by Robert Fraga
By contrast, the leader of the revolutionary forces in the southern state of Moralos, Emiliano Zapata, left a more lasting and positive mark on the country. Born in 1879, he gained notoriety by protesting the seizure of peasant-owned land by a wealthy farmer. For his pains, he was arrested, then pardoned and inducted into the Mexican army. He served for only six months. Upon his return to civilian life, he resumed the peasants’ struggle against landowners who would not stop stealing people’s land. Zapata tried to have land restored by peaceful means, sometimes using ancient title deeds to establish claims. Increasingly, when that failed, he and his followers forcefully seized disputed land and distributed it as he saw fit.
Emiliano Zapata was a handsome hombre, what in Latin America is called a mestizo, part Indian, part Spanish. Photos of the man showed his face overshadowed by an enormous sombrero of the kind mariarchi band members wear. Above his mouth spread a bristling handlebar mustache. Black circles lay beneath his deep-set, unflinching eyes. He was the iconic Mexican revolutionary.
In one photograph, taken in Zapata’s younger years, he wore a basketball jersey, revealing the tattoos that covered his arms and upper chest.
Tattoos play an important role in Mexican culture. They go as far back as the early thirteenth century when they appear in both Aztec and Mexica codices. Dogs, snakes, and jaguars figure prominently in pre-Columbian tattoos. These animals are spiritual guides. They convey symbolic power to the men across whose biceps and pectoral muscles the animals frolic.
In colonial Mexico, the Catholic Church took a jaundiced view of tattoos, which it considered relics of a pagan past. This, of course, was true. One inspired the frontispiece for this book: a grinning, sombrero-wearing skeleton, strumming on a guitar and festooned with red roses. This is a figure commonly associated with the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Although el Dia de Muertos is a Catholic feast day, subsumed in All Saints Day, the skeleton has its bony roots in Aztec culture.
Mexican prison tattoos can be read like a book, explaining who the wearer is, what he is doing time for, and where he has been. The tattoos offer some protection in jail, since they establish a gang identity for the person tattooed. Tattoos acquired in prison are the product of a needle dipped in ink and drilled into the skin. Tear drops are a common tattoo: a tear drop indicates that the wearer has killed someone, and the number of tear drops shows the wearer’s number of victims. They are like notches on a gunfighter’s belt.
Tattoos serve a useful purpose as well as an ornamental one: they intimidate enemies. Black and grey tattoos, which originated in the barrios of the U.S., spilled across the border into Mexico where gangs, including gangs with a non-Mexican origin but with Mexican connections (think MS-13), use tattoos as gang logos.
At the beginning of the Mexican Revolution, in the early days of the twentieth century, a victory by Zapata’s men and a simultaneous win by Pancho Villa in the north persuaded the president of the country to surrender power and flee to Europe. A falling-out among the victors of the revolution sent Zapata packing for the hills. The revolution continued, this time with a different government in Mexico City. Zapata’s men—known as Zapatistas—adopted the slogan, Tierra y Libertad (Land and Liberty). “The land belongs to those who till it,” Zapata said. It was probably his most memorable quote. But there were others worth quoting: “Since time immemorial, ignorance and obscurantism have produced nothing more than masses of slaves primed for tyranny.” Or this one, which has a peculiarly Mexican flavor: “If you want to be a bird, then fly. If you want to be a worm, then crawl. But don’t bitch when they crush you underfoot.”
Emiliano Zapata’s primary concern was the distribution of land to the peasants of Mexico. To this end, he established a Rural Loan Bank. It was the country’s first agricultural credit union. A U.S. envoy who visited Zapatista-controlled areas of Mexico in 1917 contrasted what he saw there—what he called “the true social revolution”—with the disorder prevalent in the rest of the country. His description of the situation appeared in a series of articles published in the U.S. When these articles were read to Zapata, he said, “Now I can die in peace. Finally, they have done us justice.”
Zapata’s death was not peaceful. As in the case of Pancho Villa, assassins snuffed him out. The national hero of Mexico was killed in an elaborately staged ambush in the spring of 1919.
