Faded Jeans, Faded Futures
by Paul Jeffrey
Hector Cuevas walks through his cornfield, the irrigation water that swirls around his feet giving off a chemical stench. Mr. Cuevas' corn patch, located on the outskirts of Tehuacán, a city in central Mexico, appears healthy. Yet he wonders about the effects of the blue water, a cocktail of industrial waste he diverts from ancient irrigation ditches that crisscross the flat valley floor. When the irrigation water dries up, a light blue layer of industrial residue remains on top of the soil.
"Some inspectors from the government came one day and told me that because of the water, I could no longer grow other vegetables here," Mr. Cuevas said. "That's too bad, because I can make more money with other vegetables than with corn."
Since then, he's grown just corn, even though its market price has steadily plummeted as imported U.S. corn has inundated Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The people of Tehuacan have grown corn for more than 7,000 years. Archeologists say the fields around village were the site of some of the earliest agriculture in Mexico, with Mr. Cuevas' Aztec ancestors growing chilies, avocados, cotton and maize -- the predecessor to Mr. Cuevas' corn crop. The Aztecs could depend on clear, abundant water. Even today, much of Mexico's bottled drinking water is produced in Tehuacán, pumped from endangered aquifers under nearby mountains. Yet no one would want to drink the water Mr. Cuevas uses to grow his corn.
The source of the blue water is about two kilometers –- 1.24 miles -- upstream from Mr. Cuevas' irrigation ditches. It's a factory that washes blue jeans, mixing bleach and pumice stones in giant vats to produce a faded look that adds value to the designer clothing.
A worker on his lunch break said some of the jeans he helps wash inside the factory are fixed with price tags as high as $300. He pointed out the cement drain, hidden in the trees behind the factory, where the plant's industrial waste flows directly into the stream that runs down the valley floor to where Mr. Cuevas waters his corn.
Industry’s impact
Tehuacán is the blue-jeans capital of the world. More jeans are produced here than anywhere else. The factories -- which produce about $600 million a year in retail products, more than the exports of many small countries -- have made the city a magnet, drawing workers from a rapidly depopulating countryside and putting strains on the environment.
Despite the problems, Mexico's economic and political leaders see Tehuacán as a model, and want to replicate its development throughout the south of Mexico, beginning in the nearby town of Puebla and running through Mexico's nine southern states and beyond through Central America all the way to Panama.
In 2001, Mexican President Vicente Fox launched what he dubbed the Plan Puebla-Panama. In theory, the plan would redress a heritage of lopsided economic development and bring two distinct Mexicos closer together. While the industrialized center and north of Mexico provides most of the nation's gross domestic product, the resource-rich, heavily indigenous and chronically malnourished south has long been left behind.
Only 10 percent of foreign investment in recent years has gone to the nine southern states of Puebla, Guerrero, Veracruz, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo. Mired in crushing poverty amid biological splendor, 714 of Mexico's 850 poorest counties are found in the nine-state region. Illiteracy in the south is the highest in Mexico and the average life span is eight years less than the national norm. Infant mortality in Chiapas and Oaxaca is double that of Mexico City.
Plan Puebla-Panama
With a price tag of $10 billion to be covered by loans from the Inter-American Development Bank, the Plan Puebla-Panama is an ambitious integration and development package that would link those nine Mexican states with the seven Central American countries -- Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama -- in an area comprising 102 million square kilometers –- about 6,325 square miles –- and 63 million people. The plan area holds huge petroleum reserves, 34 million hectares – __ acres -- of virgin timber, spectacular water resources, and the World Bank-created Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, which contains at least 7 percent of the world's biodiversity.
The plan envisions new highways and communications networks, and a Pacific freight terminal that would ship cargo by bullet train and truck over the narrow hump of the Mexican isthmus, shaving as much as two weeks off transit time through the Panama Canal.
Much of the infrastructure to be built under the plan would support the installation of thousands of maquiladoras -- assembly plants -- to take advantage of the region's 30 million low-wage workers. That would produce a major population shift, accelerating flight from the countryside to new population centers located around the factories.
Although President Fox unveiled the Plan Puebla-Panama at a summit with Central American presidents, his counterparts have been skeptical about it because it seemed more Puebla than Panama focused. Their concern deepened when just days after the plan's announcement, President Fox's administration announced a new program -- the Plan Sur or Southern Plan -- to seal off Mexico's southern border against northbound immigrants. The two plans, when taken together, made Central Americans wonder why capital would be allowed to cross borders, but not people.
