What happened to José Ramírez? In simple terms, the El Niño pushed him into debt, which in turn forced him to migrate north. As I have repeated throughout this book, it is impossible to say that a warmer globe has caused any single weather event. But the pattern of association is clear: increased surface temperatures correlate with more El Niño events.
Climate change unfolds as part of a matrix of causality. The warm water of the El Niño triggered the poisonous red tide algae bloom that killed and pushed away the fish and thus began Ramírez’s sojourn in the north. But the toxic algae bloom was not produced by warm water alone. It was also created on land by rampant development of tourist hotels, golf courses, and agroexport fruit plantations, all of which discharge more sewage and organophosphates into the sea, feeding toxic algae blooms.
Compounding this increase in organic pollution is the decline of natural defenses in the form of mangrove forests and wetlands. Mangrove forests grow on tidal flats and clean freshwater runoff by absorbing the nutrients that otherwise feed algae blooms. Their decline means more algae. The same uncontrolled development that adds organic pollutants to coastal waters also clears away mangroves. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization, Mexico had 1.4 million hectares of mangrove forest in 1971. By 1999, those coastal woodlands had dropped by almost half to only 733,000 hectares.15
Likewise, the social impacts of the red tide were not inevitable but were created in part by political economic policies. For example, why were the fish stocks not more robust? Because Mexico’s fisheries are badly managed and in decline; catches have been level since 1980 despite ever more investment. 16 Why was there no public system of support for José Ramírez during his difficult times? Because Mexico is now a social laboratory of radical free market orthodoxy.
Neoliberal Fish
The Mexican Revolution was broadly progressive in character. Among its many reforms, it reserved the best fish stocks for small individual fisherman and state-sponsored cooperatives. “Throughout the 1930s co-operatives were progressively awarded concessions to national fish stocks, a process that culminated with the 1947 Fishing Law granting them exclusive access rights to the nine most important inshore marine and shellfish fisheries.”17 Subsistence or artisanal fishermen got the rest. How fish were caught, processed, and sold was, like much of the economy, encased in layers of regulation defined by economic nationalism. A parastatal enterprise called Productos Pesqueros Mexicanos, or Propemex, controlled fish packing and processing, price regulation and marketing.18
During the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, Mexico steadily liberalized its economy. The end goal of the process was a free trade agreement with the United States and Canada. As part of that, Propemex with all its canneries, processing factories, and vessels, was privatized. Deregulation of the banking sector allowed private firms to push aside government financing of the fishing sector.19 In 1989 foreign ownership of up to 50 percent of fishing and fish-processing industries was allowed.20 The monopoly of the co-ops was ended, forcing them to compete with the private sector for formal access rights. The state reduced public expenditures by selling the main state-owned fish processor and exporter to a private bank and reducing subsidies to small fishermen. More broadly, between 1982 and 1994, 940 of 1,155 publicly owned businesses throughout the economy were privatized or liquidated. And previously closed markets were opened. In exchange for all of this, Mexico got greater access to US markets.21
The neoliberal model of fisheries management has come at a high social and environmental cost. Stocks have plummeted and poverty has risen among fishing communities. As the state downsized its role and private capital moved into a heavily regulated sector, official corruption and marine-resource poaching grew.22
The little regulation remaining is often circumvented in what veteran Times reporter Tim Wiener called “the great divide between Mexico’s laws and its law enforcement.” Officials have estimated that as many twelve thousand unregulated fishing boats work the Sea of Cortez alone.23 Foreign boats take much of the fish: Mexico’s fleet accounts for less than 10 percent of the total catch, with the rest going to boats from the United States, Canada, and Japan.24 This bad management of fish resources has made people like José Ramírez vulnerable to the new freak weather and helped push them away from their original livelihoods and toward Mexico’s cities and the United States.
