Now that NAFTA is being renegotiated -- or at least, rechristened -- in part by a U.S. president who has threatened to build a wall to keep out some of that agreement's multitudinous victims (and who is threatening to upset these negotiations if Mexico does not violate international law by denying access to Central American asylum seekers at its southern border) -- this is perhaps the season to look back and remember the destruction that NAFTA has sowed in Mexico over the last two decades -- how it is linked to the very mass migration that Trump is trying to stymie -- and how this relates in turn to the broader global patterns of dispossession that lie at the heart of neoliberal capitalism.
The effects of NAFTA on U.S. manufacturing have been generally, if vaguely, acknowledged in this country -- even by the aforementioned mercurially "populist" occupant of the oval office (who, as has been observed, has said a great many things). Far less understood in this country is its more ruinous impact on Mexican agriculture.
The most immediate effect stemming from NAFTA specifically in Mexico was the result of suddenly opening a subsistence agriculture economy -- based largely in communally-owned farms called ejidos -- to competition with heavily-subsidized U.S. crops, in particular corn. According to estimates by the Center for Economic and Policy Research in a report on the effects of NAFTA from the perspective of twenty years later, this single policy change resulted in a net loss of nearly two million agricultural jobs -- with untold displacement, migration, and pauperization along the way.
A significant portion of the mass migration from Mexico to the United States that occurred in the 1990s and 2000s (and which has since slowed to a relative trickle, contrary to Trumpist rhetoric) is believed to be attributed to this cause.
This side of NAFTA's Janus face is less often emphasized in the U.S.
This is, sadly, only one of many instances in which our national perspective is taken up with ourselves to the eclipse of our southern neighbors -- who, by contrast, are not generally at liberty to indulge such chauvinism, since the effects of U.S. decisions weigh so heavily on their lives and history. Our country is always, at the very least, visible to them, even when they are invisible to us. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian contains a memorable scene on this subject, in which his murdering and piratical American protagonists are welcomed to a dinner in celebration of their exploits in the employ of the Mexican government. The Mexican representatives call for a series of toasts in honor of famous American generals and politicians. "The Americans respond[ed] with yet more of their own country's heroes," writes McCarthy, "ignorant alike of diplomacy and any name at all from the pantheon on their sister republic."
One of the names from that pantheon of which many contemporary Americans may be no less ignorant is that of Emiliano Zapata, who was the guiding spirit behind the early 20th century land reforms that resulted in the ejido system -- a form of peasant agriculture in which land was collectively held, with decisions about its use being made by democratic vote in a village council. This system replaced an earlier despotic land regime in which tenant farmers were at the mercy of powerful landlords in whose hands the farmland was concentrated.
By all accounts -- including sympathetic ones like this, by David Yetman -- the pre-1990s ejidos were no one's idea of an Arcadian idyll. In spite of their promising conception, they were riddled with corruption and violence, and the ostensibly democratic process that underlay village decision-making was vulnerable to political manipulation, threats, and bribery. Whether these problems could only be overcome by uprooting and destroying the whole system is a question I intend to revisit below.
NAFTA and the inpouring of low-priced, highly subsidized U.S. agricultural products is one of the forces that worked to unmoor the ejido system -- another, which was news to me when I heard about it in a recent opinion piece in local media -- was near-concomitant Mexican land reforms that were inspired by the same neoliberal mood. These reforms made it easier for peasants to gain individual ownership of the collective land and sell it. More recent reforms reported in Reuters would -- if passed -- apparently make it still easier to alienate this previously communal land to developers -- especially large scale energy and resource extraction concerns. The legislation described in that article was proposed in 2015 -- I don't know if it has since passed.
The point here is not immediately whether these reforms were a positive step or not, overall. The interesting thing to note preliminarily is how closely they recapitulate the history of capitalism, in its earliest and most ruthless forms.
The parcelling of formerly communal lands into individual plots -- and the resulting concentration of land formerly held in common in the hands of the wealthy -- is precisely the pattern of "enclosure" that left such deep traumas in the early modern history of Britain -- so much so that it even made its way into the literary record, despite the fact that the latter was penned mostly by people insulated from its worst effects. These are the enclosures so memorably condemned by Thomas More in the opening sections of his Utopia (albeit through the mouth of his radical visitor Raphael, rather than in More's own voice).
The dislocation and wrath engendered by these dispossessions of the rural poor even seem to have caught the attention of the largely socially-indifferent William Shakespeare.
His Henry VI trilogy (believed to have been among the first plays he authored) has for the most part god-awful politics -- displaying the kind of moral stupidity I always feared I might find in the bard when I finally got around to reading him. Its portrayal of Joan of Arc is rancid with English jingoism (her English captors kindly offer to heap more fuel on her stake, e.g., the faster to burn upon, her being merely "a maid." How thoughtful of them. She then tries to save herself by confessing to a pregnancy, with leads to much crude Elizabethan mockery of her as a harlot and mother of bastardy, whose saintly virgin image was a pose. Our playwright seems to take the side of her persecutors and their japes.)
