The Road Through San Judas

by Robert Fraga

  NAFTA won in the U.S. Congress because Clinton muscled it through. There was a flurry of horse trading. One member of Congress said that he had been offered so many bridges for his district that all he needed now was a river. A former head of American Express said of Clinton that he had “stood up against his two prime constituents, labor and environment, to drive it home over their dead bodies.”

  The least that could be said about the price Clinton paid for double-crossing his allies was that it contributed to the Democrats’ loss of the House of Representatives in the 1994 election. That set the stage for Clinton’s impeachment four years later.

  What about the prospective trading partners of the U.S.? They didn’t really count in the overall scheme of things. “We are two very thin slices of bread and the top and bottom of a huge sandwich.” Those were the words of one Canadian diplomat.

  When all was said and done, was it worth the struggle? Here is the résumé of a rather lopsided balance sheet: two-way trade between the U.S. and Mexico expanded over a six-year period, rising from $100 billion in 1994 to $248 billion in 2000, one year after Mexico replaced Japan as this country’s second largest trading partner. Laredo and El Paso, Texas, found themselves among the busiest ports in the country.

  NAFTA supporters claimed that the agreement had created six million jobs in the U.S. In early 2006, Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, made the point that the state of Ohio had gained three hundred thousand manufacturing jobs over the first two years of NAFTA. But in 2006, the state’s unemployment figures rose nearly 6 percent from the spring of that year to the fall. What happened? Replacing human workers with robots was part of the answer. A transfer of job abroad was another factor, although Reich was quick to point out that American jobs went to China, not Mexico.

  There was, naturally, another thoroughly caustic view of the matter, one that inspired a cartoon published in 2000 in a Mexican daily, the one reproduced at the beginning of this chapter. It showed a ragged Mexican campesina confronted by a stylishly dressed and bearded entrepreneur. It involved a play on words: when the entrepreneur, his arms spread wide to the heavens, intones in English the phrase “Free Trade!” the peasant woman—a hawk-nosed hag with a weary-looking kid in her shawl and an empty plate in her hand—cackles back “Free Joles!” i.e. frijoles, kidney beans in Spanish, a staple of the Mexican diet; the first syllable in that word is pronounced like “free.”

  The consequences of the agreement were indeed dire for Mexico. While growth had increased in Latin America to nearly 2 percent since 2000, Mexico’s remained stubbornly below 1 percent. The poverty rate in the region has fallen dramatically since 2000, dipping from 44 percent to 28 percent. Over the same period of time, Mexico’s has stuck a tad above 52 percent.

  NAFTA allowed the dumping of U.S.-produced corn on the Mexican market. In 2002, for example, a bushel of U.S. corn sold for $1.74. But it cost $2.66 to produce. Federal government subsidies made up the difference. Mexican corn growers could not hope to compete with the subsidized price of U.S. corn. The result was that Mexican farmers were forced to abandon their land in droves—1.3 million of them, by one conservative estimate, followed in the footsteps of José Bernal’s family.

  The ruin of small corn farmers was, of course, predictable. It offered an example of what has been called the “creative destruction” of working capitalism: the inefficient wither away in the face of the more efficient. This is what the Salinas government and its successors wanted. The elimination of small Mexican farms provided a source of still more cheap labor for foreign investors in Mexico. Ten years after NAFTA came into effect, the New York Times asserted that “Mexican officials say openly that they long ago concluded that small agriculture was inefficient, and that the solution for farmers was to find other work.”

  But that was not so simple. In the ten years after its implementation, Mexico gained more than half a million jobs in the poor-paying maquiladoras that pimple the U.S.-Mexico border. But it lost one hundred thousand jobs in the non-maquila sector of its economy. The net result was to replace higher-paying jobs with jobs that paid less.

