Mexico and the United States: Facts Everyone Should Know

*This information comes from an August, 2014 lecture by an exiled American professor who teaches at a Mexican University. For his safety, I am keeping his name private. He was forced to leave academia in the U.S. in the 1960s for his radical views and disseminating ugly truths about our government’s foreign economic policies.

• 1940: President Miguel Aleman elected in Mexico. He made industrialization a priority to show Mexico was making progress and keeping up with the rest of the world.
• He wanted the U.S. to invest in Mexico because they did not have the capital to develop on their own, so he invited companies like Chrysler, General Electric, Coca Cola and many more to open factories there.
• Examples of products produced: cars, Kleenex, toilet paper, canned goods, washing machines, detergents, soda, etc. 
• Foreign capital (from the U.S., Germany and Japan) ultimately industrialized Mexico
• Aleman’s practices & policies in this era opened the door for future U.S. economic entanglement

• North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): 
•  Enacted in 1994: it linked Canada, the United States and Mexico’s economies in a free market to break down trade barriers, eliminating tariffs. 
• Permitted the U.S. to buy corn from Mexican farmers without having to pay taxes. Then two years after NAFTA was enacted the U.S. signed The Farm Bill into law, which subsidized American farmers for growing corn so they no longer had to purchase it from Mexican farmers.
• Rural, agricultural areas in Mexico are in economic ruin because of free trade. A flood of cheap corn came in from the U.S., which made it impossible for Mexican farmers to sell theirs in the cities. 
• This has also caused the narcotics trade to increase immensely because the abandoned farm land is perfect for growing marijuana and poppies. 
• Mexico has much less strict environmental and labor laws than the U.S., which American corporations have taken full advantage of. Even more of them started moving their factories to Mexico because they could pay the workers there next to nothing and they have much less protection legally than workers here, which leads to a lot of abuse (long hours, very few bathroom breaks, women are berated for being pregnant & can be fired for it, no unions allowed to organize, scandalously low wages, etc.). The loose environmental regulations have fueled reckless practices by these American corporations that are wreaking havoc in Mexico (Rio Grande totally polluted; babies born with birth defects and deformities with regularity in that region; chronic illness in general; land has become unusable). Since farmers can’t afford to farm anymore they’re being forced into working in these unsafe maquiladoras (factories).
• This export platform has enabled the top 10% of the Mexican population (the uber wealthy) to make more money than ever before. The economy is booming for them and American corporations—the average, annual GDP of all products produced in Mexico is $1 trillion! 
• 20 million people have tried to come into the U.S. because of the economic situation NAFTA has created and more are being thrown out than ever before.

• School of the Americas (SOA): military academy for Latin American soldiers that was started in Panama in 1946 and has since been moved to Fort Benning in Georgia
• It is branded as a school to promote democracy in Latin America, but in reality its purpose is to train & support militarized governments that will help American corporations through economic policies we mandate
• 1979: bloody civil war started in El Salvador. Over 75,000 people were killed (an entire generation) mainly by the El Salvadoran government. 1,000 of their soldiers were trained at SOA. 
• Of the 60,000 soldiers trained at SOA to date, 600 are convicted human rights violators
• At a time when more prisons are built than schools and cuts to education are constant in the United States, the government is using our tax dollars to give scholarships to the Central and South American soldiers sent here to learn how to torture and oppress their own people. As American citizens, we have culpability in this for not knowing or caring where our money is going. 
• In the year 2000, SOA was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for National Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), mainly so SOA protesters would think it had closed. Human rights courses were added to the curriculum as part of this rebranding, but the oppressive tactics are still taught as well. It operates in the same building as SOA.

• Comparing the U.S. to Mexico on...

• Nationwide Unemployment Rates:
• in the United States: 5.5%
•  in Mexico: 50% (one of the highest in the world)
• Federal Minimum Wage:
• in the United States: $7.25 an hour *President Obama hopes to raise it to $9 in stages by the end of 2015
• in Mexico: 65 pesos a day (less than $6)  

• Other Facts about Mexico:
• The same political party has been in power for over 70 years (PRI), with two exceptions of Presidents from the PAN party in the 21^st Century ( elected in 2000 & 2006). Because PRI has been in power for so long these two PAN Presidents (Calderón & Fox) did not have much of a political structure to rely on and the majority of positions under them were still held by PRI members. 
• Honest voters in Mexico are ones who are “bought and stay bought.” Loyalty comes through bribery and coercion (people are offered financial incentives for their votes and physically dragged from their homes and forced to vote a certain way). There is a very limited understanding by the general public of how the electoral system works in Mexico than there is in the United States.
• The United States is the biggest consumer of illegal drugs in the world, so we are fueling the narcotic trafficking crisis so many of us criticize and fear.  The drug industry accounts for $100 billion of the Mexican GDP (10%) total, so it feasibly can’t be eliminated, even if it could be, because the economy would really crumble.
• Socioeconomic Breakdown:
• Top 10%: the super rich and multinational corporations 
• Middle 20%: the middle class: professionals
• Bottom 70%: marginalized population, small business owners

*Compiled by Maddy Mitchell