Despite his own tumultuous childhood in Germany, Gustav was out of his depth in coping with the ups and downs of Mexican politics in the 1910s. Not so the young Emanuel, who navigated the shoals of revolution with a canny sense of timing and the ability to assess accurately an ever-changing situation. By 1920, thanks to Emanuel’s adroit maneuvering, the Schmidts of Ciudad Juárez emerged from the war richer and more powerful than ever before. In the process of securing the family fortune, Emanuel developed a kind of ruthlessness that was alien to his father and grandfather. He began to buy property from people whose claim to the land they sold was dubious if not outright bogus. Some of Emanuel’s business dealings skipped lightly over the boundaries of legality. Bookkeeping in the offices of the Schmidts became a sleazy proposition. “That’s the way things are done here,” Emanuel said when Gustav questioned some of his son’s entries. By implication, Gustav was too “old country,” too rigid, to compete successfully in the modern world.
The Schmidts had long since assimilated into the life of the country to which Konrad had emigrated, at least on the surface. But a vestige of ancestral linkage remained. Long dormant in his grandfather and father, it glowed like an oxygenated ember in the depths of Emanuel’s soul. This was not a business calculation. It was pure sentiment, an attachment to a country, to a culture and a history, and to a people he had never known. “Sie sind muy macho,” he told Gustav of the Nazis running Germany in the late 1930s, expressing himself in a mixture of Spanish and German. This was how the family spoke among itself, acknowledging the power of das Dritte Reich.
Then Germany altered its policies toward Mexico. Its submarines foolishly sank two Mexican freighters, and Mexico joined the alliance against Hitler in 1942. All Emanuel could do was to shrug and tell anyone who would listen that the situation had changed. There was no question that his reputation had been damaged. But a couple of good business deals soon glossed over the embarrassment of having chosen the wrong ideology and the wrong side of the war.
Emanuel was so busy making money and wielding influence that he postponed marriage far longer than was customary in Mexico. When he did finally choose a wife, she came—naturally—from another of the families of the business elite in north Mexico. Doña Patricia Gasset y Ortega was much younger than Emanuel. She could trace her family back to the conquistadores who arrived in Mexico from Spain in the early sixteenth century. Like Emanuel, she had an agile mind. Her ancestral pride morphed into arrogance as she aged. Friends and acquaintances understood this to be a projection of her personality, of her determination to have her way in all things.
The Schmidts’ son was content to stand in his father’s shadow as he grew up. In this respect, he did not take after Emanuel. Pablo led a cloistered life, educated in Catholic schools and befriending only children of his own background, wealth, and social status. Emanuel wanted his son to aspire to a career as an international businessman. It would be necessary, of course, for him to learn English and to develop contacts in the English-speaking world. So Emanuel made a radical decision, to pack his heir off to a tony U.S. boarding school, then to the most prestigious U.S. university he could gain admittance to. First Hotchkiss in Connecticut, then Stanford in California.
Adjusting to life in the U.S. in the aftermath of World War II took some doing. But young Schmidt was exempt from the most savage anti-Mexican racism, since he came from “a better class of Mexican.” All that made him more acceptable to his classmates, who even gave him an affectionate nickname, the Beaner. When they hazed him about being Mexican, he just shook his head, mumbled something unintelligible, and looked amiable. It was not surprising that his clas
smates’ views rubbed off on him. These views, similar to those he had imbibed from his parents, reinforced the teenage Pablo’s conviction that, yes, obviously he was superior to the bulk of his countrymen with their swarthy skins and Nahuatl/Yucatec features. Return visits to Ciudad Juárez and contact with his parents did nothing to alter Pablo’s opinion of himself. Quite the contrary: these visits just reinforced his growing feelings of racial superiority.
Emanuel was pleased at how his son had turned out after his exposure to life in the States. Shortly after Pablo’s graduation from Stanford and return home, he made him effectively a partner in his business. This was just as well. Emanuel’s health was failing. His heart was now skipping every fourth beat. “You need more rest,” counseled his doctors. “More exercise. Fewer tacos, no more empanadas.”