  What’s more, not all the displaced peasant farmers in Mexico could be absorbed by Mexican industry. One million peasants driven off their land were left unaccounted for. These bankrupted campesinos needed to earn a living somehow. So what became of them? A partial answer to the question is that some became itinerant farmers working for larger farms in Mexico. The complement to that answer is that they crossed the border as wetbacks and wanderers in the wilderness, some to work for the same companies that had put them out of business in Mexico. What had been touted as a benefit of NAFTA—that it would ease the illegal emigration of Mexicans into the U.S.—produced the exact opposite result. “If Washington wants to reduce Mexico’s immigration to the United States,” the New York Times wrote on March 3, 2003, “ending subsidies for agribusiness would be far more effective than beefing up the border patrol.”

  Illegal immigration into this country was a case of chickens coming home to roost. In an Orwellian twist, the failure of NAFTA to solve the problem of illegal immigration was seen as a potential success of the agreement. Some political commentators viewed the flood of Mexican workers who swarmed into the U.S. as a solution (of sorts) to the vexing labor problems in Mexico. It just needed a little tinkering to set things right. Unemployment and sub-subsistence wages drove Mexicans to swim the Rio Grande and to trek across the Arizona desert. What to do? Obviously, legalize what had been illegal: make the migrants legal residents of the U.S. Make it possible for them to stay on in the country as long as they were needed. That was just the ticket. “Free trade will not substantially moderate pressures for migration as long as the social and economic fundamentals continue to encourage movement,” said Mack McLarty of the Clinton administration, one of the most fervent supporters of NAFTA.

  It was not only American politicians who saw migrant labor in a positive light. One of Salinas’ successors as President of Mexico, Vicente Fox, hailed the newly minted braceros of NAFTA as national heroes for sending back home billions of dollars of their pay.

  There is yet another answer to the question about the fate of displaced peasants, and it is the most sobering. Many campesinos forced to abandon their fields found work in the country’s drug cartels.

  For poor Mexicans, NAFTA was a lethal proposition. In 1994, when the agreement came into effect, their minimum wage bought almost 45 pounds of tortillas. A little less than a decade later, it bought less than 20. The 24.5 liters of gas (for cooking and heating) that it bought in 1994 had—by 2003—dwindled to 7.

  The border region between the U.S. and Mexico became a sliver of a boomtown. It could not cope with the influx of refugees from elsewhere in Mexico. It could not cope with the industrial pollution that the burgeoning maquilas produced. Toxic waste was dumped hither and yon, in the rivers and on the land.

  One positive, if unintended, consequence of NAFTA’s adoption was the meteoric growth of a homegrown revolt against the Mexican government. This one made headlines throughout the world. It was the Zapatista rebellion, which erupted on January 1, 1994, the day that NAFTA was launched.

  As many as five hundred people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, were killed in the first twelve days of fighting during the first month of the Zapatista insurrection. Shortly thereafter, one hundred thousand protesters filled the Zocaló of Mexico City to demand the withdrawal of the Mexican army from the jungles of Chiapas. Twenty years after it began, the revolt still controlled a handful of municipalities in Chiapas.

  Who were these revolutionaries and what did they want?

  The movement was named after Emiliano Zapata, the national folk hero who fought during the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910 and continued sporadically for the next ten years. The Zapatista movement took shape during the 1980s in response to peasants’ frustration with their situation in the country. The indigenous people of Mexico endured conditions tantamount to sl
avery. Preparations for NAFTA were the straw that broke the camel’s back. At the insistence of the U.S., Carlos Salinas modified part of the Mexican Constitution—Article 27—which had provided the legal framework for the distribution of communally owned land called ejidos. By the time NAFTA came on the scene, about half the farmland in the country was in the form of ejidos. When Salinas acted to abolish them, there were literally thousands of ejido petitions pending before the Agrarian Reform Commission. With his obliteration of land reform, communities throughout the country lost all hope of achieving ejido status. Peasants were fed up with their government’s neglect.