The story of José Ramírez, multiplied across the country, is the story of climate change expressing itself through the political economic realities of neoliberalism. While it is impossible to say that climate change caused the 1997–1998 El Niño, we know that a hotter planet will likely lead to more extreme weather events like the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and more toxic algae blooms. Combined with bad economic policies, climate change is already creating climate refugees.
Pushed from the Sierra
On the southwestern edge of Juarez, where the slums creep up into the Sierra Madre, I met other climate migrants in a colonia of Rarámuri Indians. Also known as the Tarahumara, these famous long-distance runners come from southern Chihuahua’s Sierra Madre Occidental. Their urban colonia replicates a mountain village centered around a plaza and a yellow-walled catholic church. Above them looms a cold, grey massif. On a fence hung two drying cowhides from animals slaughtered for the holidays. Many of the Rarámuri men were out of work or had only intermittent day labor, and many were drunk. The Indians moved here because jobs pulled them north, but drought back home is also pushing them.
“ We have no rains there, so many people are coming here,” said Celso Nava Galindo. Thirty-six, he moved from a village seven hours away called Bocoina. “No rain, no people,” said Galindo. “Back home we survive by farming and speak our own language. But the drought makes it very difficult.”
In 2008, travel writer Richard Grant noted the same: “The Tarahumara had moved out of the area now. It was climate change as much as anything. There had been twelve drought years in the last fifteen. And it was becoming impossible for subsistence farmers to keep themselves alive. Of all the problems and challenges the Tarahumara are up against, this was the most intractable.”25
When farming gave way to drought, Galindo became a full-time logger, but when the trees were cleared, he lost his job. So he came to Juarez—like the timber from his homeland—and worked in construction. Like the other men in the plaza, he explained the drought in local and empiricist terms: “Too much logging.”
Indeed, the forests of the Sierra Tarahumara are under strain; almost 90 percent of the lumber produced in Chihuahua State comes from there. Mexico as a whole, never heavily wooded, has cut down more than one-third of its forests. The 1980s, the decade of steady liberalization leading to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), saw rapid deforestation. Between 1990 and 2005, Mexico lost 6.9 percent of its forest cover.26
The men on the plaza may be correct that deforestation is a cause of the drought. However, the problems extend beyond their sierra. Much of Mexico is suffering dry and erratic weather, including sudden flooding in otherwise drought-plagued areas. Increasingly, climate change will be the central dynamic in migration. The World Watch Institute reports, “Desertification affecting [Mexican] drylands is leading some 600,000 to 700,000 people to migrate annually.” In 2009 and 2010, thanks to an El Niño, Mexico was gripped by the worst drought in decades. In many parts of Mexico, ownership of water has been even more important than ownership of land.27 “Almost 40 percent of the farm land inspected by the government has been affected by the drought, causing shortfalls in the harvests of corn, beans, wheat and sorghum,” reported a business wire. And the Mexican government spent more than $100 million on emergency crop-insurance aid to farmers.28 It announced that drought had reduced the 2009 harvest of the staple white corn by 10 percent but insisted that “the supply for human consumption will be guaranteed.”29
CARE International examined desertification and migration in Mexico, finding more evidence of climate-driv
en dislocation. “When our harvest is bad, we have to rely on ourselves,” explained one farmer. “Many of us had to leave, to Canada or the United States. . . . The money I made there . . . was a big help for my family. Without that income, it would have become extremely difficult.” Another farmer told CARE, “My grandfather, father and I have worked these lands. But times have changed. . . . The rain is coming later now, so that we produce less. The only solution is to go away.”30
Further south, similar conditions obtain. The warming of the Pacific off Peru has meant that Guatemala faced its worst drought in three decades. In 2009 corn crops failed in four provinces, and four hundred thousand peasant families needed food aid. The government pleaded for $100 million in emergency donations. In El Salvador, Hurricane Ida brought massive flooding: fifteen thousand people were displaced, and more than two hundred died. But the real devastation from that storm would arrive later as eroded soil, failed crops, and mounting household debt drove people off the land into cities and beyond, to Mexico and then north again.
