
authorities, the Anaversa damnificados appealed to the Organization
of American States' Inter-American Human Rights Commission, the first
time that the commission had ever considered the violation of human
rights as being the consequence of environmental disaster.
Examples of such globalization-driven comings-together abound here.
Oil is the most global fluid and Mexico is the sixth largest producer
on the planet. Although under heavy transnational pressure to
privatize the industry, Mexico's petroleum resources still belong to
the nation under the management of PEMEX, the government oil
monopoly, an enterprise which generates 40 percent of government
income.
When the Mexican peso collapsed in 1995, then president Ernesto
Zedillo was forced to deposit the nation's considerable oil export
revenues in the U.S. Federal Reserve as collateral on a multibillion
dollar bailout engineered by Bill Clinton. To pay off the debt as
quickly as possible, PEMEX pumped away full-blast, particularly in
the southern state of Tabasco where the most important land-based
deposits are located, venting and burning off vast amounts of natural
gas that triggered acid rainfall, and putting unwarranted pressure on
its rusting infrastructure. Pipeline blowouts, fires, and toxic leaks
ruined cornfields and fruit tree groves through which the pipelines
snaked.
When a gigantic fireball killed eight farmers and charred farmland
for miles around on the ejido (rural village organized as a
production unit) of Platano y Cacao, the local priest went straight
to the CNDH, which ruled that his parishioners' rights had been
violated by PEMEX's failure to adequately maintain its pipelines and
indemnifications were ordered to be paid. Once again, issues of human
rights violations, agrarian struggle, and environmental disaster
converged around the globalization of resource exploitation.
NAFTA opened Mexico's long-distance market to transnational
competition – by its very nature, the communications industry is a
beacon of globalization. The U.S.-based GTE Data Systems was quick to
seize the opportunity and the Mexican government cheerfully obliged.
Modifications to the Agrarian Reform sections of Constitutional
Article 27, a stepping stone to NAFTA, allowed unused communal
farmland to be sold to private buyers. Utilizing a Mexican dummy
corporation, GTE, with Zedillo's encouragement, picked up sizable
chunks of farmland near Tepotzlan Morelos, just south of Mexico City,
to set up a high-tech industrial park that would manufacture fiber
optics for the newly-opened long-line market.
To make the Tepoztlan project more enticing to outside investors, GTE
contracted golf's "golden bear" Jack Nichlaus to construct an 18-hole
professional course on the site. But the campesinos of
Tepoztlan "don't play golf," affirms the town's mayor, Lazaro
Rodriguez, to explain the fierce resistance of local farmers.
The resource at stake here was water. The Tepozteco golf club would
have sucked millions of cubic liters from Tepoztlan's fragile aquifer
just to keep Jack Nichlaus's greens shining, and left the locals high
and dry. In the spirit of revolutionary martyr Emiliano Zapata, whose
birthplace lies less than 20 miles away as the crow flies, the
campesinos of Tepotzlan barricaded the town and threatened to torch
construction equipment. One farmer was killed by elite police and
many leaders taken prisoner (one teacher became an Amnesty
International "prisoner of conscience"). GTE quickly calculated that
the resistance was unquenchable and pulled up stakes.
In Tepotzlan, agrarian, environmental, and human rights struggles
combined to roll back the globalization of resource exploitation.
Amnesty International has been a key player in still another Nexos of
these three social thrusts. "Campesino-ecologistas" (farmer-
ecologists) Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera are also high-profile
AI prisoners of conscience and the London-based human rights lobby
has organized, along with the U.S. Sierra Club, a worldwide campaign
to set the two farmers free.
Their crime? In 1998 the campesino ecologistas blocked mountain roads
along Guerrero state's Pacific Coast to keep the U.S. timber giant
Boise Cascade from clear-cutting on their ejidos – deforestation of
the coastal sierra was drying up mountain streams the farmers needed
to irrigate their corn patches.
Boise Cascade had utilized the NAFTA-inspired modifications to
Article 27 to enter into "association" with powerful ejido bosses and
set up shop in the Guerrero sierra.
As a result of the blockade, Boise's log flow to its mills was
curtailed and the transnational closed down its operations and headed
for Chile. Soon after, Mexican army troops arrested and tortured
Montiel and Cabrera and the two are now serving 6 and 10 year terms
in a federal penitentiary. Intense pressures brought by international
organizations – the so-called "globalization of resistance" – has
provoked President Vicente Fox to order a review of the sentences.
The next battleground in this low-intensity resource war looks to be
the Montes Azules biosphere reserve in the Lacandon jungle of
southeastern Chiapas where major biotech transnationals like Monsanto
are mapping the genome of the jungle for commercial profit. The "bio-
pirates" have aroused the ire of local Mayan Indians whose healers
have dominion over the medicinal properties of the rainforest.
Recently a Dutch drug company isolated an enzyme in the Mayan corn
gruel "pozol," known to be a digestive aid, and will soon market it
as an antacid medication. Such commercialization can generate
billions for the pharmaceutical industry.
The Montes Azules biosphere has long been home to the rebel Mayan
Indian Zapatista Army of National Liberation (the EZLN), which set up
its first camps there back in the early 1980s, and still retains much
political influence in the region. The EZLN has been in the vanguard
of the globalization of resistance to the sort of corporate take-over
of the planet's natural resources that the impending FTAA forebodes.
Long time Bay Guardian contributor John Ross is trudging the east
coast of the U.S. trying to unload his latest work The War Against
Oblivion – Zapatista Chronicles 1994-2000 on unsuspecting students
until he returns to Mexico City in mid May.
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