“I can rest while I’m exercising,” Emanuel declared. He was who he was and could not, would not, change his ways. So Emanuel Schmidt died of the consistencies in his character. His heart skipped its last beat while he was speeding on a desert road. He totaled his new Chevy by wrapping it around a telephone pole. Doctors in both Ciudad Juárez and El Paso tried to revive him but to no avail. Since his son was still a young man, his wife Doña Patricia became a sort of regent for family affairs. Business was something she was good at, since her instincts were sound, and she was as heartless as her late husband. Pablo listened respectfully to her directives, followed her advice, and bided his time waiting for when he could act independently of her. That time never came during her lifetime. Doña Patricia was too strong-willed to relinquish total control of the Schmidt empire.
Toward the end of Emanuel’s life, the family had begun to dabble in philanthropic enterprises. It was good for business, Emanuel argued, since it enhanced the family’s prestige. He renovated at considerable expense an orphanage associated with a local church and renamed it after the family. Outstanding students at Ciudad Juárez schools received awards, also named after the Schmidts. The family funded art fairs and gave generously to the Museum of Fine Arts. Seminarians wishing to pursue their studies at European institutions were eligible for stipends, renewable on a yearly basis. The Schmidts, of course, were on good terms with whoever the bishop of Chihuahua happened to be at any given time.
And there were other enterprises. Early in 1998, U.S. Immigration authorities uncovered a large stash of cocaine under the body of a liquid propane gas truck owned by Schmidt Enterprises. This occurred as the truck was crossing the border between Mexico and the U.S. Both countries launched investigations, but neither came to any conclusions, thanks in part to letters of support for the family from the governor of Chihuahua and a prominent U.S. senator. Other investigations concerning tax evasion and drug smuggling similarly came to naught. Pablo Schmidt led a charmed life as far as his entanglements with the law went.
As the years passed, Pablo came into his own, emerging slowly, painstakingly from the cocoon his parents had woven around him. He took Emanuel’s place on the various commissions and committees his father had been a member of. And it was Pablo who, with the patience of an agile spider, continued to weave the web of relationships and alliances, both legal and illegal, Mexican and American, that Emanuel had begun.
Tirelessly the young Schmidt consolidated what his father had built up in Juárez, but NAFTA fundamentally altered the logistics of business in the north of Mexico. Pablo was quick to realize how that agreement made previously worthless land now strategically valuable. He rummaged among Emanuel’s records and found something that piqued his interest. Apparently Emanuel had an interest in a swath of land to the west of the city that was so desolate that even the rattlesnakes gave it a wide berth. There was nothing as formal as a transfer of title, little more than a couple of letters and a few suspicious-looking stamps, but Pablo read into these documents the basis of a claim to a valuable parcel of land. It was the Schmidt family’s equivalent of the Louisiana Purchase. The property in question lay on the route of a major highway, part of a system of roads that circled the El Paso-Juárez metro region and formed a leg of the NAFTA highway linking the three countries of North America.
This land lay in the colonia of San Judas. And it was the Schmidt family that owned it. Or so Pablo argued. This contention would have tragic and entirely foreseeable consequences.
La Jornado , January 11, 2000.
GENTLEMEN’S AGREEMENT
The buses arrived at 5:00 p.m. sharp. You could set your watch by them. And you could hear them before you saw them, since none of them had functioning mufflers. They juddered down the road, generating clouds of dust as they bounced over the rocks. In a previous lifetime, these vehicles had served as school buses in the U.S. Now they conveyed female workers back and forth from their low-paid jobs in the maquiladoras to the cinder block and wood pallet houses that they shared with their families. The factories where so many of the women living in San Judas worked—some of them for six days a week, fourteen hours a day—were entirely foreign-owned, mostly American but Korean and Taiwanese as well.
