IN VIEW of the New Year’s Day armed uprising in - Mexico, an article published in Scientific, American in the November 1993 edition was ‘slightly ahead of its time. The piece, titled The Perils of Free Trade, was penned by Herman E. Daly, the senior econo- mist in the environment department of the World Bank in Washington. D.C., whose views, the editors noted, “should not be attributed to the World Bank.” No kidding. He blasted free trade at the water line from bow to stern, argu- ing that it will destroy our chances ‘Yor finding interesting ‘and different kinds of work. inevitably tead to an “accelerated rate of destruction of our global environment, drag down wages in the industrialized world, — and generally function as a “recipe ‘for national disintegration.” If a guerrilla war launched from it vast rainforest by 10,000 rebels Jsnila symptom of some kind of trend-line in the direction at least of national disintegration, I'm not sure what is.) For all [knew, the Zapatista “Army of National Liberation may, ‘be utterly rouied by: now, but I Ahink not. : cos The Chamula “Indians of Chiapis . -- | State have taken up. arms on what Sun * +. ‘Ta, the old Chinese guru of war, called _ “dying ground.” “On dying ground, there is only one thing todo: "Fight." With'some 15,000 of them having been thrown off their little - patches of Jand by the Salinas government to clear the way for agri- _ businesses — 10 take advi untage of ‘NAFTA, things'are going to get “much worse, . _.“The former governor of Chiapas, Gonzalez Garrido, now \ Mexico's Interior Minister, is - described as having been one of the State's most repressive bosses He dismisses the rebel: Tent professionals.” so }0an uprising han 1come soon- er, ‘it would likely have come later, and if not in Chiapas, somewhere else, because the inspact of NAPTA is just starting to make itself felt in - Mexico, and the Indians, descen- dants of the Mayans, just happen to be its first victims, ” With a federal élection coming, “i's going to be a very jittery year * for our new business partners, the near-imafiosi who rule Mexico, the Institutional Revolutionary Party Provincial @ Government uaranteed - plexes Call: . The North ‘Shore’ Ss only Full Service Investment Firm ° 981- 6600 DOMINION © SECURITIES © ore blood ree trade trail STRICTLY PERSONAL (PRI), which is trying, in accor- dance with its unbroken 65 years of abusive rule. 10 pass power smooih- ly from one party-brokered de facto dictator to another while going through the charade of massively- rigged elections. In his Scientific American arti- cle, economist Daly predicted: "I is likely that NAFTA will ruin Mexican peasants when ‘inexpen- sive’ U.S. corn (subsidized by 66 On the dying ground, there is only one thing to do: fight, 99 depleting topsoil, aquifiers, ofl] wells and the federal treasury) can ~ be freely imported. “Displaced peasants will bid- down wages. Their tind will be bought cheaply by agri-business to produce fancy vegetables and cut _ flowers for the US. market. “Tronically.” he adds, “Mexico helps to keep U.S, corn ‘inexpen- sive’ by exporting its own vanish- ing reserves of oil and genetic corm variants. which the U.S. needs to sustain its corn monoculture. According to Amnesty International's report on Mexico, titled Torture With dpunity, the campesinos who were thrown off their land in Chiapas have been subjected to violent evictions, imprisonment without cause, rou- tine suspension of the rules of law, “and mass arrests of men, women and children. Now known as the expudsados, the expelled. they have been robbed by the PRE of the right to a piece of hind. aright enshrined in the Mexican Constitudon as a result of the 1910-1920 Revolutionary War, As one of the clearing opera- tions involved in setting up the NAFTA deal, the government of Carlos Satinas de Gortari rewrote the constitution to allow communal land to be privatized. The dispossessed Chamula Indians of Chiapas may not be as removed from average Canadians as we'd like to imagésg Economist De iy SUES the effects of NAFTA and treGATT gol of globalization as diminishing our standards of tiving. too. to the point where many more of us will find ourselves being dumped on the street. As countries are convinced by the free-trade advocates to pour their energies into specialized areas where they have a comparative advantige, while buying everything else from other places with other comparative advantages, the range of occupational choices in each country shrinks, ; “The tree traders.” Daly writes, “seck to maximize profits and pro- duction without regard for considerations that represent hidden social and environ- mental costs. f “They argue that when growth bas’ made people wei iitipy enough, theyAvill have the funds tarclean up the damage done by growih’ “Conversely, envi- ronnientilists .., Sus- pect that growth is increasing environ- mental cost faster than benefits - from prodtiction — thereby making us poorey, not richer.” He notes that “counting all costs is the very basis of efficiency,” and says that so longas free traders can getaway with avoiding responsibil- ity for environmental costs. which they can do by moving to Mexico, deals like NAFTA allow corpora- tions to put off the day of ccologi- cal reckoning, guaranteeing a worse mess in the end. “As capital flows abroad,” Daly writes. “the opportunities for new domestic employment diminishes, which drives dawn the price for domestic fabor.” Ina nutshell, that's where Brian Mulroney landed us, and Jean Chretien went along for the ride. 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