Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>On Mexico's border, 'prosperity' has an ugly side
>By Diego Ribadeneira, Globe Staff
>NOGALES, Mexico -- Paradise lost. Those are the words many here use to
>describe this remote and beautiful corner where Mexico meets Arizona.
>A once-pristine region of deep blue skies, soaring cactus-dotted mountains
>and spectacular sunsets has been laid waste by industrialization run amok,
>many residents say.
>The villains, they charge, are the maquiladoras, the Spanish word for the
>US assembly plants that have set up shop in Mexico within eyesight of the
>United States.
Not to be denied. But, as people say, at least there are jobs.
A good deal of the people who work in the maquiladora zones by the border
are from the southern and central states. They left their paradises because
there were no jobs -- not even maquiladora jobs. Marxists and
environmentalists don't provide them with jobs -- capitalists do. Down in
the south, there were no clinics for pregnant women and babies, no schools
for the children, no paved roads to get their ill out on time, no potable
water, no drainage systems, no bridges to cross a stream in the rain season.
If there's a storm, some people lose their huts, belongings, harvest, and
even lives. Infections that can be easily subdued with a penicillin shot
are still killing people. Child mortality is high. Life expectancy is low.
In 2001.
Nature (i.e., rain, lightening, rivers, fire, animals, bacteria, viruses,
human births) doesn't appear so nice under such circumstances. The
'pristine' water in streams and rivers in poor rural areas is likely to be
very contaminated, not by industrial pollutants or chemical fertilizers, but
by human, dog, and pig organic waste. People (women, first and foremost)
burn wood to cook and, since sometimes ventilation is not good or kitchen
and house are one and the same thing, they breathe this romantic form of
carbon monoxide routinely. With no electricity, there are no fridges, and
food poisoning is common. There are vast rural areas in Mexico where the
people who stay -- mainly women, elder, and children -- depend, not even on
seasonal agriculture, but on hunting and gathering. They depend on luck
with the odds against them. In other words, they depend on nature. No
wonder the young and able abandon their natural paradises.
Maybe Mexican workers don't realize the full magnitude of global warming and
other global ecological threats, but the local and simple way they look at
the problem is not completely senseless. They know they are taking chances.
But life is full of dilemmas. There is a twofold threat: (1) starvation,
deep poverty, joblessness -- perceived as an assault at gunpoint -- and (2)
lost natural scenery, environmental pollution, and more 'normal' capitalist
exploitation -- drops of poison that will kill you eventually. But getting
rid of the first threat appears much more urgent. Other factual references
seem to support their priority rankings.
For instance, Mexico City is heavily polluted, but at least there are
environmental laws and -- with some luck -- they get enforced. People think
there has been a modest but tangible improvement in environmental law
enforcement in the last few years. In part, at least, as a result of the
Left's struggles and political advances in Mexico City. A good deal of the
technical difficulty in reducing pollution in Mexico City has to do with its
relentless growth under the pressure of migratory waves of rural poor. In
the rural areas of the south (but not only on the south, also on the Pacific
and Gulf coasts and on the central 'altiplano'), there's lawlessness,
tragedy of the commons, hopeless poverty. That's hopeless environmental
degradation -- one where a modest part of nature is degraded, i.e., human
beings. In today's Mexico, the ability to lift the environmental standards
(or simply to keep them as they are) and enforce them seems to depend on
more, not less, capitalist production.
Nogales, Cananea, and some other towns in the Sonora desert that now have
maquiladoras used to be mining towns, and environmental problems there have
a long history. With all due respect to the journalists of the Boston
Globe, I'm not sure they do justice to the complexity of the social problems
in that region. Maybe we shouldn't demand more from a brief newspaper
article. I'd even say that, to an extent, the spoiled landscapes by the
border lamented by the Boston Globe were nice for relatively privileged US
(and a few Mexican) tourists who could enjoy them. The Mexican poor
benefited little from them. On the other hand, once workers have
maquiladora jobs, they want more things -- not less. And people have the
good sense to use the foreign media to voice their dissatisfaction with
social problems that are lower in the list of priorities. (Mexican
government officers seem to react more briskly to what's published in the
New York Times and the Washington Post than to local media.)
As a rule, workers in the Mexican maquiladoras don't want the maquiladoras
to be dismantled. But they do want them to clean their act. They want
higher wages, better working conditions, public safety (particularly women,
who form a significant portion of the maquiladora labor force and have
suffered a long series of attacks, rapes, and murders), housing, dignified
transportation, schools, clinics, electricity and public lighting, phone
services. Their environmental agenda is modest: potable water, drainage
systems, garbage disposal, and -- further down the list -- cleaner air.
Tourist dollars foregone, beauty lost, environmental hazards, and sweat,
Mexican workers appear to give a lot of weight to the upside of their
scorned maquiladora jobs.
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