The play's treatment of Jack Cade and the Kentish peasant's revolt is equally didactic and chauvinistic, although it has the advantage at least of being slightly more amusing. Portraying Cade and followers as an ignorant rabble intent on petty tyranny, rapine, and mass murder, it has much the same moral tone, you could say, as the title of Luther's essay on the German anabaptists: "Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants." The contrast with the modest demands articulated in the actual historic "Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent" is striking.
Despite all Shakespeare's moral obtuseness, however, the second play in the trilogy nonetheless includes a reference to the enclosures that betrays -- perhaps -- a flickering of social conscience. The straying and ultimately treasonous Earl of Suffolk -- who has fallen in love with the same Queen Margaret whom he has just delivered to the King -- is revealed in one scene to be a tyrannical landlord too -- amongst his other faults. Having interdicted a series of petitions that were originally intended for the virtuous Lord Protector the Duke of Gloucester (the old one -- not the one who will eventually become Richard III-- and who seems to have Shakespeare's sympathies), Suffolk is enraged to find one among them that has as its title "Against the Duke of Suffolk, for enclosing the commons of Melford."
The enclosures also formed the backdrop for those twin unparalleled achievements of late-eighteenth century social protest: Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village (1770), and the nearly-homonymous The Village of George Crabbe (1783), both of which describe the depletion of the rural population and the devastation of rural communities caused by the fencing off of common lands and the concentration of land rights in the hands of individual property owners. ("Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide," writes Goldsmith, in words that could well be applied to modern Mexico, "and even the bare-worn common is denied.")
What the historical and literary record makes unmistakably clear is that migration -- fueled by dispossession, then displacement -- was central to this process from the very first days of capitalism. You cannot uproot traditional communities, fed by subsistence agriculture, without forcing people to seek elsewhere for their livelihood. Just as this was certain to befall the peasants of early modern England, it was sure to be the result of NAFTA and the neoliberal land reforms of the same era. Even the early proponents of NAFTA knew this would be the agreement's immediate impact on Mexican agriculture -- they simply argued that economic growth would create job prospects somewhere else.
Having uprooted whole communities, U.S. policy-makers cannot try to wall out or criminalize the people they have pauperized, when the latter come seeking a chance to eke out a new life. To do so would be to punish the victims in exactly the manner condemned by Thomas More (or his mouth-piece Raphael) in the very dawn of capitalist development. In England, the vast numbers of rural poor who were turned out onto the highways of the world by the enclosures often had little choice but to poach from their former common lands and the estates of lords in order to survive, or else to pile on a ship and risk death in a trans-Atlantic crossing (Wordsworth described the horror of both options memorably in his "The Female Vagrant," from the Lyrical Ballads). Rather than addressing the social forces causing people to flee their original homelands, the English state responded with a series of "bloody laws" prescribing death and other extravagant penalties for minor property crimes. As More responded to all this: "what else is to be concluded from this but that you first make thieves and then punish them?"
So too, what is the United States doing, when it detains families and separates children from their parents, but making people migrants and then torturing them for it?
These patterns are not of course unique to Mexico. They are the same that underlay the rural depopulation and urban overcrowding in Haiti that made the 2010 earthquake so deadly. They are the same that are occurring in any part of the world today where neoliberal trade policies and an infusion of foreign investment are leading to massive "economic development" -- which always entails economic displacement.
I was privileged recently to attend a talk by Alfred Brownell, a Liberian attorney and human rights defender whose life and freedom have several times been threatened for his work on behalf of the land rights of the rural and indigenous poor in his home country. In his presentation he encapsulated a global portrait of development-driven displacement, in which multinational corporations intent on extracting resources and meeting an insatiable global demand for profit, energy, and consumer goods first arrive in any area, then overpower any land rights claims under domestic and/or international law that rural and indigenous communities may have to the places they have occupied for centuries, and finally proceed to construct new industries on these lands that are unsustainable.
These new mining concerns and rubber or palm plantations, etc. deplete forests and other landscapes from which the traditional communities drew their subsistence livings. The loss of forests, with their natural capacity to absorb carbon, furthers climate change, among all the other damage it does to the human communities, animals, and ecosystems that depend on them.
The original inhabitants of the land are invariably displaced by this process. If they try to defend their land rights through advocacy, they are subjected to death threats, stalking, and eventual assassination. If they seek jobs in the new industries that have arrived, they work for starvation wages and in slave conditions, waking up as early as 2 AM to arrive at the plantations. If they move to urban areas, they join massive and burgeoning slum communities where crime and social disorder are rampant. The poverty and violence they encounter there often force them to migrate again, eventually seeking safety and employment in developed economies.
