by VICTOR SUAREZ & ALEJANDRO VILLAMAR
NAFTA opened the doors for a flood of subsidized agricultural products and large-scale consolidation, eviscerating small farmers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border PHOTOBread for the World/Flickr
Donald Trump seems to think Mexicans made out like bandits from NAFTA. In reality, workers in all three NAFTA countries have suffered.
In a recent appearance with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump promised that “we’re going to tweak” the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, because of its “severe” impacts on U.S.-Mexico trade relations. But the real impacts of the agreement run much deeper than a trade deficit.
Some politicians and “experts” still don’t understand — or don’t want to understand — that a great deal of popular discontent in the United States, Mexico, and Canada alike is rooted in undemocratic policies that have produced inequality, unemployment, migration, food dependency, and pollution. NAFTA isn’t the only factor — but it’s one of the most powerful.
The reason is that NAFTA was never designed for the development of our peoples through trade, but instead to advance the narrow corporate interests of multi-national firms and the governments that serve them. In the case of Mexico, it was negotiated and signed by an authoritarian government that only served the interests of large Mexican and global corporations, and which turned its back on productive sectors linked to the domestic market.
NAFTA was once boosted as a democratizing force for Mexico. Though Mexico’s traditional ruling party did lose a few presidential elections, the continued involution and deterioration of the Mexican political system since 2000 has put lie to the claim that NAFTA was going to spur meaningful democratization.
Mexico’s economy has grown since then, but the rate of growth has actually been much slower than in periods from before NAFTA. What has grown since then is extreme inequality, between both social classes and regions in Mexico.
Yet Donald Trump would have us believe that Mexicans have made out like bandits from NAFTA, robbing middle-class jobs from the United States. Instead, more than 60 million Mexicans — more than half of the total population — live in poverty, exposing Trump’s deceptive claims as propaganda.
Almost one million small and medium-level entrepreneurs in Mexico were ruined by NAFTA’s rules of competition, which were written in favor of big transnational corporations, and by the lack of internal support policies for displaced workers and owners. Millions more there were once middle class and thought that with NAFTA they had a prospect of social advancement, but now they’re approaching poverty, too.
In all three countries, NAFTA has meant a downward standardization of wages, labor rules, and environmental standards affecting workers and farmers across each border. Just as many American farmers and workers saw their incomes decline and jobs vanish under NAFTA, millions of Mexicans similarly watched as their economic lot in life grew unbearable.
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