Maquiladoras predated NAFTA. They had begun to pop up along the U.S.-Mexico border when the braceros program, which had allowed guest workers from Mexico to take jobs in the U.S. without penalty, had been discontinued in the 1960s. The idea was that these factories would operate in duty-free zones. Materials were imported from the U.S. Finished products were exported duty-free back across the border. After the implementation of NAFTA at the beginning of 1994, the number of maquilas quadrupled. These sweatshops had a lousy reputation. Working conditions were often shockingly bad, mostly because there was no practical way to set up unions to protect the workers.
Here are a couple of for instances: one female worker attempted to get her factory, which produced paints, to provide masks to protect her and her fellow workers from paint fumes. The Mexican government’s response to this request was to try to arrest the woman on charges of “destabilizing the maquiladora industry.” She sought refuge in the U.S. There she filed a complaint against her company and the Mexican government. Need one note that nothing came of it?
A Korean-owned firm in Tijuana paid rock-bottom wages, when it paid them at all. Electrical cables charged with 440 volts wriggled through standing pools of water on the factory floor. Working spaces were unventilated. Streams of chrome-colored piss fouled workers’ restrooms. The company was violating Mexican labor law left, right, and center, and government inspectors routinely filed reports of company abuses. None of these complaints elicited any response. A worker unloaded on his “union” rep who told him, “If you were paying me, then I would help you. But you do not pay me. The one who pays me is the company.”
So much for the maquilas. What about NAFTA?
The concept of a North America Free Trade Agreement began in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan, but nothing concrete was achieved until Bill Clinton became president in 1992. The incoming Democratic administration had to decide on its priorities: Would it push first for a national health program, as Hillary Clinton wanted, or a trade agreement with Canada and Mexico? This is what Robert Rubin and other of the president’s advisors advocated. And this is what Bill Clinton ultimately agreed to. During the 1992 campaign, Clinton had said that he would not support NAFTA unless it came with protection for workers’ rights and environmental standards. After the election, his trade representative Mickey Kantor negotiated what were called side agreements, which aimed to do what Clinton had promised. But these side agreements stood outside NAFTA and did not enjoy the status of that agreement. In fact, they did little more than urge member countries to enforce their own labor and environmental laws. Member countries could ignore them with impunity: Mexico’s finance minister went so far as to assure the Mexican business community that the side agreements were meaningless.
Some political observers believed that Clinton played his hand on the NAFTA negotiations ineptly. The President of Mexico, Carlos Salinas de Gotari, had bet the family farm on securing a trade agreement with the U.S. He would have had to
accept, however grudgingly, provisions to protect labor rights and environmental standards with real teeth to them. The Canadians would also have come along. Clinton’s failure to push on these safeguards would come back to haunt him.
Of course, there was resistance to the agreement from trade unions. They feared that U.S. workers would lose their jobs to cheap Mexican labor. Resistance also came from environmentalists. They worried that outsourcing production to our neighbor to the south would allow industry to evade antipollution regulations. Clinton’s assurances were meant to allay the fears of these constituents.
Noam Chomsky produced one of the most prescient analyses of the outcomes of the agreement in 1994, the year that NAFTA went into effect. “The purpose of NAFTA,” he said, “was to create an even smaller sector of highly privileged people—investors, professionals, managerial classes.”
“It will work fine for them,” the social critic warned, “and the general public will suffer.” His most damning criticism of the pact came later:
The search for profit, when it’s unconstrained and free from public control, will naturally try to repress people’s lives as much as possible. The executives wouldn’t be doing their jobs otherwise.
The flashiest opposition to the agreement came from a Texas businessman who ran for president in 1992 (and again in 1996) as the anti-NAFTA candidate. Ross Perot contributed one memorable phrase to the debate over NAFTA: a “giant sucking sound.” This is what the flood of jobs pouring into Mexico would generate. But Perot offered the pro-NAFTA forces a perfect straw man. It was easy to portray him as a clown, clueless about international commerce. His ignorance would imperil the country’s struggle to emerge from recession. Or so his political opponents claimed. Clinton was endowed with formidable political skills. He managed to make Perot rather than NAFTA the issue.