When displaced populations meet with more poverty and unemployment, slum living, the lure of the underground narcotics trade, state corruption, inequality, and a media landscape full of materialism, narcissism, sexism, and blood lust, the resulting anomie and relative deprivation they experience fuels crime. Crime justifies Mexican state repression and, as we shall see latter, a xenophobic hardening of policing in the United States. In this fashion, a crisis of natural systems becomes a crisis of urban violence and border repression.
The catastrophic convergence as it unfolds in northern Mexico links migration, economics, violence, and climate. To understand the social breakdown that is the Mexican drug war and into which climate refugees now flow, we must understand the country’s economic history, because the strange new weather that drives people off the land is articulated through the economic realities history has bequeathed. This is evident in the case of José Ramírez, the fisherman from Michoacán, and Celso Nava Galindo, the Rarámuri farmer turned logger, then urban day laborer. Migrants like them are not merely pushed away by drought, floods, and algae blooms; they are also pulled into the vortex of migration and border politics by the lure of industrial work. Thus, making sense of climate change in Mexico and at the militarized US border requires a foray into the economic history of the Mexican Revolution and the transformations wrought by NAFTA.
Insurgent Mexico
From 1920, when the guns of the revolution fell silent, until the early 1980s, the Mexican economy developed along inward-looking, state-led corporatist lines in a pattern similar to Brazil’s and common throughout Latin America. Under Porfirio Diaz, Mexico was said to be the mother of foreigners and the stepmother of Mexicans.31 As The Nation correspondent and historian Carlton Beals described in his biography of Diaz, “His group had only one basic idea, to steal, much, often and scientifically.”32 This was particularly so after the US war with Spain in 1898, when under commercial pressure from the north, Diaz slipped into the authoritarian caudilloismo for which he is best known. Economic depression in 1903 made it worse. Strikes during the recovery in 1906 and 1907 were met with vicious repression. His methods—pan o palo, “bread or stick”—combined repression and corrupt patronage. During his last decade in power, economic policy was in disarray, and in response to the international economic crises of 1893 and 1903, Diaz borrowed heavily and at high rates of interest.33
By the eve of the revolution, power relations in Mexico were rotten. Beals painted a picture (perhaps exaggerated) of unbearable humiliation: “Everywhere, the hacendado had first right to women. Frequently the hacendado, or foreman, after enjoying a girl just entering puberty, would call in some young peon, with the remark ‘this is your wife’ such was the marriage ceremony.”34 At the top of this heap was Diaz.
When the revolution against him finally broke out, it was a chaotic affair, pitting geographically and ideologically heterogeneous forces against Diaz and his backers: hacienda landlords, the corrupt officialdom, and large foreign capitalists, mostly British and European.35 The rebels included Liberals, demanding free politics; Indian peasants, demanding land; cowboys and gangsters, demanding loot; and nationalist entrepreneurs, seeking a path toward modern economic development. As Frank Tannenbaum put it in his contemporary classic Peace by Revolution, “The Mexican Revolution was anonymous. It was essentially the work of the common people. No organized party presided at its birth. No great intellectuals prescribed its program, formulated its doctrine, outlined its objectives.”36
Article 27 and the Corporatist State
In victory, the revolution settled on an agenda of economic modernization and capitalist development that pivoted, interestingly, on the world’s first socialist constitution.37 More specifically, Article 27 of that 1917 document read, “In the Nation is vested the direct ownership of all natural resources.” That meant all lands, minerals, and forests, all the waters and all the fish. The actual text goes on in great detail to enumerate “precious stones, rock-salt and the deposits of salt formed by sea water . . . petroleum and all solid, liquid, and gaseous hydrocarbons.”38 (Even the rock salt!) At the heart of Article 27 was land reform, which liberated much of the peasantry from debt peonage. By 1940 almost 23 percent of all land was collectively owned in the ejido system, up from 1.6 percent at the end of the revolution.39 In 1960, about 20,000 ejidos with about 2 million members worked “slightly less than half of all cultivated land.”40