  Zapatista groups in Chiapas began to consider whether they should unleash armed resistance to the government. Despite resistance from the Catholic Church, the decision was made to launch attacks on government targets. They pounced on the first day of the year 1994. While the ruling party was hosting a glittering gala at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, the Zapatistas—otherwise known as Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN)—were hacking their way through the jungles of Chiapas. They quickly seized the capital of the state, San Cristóbal de las Casas. Immediately thereafter, the insurgents ransacked the city’s Palacio Municipal. They tossed the building furniture and the half-shredded documents that they had grabbed from the civil registrar’s office into the square below. Then they doused the pile with kerosene and struck a match to it.

  Eyewitness reports of what happened that New Year’s Day conveyed the excitement that gripped the city when the Zapatistas took control of San Cristóbal and other localities in Chiapas. One observer—a journalist named Gaspar Morquecho—was returning to town after attending a party when he encountered a roadblock. He circumvented it by detouring through the parking lot of a filling station. When he arrived in the center of San Cristóbal, he asked one of the Zapatista soldiers what the hell was coming off. The man tore a poster off a wall where it had just been affixed and handed it to the journalist. Morquecho could smell the fresh glue on the poster. It was the movement’s declaration of war against the government of Mexico.

  Morquecho could not sleep that night. He roamed the city center at will despite the presence of Zapatista soldiers in the street. He was euphoric. After the failure of so many movements in the past fifteen years, he felt hope springing up in his heart.

  “At last,” he said, “something was happening in this fucking country.”

  The following day the army arrived in San Cristóbal. The Zapatistas melted back into the jungle. In fact, the EZLN had no realistic hope of defeating the government of Mexico and its army. Their mission, even in their own eyes, appeared suicidal. But the revolutionaries believed that their word was stronger than the sword or the bayonet or the MK-47 or anything else in their foe’s arsenal. Theirs was what has been called a war of magic. The spirit, they believed, could vanquish steel bullets.

  The bishop of San Cristóbal, Samuel Ruiz, brokered a ceasefire that ended the fighting later in January 1994. Although he had not condoned the Zapatista uprising, Bishop Ruiz was a well-known advocate of liberation theology—a movement in the Catholic Church that identified with the poor—and he was sympathetic to the plight of the indigenous people of Mexico. He was the right man at the right place at the right time. He lived with his flock, learning their languages, eating the beans and tortillas that they ate, and discovering for himself what their living conditions were like. He experienced a sort of conversion in reverse, and this set him at odds with the mestizo establishment of Chiapas, who called him “el Obispo Rojo” (the Red Bishop).

  The bishop’s offences included organizing peasant cooperatives and teaching Indian culture and traditions. “They are God’s people, every one of them just as much as a white person is,” he said of the indigenous people of Chiapas and, by extension, of Mexico and Latin America in general. “But one thousand Indians do not matter when one white person speaks out.”

  The Zapatistas’ stress on autonomy led to the creation of governing groups, juntas de buen gobierno, whose members were selected to serve for one year. These groups, which governed regions under Zapatista control, gained a reputation for honesty and transparency. Given the movement’s allegiance to autonomous governance, it was not surprising that no orthodox leadership emerged in the EZLN. Its iconic spokesman was known for the better part of his public life as Subcomandante (Sup) Marcos.

  Marcos was not himself an indigenous Indian although it was hard to say what he looked like. He was always photographed wearing a black ski mask, sometimes with a skull-and-bones eye patch over the right eye. He was often seen smoking a long-stemmed pipe. The ski mask became the trademark of the Zapatista movement. It struck terror in the hearts of the ruling class. The government claimed that Marcos’s real name was Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente and that he was the son of Spanish immigrants and had attended the Sorbonne in Paris, but there is no record of this.

  Marcos is the embodiment of mystery. Like Jesus, he often spoke in riddles. He once said, when asked his age, that he was 518. He described himself this way:

  Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristóbal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Québec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10:00 p.m., a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student, and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.