The plan also met with opposition from environmentalists and indigenous groups, who saw it as a blatant land grab by Mexico's elite. The plan's debut coincided with the gutting of an indigenous-rights law that Mexico's indigenous groups struggled to push through the Mexican Congress. The original version of the law had recognized the rights of indigenous communities to political autonomy and control over land and natural resources, something incompatible with the plan and thus deleted from the final version of the law.
Today’s colonialism
Onécimo Hidalgo, an analyst at the Center for Economic and Political Investigations in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, said Plan Puebla-Panama is really a project dictated by the United States.
"The plan is but one of several pieces of the puzzle of stepped-up U.S. hegemony in the region," Mr. Hidalgo said. When considered alongside the expansion of hemispheric free-trade agreements and political projects like Plan Colombia, which is militarizing the Andean region as part of the U.S. War on Drugs, the Plan Puebla-Panama is colonialism dressed in the well-pressed clothes of a modern business executive, Mr. Hidalgo said. Whereas the riches of old were gold and silver, northern transnationals today seek petroleum and genetic riches from the forests of the isthmus, along with the cheap labor of those displaced from the jungle.
The green hillsides of Chiapas make it obvious President Fox, the former executive of Coca-Cola's Mexican operations, wants to integrate Chiapas into the national economy. It's a lush place. One-third of the nation's electricity is generated in Chiapas, including over half of the hydroelectricity. And the federal government wants to dramatically increase that. More than 30 new dams are planned for Chiapas under Plan Puebla-Panama. Maquiladoras need electricity to operate.
Chiapas is host to a variety of other natural resources that capitalists in Mexico City and abroad dream of getting their hands on. The connection between natural resources and militarization is not coincidental. Chiapas is the most militarized Mexican state, yet it's not exclusively a response to the Zapatistas. The military is there to repress indigenous rebellion, but also to protect the area's natural resources.
If there were no natural resources to be exploited, the Mexican military might leave the indigenous peopls alone. The threat of autonomous control in indigenous communities means the benefits of natural-resource exploitation would have to be shared with the poor, a scenario that's anathema to the Mexican and foreign companies with their eyes on Mexico's south. Plan Puebla-Panama has a counterinsurgency role to play.
Biodiversity threatened
Another resource at stake under the plan is the region's biodiversity. Long a source of mahogany and other hardwoods, the jungle in the far south of Mexico is a money-making machine for pharmaceutical and chemical companies looking for new genetic materials they can patent, and thus control.
Local communities have begun to fight for a fair share in the profits. In 2001, indigenous groups in Chiapas achieved the cancellation of a bio-prospecting enterprise sponsored jointly by the U.S. government, the University of Georgia-Athens, the Mexican College of the Southern Border and a Welsh biotech company.
One of the project's opponents, Antonio Perez, head of a group of traditional doctors and midwives in Chiapas, claimed the project's cancellation was a victory for all indigenous peoples in Mexico.
"Indigenous communities are asking for a moratorium on all biopiracy projects in Mexico, so that we can discuss, understand and propose our own alternative approaches to using our resources and knowledge," Mr. Perez said. "We want to insure that no one can patent these resources and that the benefits are shared by all."
One such alternative approach, a seed-preservation program to protect the "mother seed of resistance" from genetic contamination, was launched early this year by school children in the Zapatista stronghold of Oventic, Chiapas. They started collecting corn seeds and storing them, as per Mayan tradition, in clay pots with ash and eucalyptus leaves to protect against insects. The project hopes to collect seeds from local bean, squash, chile and medicinal plants, and conserve them in a building with refrigeration and a lab for doing genetic analysis.
The concern about genetic contamination emerges from the revelation in 2001 that Mexico -- the birthplace of corn -- had been invaded by genetically modified corn. Despite the government's ban on genetically modified corn seeds, corn plants with laboratory-inserted genes were discovered on remote farms in Oaxaca state. The modified strains apparently came to Mexico in the six million tons of corn that it imports annually from the United States. About a quarter of that corn in genetically modified, but it's supposed to be eaten, not planted.
Some farmers evidently planted the imported corn, and now the genie is out of the bottle, worrying scientists that the new strains could displace or contaminate the country's genetic warehouse of more than 60 corn varieties, reducing biodiversity -- a critical hedge against disease, pests and climate change.