The relatively autonomous state sought to spur economic development through policies of import-substitution industrialization (ISI). Like Brazil and many other Latin American states during the twentieth century, Mexico forged a limited labor-capital compact. The state owned some industries and imposed controls upon others. Ultimately, this semisocialist set of interventions formed part of “an alliance for profit” with business.41
In exchange for cooperating and negotiating with trade unions, Mexican capitalists were allowed to form monopolies and cartels. They were also forced into state-managed business chambers. The state supported business with subsidies, protective tariffs, and regulations designed to blunt the most ravaging effects of unbridled interfirm competition and protect Mexican companies from foreign rivals. Partial state ownership allowed stronger sectors of the economy to support weaker sectors.42
The state provided cheap and stable credit as “foreign ownership of the banking system was progressively replaced by national and state ownership.” 43 The new credit system facilitated “the progress of the agrarian reform” and developed a crop-based, rather than land-based, credit system for small individual proprietors and “peasants holding communal lands in villages.” By these arrangements they could access ready credit, but communal lands would not carry mortgages or be foreclosed on.44 Meanwhile, trade unions won legal rights, although organized labor’s more radical elements were marginalized. Union agitation and collective bargaining increased wages, which in turn spurred consumption and the growth of internal markets, and that encouraged more productive investment, creating further employment, consumption, profits, and so on.45 All these progressive reforms allowed Mexican industry to compete with the more powerful British and American interests that had dominated business and trade (but not agriculture) under Porfirio Diaz.46
Cárdenas and Oil
This Mexican version of corporatism deepened significantly in the late 1930s under President Lazaro Cárdenas, who accelerated land reform and the nationalization of basic industry. “The assumption underlying Cardenas’ policies was that while capitalism was necessary for development, capital, like labor, could be controlled and regulated by the state.”47 Cárdenas “emphasized programs to improve the lot of the lower classes, especially the Indians, through education, redistribution of land, collective farms (ejidos), curbs on foreign capital, and a larger role for state-run enterprise.”48
By 1937, Cárdenas had nationalized the railroads and set his sights on the ultimate prize: petroleum. That brought him into direct co
nfrontation with Standard Oil of New Jersey, Shell, and the US government. But Cárdenas prevailed and expropriated the Mexican operations of the international petroleum firms to create the state oil company Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex.49
But the system had its problems. By centralizing power and excluding, but not smashing, capital, the Mexican state opened the way for serious corruption. The idea was that the state should be the “rector of the economy.” Business was excluded from politics and denied access to decision-making circles; owners of private businesses were not even allowed to be part of the ruling party.50 Yet, formal exclusion of the private sector from official channels of influence encouraged businessmen to cultivate informal influence and access. Corruption and clientelism resulted.
By the 1960s, some industries had founded autonomous chambers that opposed state involvement in the economy. The most powerful of these were the Businessmen’s Council, formed in 1962, and the Businessmen’s Coordinating Council, created in 1975. Within these elite factions, pressure for a rightward turn in economic policy would grow.
Oil’s Cursed Boom
The corporatist model fell upon hard times during the 1970s. Sagging growth and rising inflation were coupled with increasing public debt. At the same time, an oil boom began to distort the Mexican economy. In 1973, just as new oil reserves came into production, prices surged, going from $3 to $12 per barrel.51
At the same time, social pressure was growing throughout Mexico: farmers, workers, and, most of all, students and urban youth were forming active social movements. Their protests were met with arrest, torture, murder, and even massacre. Ten days before the 1968 Summer Olympics opened in Mexico City, soldiers opened fire on a student protest at La Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco. Some two to three hundred were killed, hundreds more wounded, hundreds arrested and beaten, with scores of bodies taken away and hidden by troops.52
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