Brownell has seen this dynamic unfold first-hand in Liberia and knows it is happening around the globe. The organization where I work has heard precisely similar stories from our partners in Honduras, where development projects have led to displacement and the murder of human rights defenders when they try to protect the internationally-recognized land rights of the uprooted communities (which are supposed to be protected, for instance, under the I.L.O. Convention 169). Berta Cáceres is the most well-known Honduran human rights defender to be martyred in this way, but there have been many others.
Among many other truths, Brownell's analysis of this dynamic sheds light on just how backward the current U.S. debate is around migration, even among relatively progressive policy elites. The Obama administration's comparatively "humane" discourse about Central American migration -- while it always refused to describe or treat the people fleeing that region as refugees -- nonetheless acknowledged that there were real social problems in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador that were driving people from their homes. That administration's calls for U.S. policy to focus on addressing the "root causes of migration," however, often amounted to a program of channeling more funds into U.S.-backed development projects, on the thesis that these would generate economic growth and eventually produce jobs that would allow people to stay in their home countries. This is the basis of the so-called "Alliance for Prosperity" in Central America.
But we have seen already that this is getting it exactly backward. "Development" is what is driving displacement, not what is forestalling it. Berta Cáceres was assassinated for trying to save indigenous lands from being flooded by a hydroelectric dam, you may recall. More than a hundred people have been murdered by death squads linked to the palm oil industry in the Bajo Aguán region of Honduras in the last decade. Similar examples could be multiplied. (Both palm and hydro, by the way, are "clean" energy sources. Those who view fossil fuels as the singular root of all evil and foresee an easy transition to "sustainable" energy sources would do well to take heed).
It is sometimes said, however, that there is no alternative to "development" in this form. To do without it is to leave rural communities mired in corruption and poverty -- as evidenced by life in the Mexican ejidos prior to NAFTA and the neoliberal land reforms. The violence and dislocation of early capitalist development may be painful, it is argued, but it is a necessary evil that will eventually benefit the very communities it is destroying in the short term.
It is worth bearing in mind that this argument -- so dear to the ideologists of neoliberal capitalism -- is precisely the same as that invoked in defense of every totalitarian social experiment of the previous century. As the Stalinist captor Ivanov says in Koestler's Darkness at Noon, defending the horrors and atrocities committed in the pursuit of collectivization, "Well, what of it? [...] Don't you find it wonderful? Has anything more wonderful ever happened in history? We are tearing off the old skin of mankind and giving it a new one. That is not an occupation for people with weak nerves."
Not only is this argument a fundamental denial of the Kantian principle that people should be treated as ends in themselves, rather than as means, it is also the quintessential example of a view that only makes sense from the perspective of the powerful, rather than the powerless. The argument does not even pretend that the promised future development and growth -- which will supposedly be the result of present dislocation -- will fall to the same people who are now being displaced. It may come to future generations of people "like them," but probably not to themselves. It is thus a view predicated upon viewing people as a mass, rather than individuals -- as a collection of units, rather than human beings each with their own needs and destiny.
It is in these shared displays of callousness that neoliberal capitalism and Communist totalitarianism -- and really the whole "modernist" developmentalist project in all its forms -- reveal themselves to be frères enemis. Walt Rostow and de-kulakization, for all their apparent opposition, are two sides of the same coin.
I would hazard that we have not come even close to pursuing and exhausting alternative models of development, such as would allow us to conclude that there is truly no alternative apart from mass displacement and the violence that inevitably surrounds it. I don't think we've put half so much heart and head into such a quest for alternative modes as would justify such a sweeping and totalizing generalization.
Even if we had, however, the question remains seriously open whether the balance of costs weighs in favor of economic modernity. Is growth worth the cost of exile? We have pointed to evils and injustices in the pre-1990s ejidos. Were they worse that the ills that have followed? Or was the cure worse than the disease?
I don't know the answer to that, but Oliver Goldsmith certainly knew which side of the question he preferred, in his "Deserted Village" mentioned above. I would ask -- would insist -- that anyone interested in exploring the question of present-day displacement in the name of development should read this poem, which chronicles precisely this dynamic at work in the early centuries of capitalism.
Goldsmith describes a village whose inhabitants have all fled due to enclosure and have fallen victim to vice and despair in the cities. It is maudlin and unashamedly nostalgic. But it is also a poem to change your life. A poem that can remind you of who you are and what you are called to do in this world.
And as I say, Goldsmith offered a view at the close of the poem on this question of whether development is worth it, if the price to pay for it is the devastation of traditional ways of life. In a closing encomium to Poetry, Goldsmith urges his Muse to do the following (emphasis added):
Aid slighted Truth with thy persuasive strain;
Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain;
Teach him that states of native strength possest,
Though very poor, may still be very blest[.]
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