That fear wasn't shared by all. The Mexico City office of the U.S. Grain Council argued Mexican farmers should pay for the "genetic improvement" incarnated in the half-breed Oaxaca corn. As foreign companies flock to southern Mexico under Plan Puebla-Panama, agricultural specialists worry such attitudes will prevail, and newcomers will take what they want, only to patent it and later sell it back to Mexicans.
Forced from countryside
The crisis in Mexican agriculture -- provoked by environmental degradation, population growth and official disinterest -- is not addressed by Plan Puebla-Panama. Tough times on the farm produce a migration to the cities where the string of maquiladoras envisioned by Plan Puebla-Panama supporters will be waiting to absorb the displaced workforce. It's not surprising that the plan makes no provision for rejuvenating Mexican farms other than to plant huge plantations where fast-growing trees would be ground up for pulp.
"The countryside just doesn't produce food like it used to," said Bishop Enrique Flores, a Puebla-based Methodist bishop whose episcopal area includes most of southern Mexico. "The peasants work hard to produce corn and beans but there's barely enough for their families. The government has agencies that supposedly help these rural farmers, but the help, when it arrives, is inevitably at the wrong time and in a form that doesn't help the farmer. The money the government spends to help farmers is more show than real assistance. Peasants no longer believe the government, which hasn't really cared about peasants for 50 years, and today only thinks about them when it needs their votes in an election."
Lourdes Amayo came to Tehuacán two years ago from a small village in the mountains.
"If it rained at the right time, we had a crop and could eat," Ms. Amayo said. "If it didn't, we went hungry. With the rains coming less and less, we moved here, but it's been hard. The work kills you, you're not paid well, the bus to work takes a big chunk of your wages. There are a lot of days I wish we'd stayed at home in the mountains. Maybe we would have starved to death, but we would have been home."
For decades, bad crop years in the countryside were ameliorated by the opportunity for the people to earn small amounts of cash as seasonal laborers during the annual coffee harvest, but with the world market flooded with an oversupply of Asian coffee beans and coffee prices low, many coffee farmers are letting the beans rot on the bush rather than pick them. So in the countryside today, there's no food and no work.
"There's no longer any hope in the countryside," Mr. Flores said. "Only the old and the very young remain there. The youth and adults have gone to the cities, or they've migrated to the other side. The old peasants may have resigned themselves to a life of poverty, but not the youth, who are looking for ways to escape."
A cancelled future
In some small Mexican towns, the whole social culture supports this exodus. Parents select which of their children will go to the city to work, sending home enough money to keep the family alive and perhaps educate one or two children. Or the girls in the family work in maquiladoras until the family has saved enough to pay a migrant smuggler to take the eldest son to the United States. Mayors fake birth records so underage workers can carry the documents needed to get jobs in maquiladoras.
Huberto Juárez, an economist at the Autonomous University of Puebla who has studied maquiladoras in the Puebla area for years, said for many industrial workers, the move to the city cuts off other possibilities in their lives.
"The politicians like to talk about our responsibility to educate young people, yet they push development models that yank children from their communities and put them in factories where they work hard for 10 hours a day," Mr. Juarez said. "When are they going to study? Politicians talk about adult-education programs but what worker has any energy left to study? Their education is aborted, their future cancelled. Our future as a nation is cancelled when they leave home for the maquiladoras in the city."
Despite its drawbacks, Tehuacán is touted as a model, and the Plan Puebla-Panama proposes to replicate it throughout southern Mexico as a quick fix to the region's poverty. But before the plan could celebrate its first anniversary, it was in trouble. After years of dizzying growth in the maquiladora sector, the last two years has seen a drop in orders and the firing of more than 150,000 workers. Recession in the north, an overpriced peso, cheaper wages elsewhere, the entry of China into the World Trade Organization -- all these have made it tough for the economic planners and government bureaucrats pitching Mexico to potential maquiladoras’ owners.
A successful union-organizing drive at a Nike maquiladora in Puebla raised a red flag to foreign investors looking for an environment unrestricted by human-rights considerations. Indigenous communities refused to accept the weakened indigenous-rights law. Small farmers protested the expropriation of their farms for the highways and airports that need to be constructed for the plan to work. In the end, the plan may have ironically provoked the resurgence of a popular movement that questions the decisions the rich make about the future of the poor.
As the controversies around Plan Puebla-Panama rage, southern Mexico remains poor. Yet an increasing number of Mexicans living in the region are coming to see the plan not as the solution the politicians proclaim but as a development scheme that will make a few people richer while ravaging the environment and leaving the majority displaced and worse off economically.
Paul Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary in Central America.