  Marcos himself disappeared for four or five years at the beginning of the new century, only to reappear in August 2005, emerging from the jungle to preside over a series of meetings. Their purpose was to chart the next phase of the Zapatistas’ struggle, la Otra Campaña, in order to avert a situation where “they will finish off the country before we are done.”

  La Otra Campaña would be peaceful. It would be a different approach to politics. The EZLN would respect “the privilege of the ear.”

  The revolutionaries launched their campaign on January 1, 2006, the twelfth anniversary of the Zapatistas’ first attacks in Chiapas. Sup Marcos, still the most recognizable and charismatic of the movement’s leaders, traveled the length and breadth of the land, touching down in each of Mexico’s thirty-one states. He made the trip on a motorbike à la Che Guevara, and throngs of admirers, “chanting and whistling,” greeted him. His ski-masked face appeared everywhere, on tee shirts, posters, and badges.

  His message was simple and clear: Land to the Peasants.

  And the Zapatistas were heard the length and breadth of Mexico. One man to hear their message and to take it to heart was José Bernal, Ojos del Lobo, the dark-skinned Mexican American volunteer who had grown up in San Judas and East L.A., the man who had worked on Alfred Von Bachmayr’s insulation project in San Judas.

  OJOS DEL LOBO

  The extended Bernal family had always been a restless bunch. Two of José Bernal’s uncles, both older than his Dad, had decamped for the U.S. years before, leaving only José’s immediate family behind in the cornfields of Chiapas. But unlike his brothers, who had left voluntarily in search of a better life, José’s father had no choice but to pull up stakes and migrate northward in the late 1970s. He did not wait for the advent of NAFTA to go bankrupt. He simply could not earn a living, not even on the rock-bottom terms of subsistence farming.

  The family had no clear idea where they were going. Possibly the U.S. border. But they had no visas to enter the country. And they had very little money. So the Bernals made their way north to an uncertain destination with nothing in pocket to get there. Occasionally they took buses. Sometimes a kindly truck driver offered them a lift. One particularly harrowing segment of the trek placed them on the top of a freight train along with a bevy of other destitute voyagers. For the most part, these were Salvadorans, peasants fleeing the civil war in that country, but there was a mix of peoples from all over Central America as well as Mexico. Young José was thrilled by this train ride. He might have be
en terrified, but the train wasn’t going fast and there was his reliable Dad to hang on to. People on overpasses would sometimes throw tortilla wraps to the migrants as they passed beneath them.

  When the money threatened to run out, the family stopped, and José’s Dad would find work as an itinerant laborer on a big hacienda. Along with other migrant workers, the family lived in a cardboard and wood pellet shack, separated by an eroded ravine from the owners’ big house. Papa Bernal endured the contempt and physical abuse of the hacienda manager to earn a handful of pesos for picking corn, herding sheep, and slaughtering chickens. José saw how his father was treated. He shared his father’s humiliation at the hands of managers who wore cowboy boots and vaquero hats and yelled orders at the campesinos under their command. But he was too young to articulate his feelings of injustice. That was just the way it was, perhaps the way it had always been. But it was still wrong, and young José determined quietly, in a childish way, that when the time came he would do something to put right what was unjust.

  After a couple of weeks of tenant farming, the family continued to wend its way northward to an unpromising future, an unknown land, possibly the U.S.—but who knew?—a country where José had two uncles, a country that the Bernal family had no way of entering, no prospective status as legal immigrants, no papers of any sort. In a word, nothing.

  The Bernals got to the border at San Judas. This happened not by design but by random happenstance. There they stopped. Papa Bernal was worn out. He didn’t have the energy to scale fences or ford concrete-walled water conduits. The land without promise lay beyond his reach.

  José’s mother found work in one of the maquilas. His Dad cobbled together a shack of cinderblocks and waste lumber. It wasn’t much, but it provided a shelter. It offered a degree of stability and routine in the life of a family that had known little of either for months.