Democracy Now had an excellent show today, with a focus on the militarization of the countryside through Plan Mexico. Weapons are pouring across the border south, as drugs flow north. It is fascinating, in a ghastly sense, to examine abstractly as a kind of soft, slow-motion genocide directed against the Mexican people… and eventually, one may infer, toward the American population.
Excerpts, with emphases added:
LAURA CARLSEN: Well, in March of 2005, NAFTA was extended … the idea was to push the borders out of the United States and create a North American security perimeter that would include Canada and Mexico. In this way, the Bush government, what it sought to do was to apply the radical national security doctrine to Mexican territory as well. …
In the case of Plan Mexico, it’s a perfect example of the result of those policies. Essentially, [it]… gets a greater military presence for the United States within Mexico….
LAURA CARLSEN: … By having a militarized society, you are assuring a certain amount of social control. We know in Mexico that there will be mass opposition to the privatization of oil. … So, by having the army in the streets, you’re in a position to quell social uprisings that may be coming up that have to do with control over natural resources, as well.
LAURA CARLSEN: Yes, Well, already with the Mexican army in the streets…what we’re seeing is attacks, basically, on social movements. Within Chiapas… the army has gone in, often with the pretense of looking for drug production, which they’ve not found, but they’ve used it to harass those communities, in which major battles over natural resources and the right to autonomy have been taking place. …
Another—and this is cases that we’ve seen in the northern state of Chihuahua—has to do with opposition leaders, in general. When Operation Chihuahua started, which is one of the major operations of the drug war, the army came in, and they immediately rounded up several social leaders that had been—had warrants out for their arrest since 2003 for blocking an international bridge in a protest over NAFTA. They were just routinely rounded up as part of these drug war operations. ….
JOHN GIBLER: …I think it’s essential to understand the link between the so-called free trade regime embodied in NAFTA and migration. NAFTA’s economically structuring of Mexico’s economy has forced millions of small farmers from their countryside, and in so doing, shattered local food production and shattered local economies. That’s forcing people to move across the border, looking for work.
Analysts that I interviewed at the University of Zacatecas said to me, Mexico, under this new economic regime, is exporting the factory of migrants. Also, they said Mexico is mortgaging its future with remittances, the money that migrants send back. And what, they argue, is taking place is that the United States, through NAFTA, is holding Mexico at bay as a kind of reserve army of workers for its own industrial restructuring, thus all the benefits and the luxuries absent in Mexico’s own countryside are being built and constructed and elaborated inside the United States by migrant labor, largely Mexican.
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