Summary: This second bulletin is the conclusion of an essay prepared for a book on autonomy as a response and alternative to neoliberal globalization that will be published in 2004 by the solidarity organization Mani Tese from Italy, among others.  The text seeks to refute the positive image that is frequently portrayed in other countries of Mexico’s economic performance, without denying that there are favorable indicators.  Nonetheless, a closer look at the results of the neoliberal model that has been imposed on Mexico during the past two decades shows its failure in terms of improving the welfare of the Mexican people, presenting as a matter of fact the fallbacks in terms of growth, employment, poverty and national revenues.

The Chiapan Economy

The journey of the Mexican economy helps to contextualize the Chiapan economy, as it would be difficult for Chiapas (which generates 1.7% of Mexico’s GNP) to withdraw from the logic and tendencies on a national level.

Due to its difficult geography and location far from the center of power, Chiapas has been lagging behind on important changes in the country.  The popular saying in Chiapas is that the Mexican Revolution of 1910 – 1920 never came to Chiapas; if it is not entirely true, the saying expresses the slowness with which Chiapas has seen changes at the national level.  For example, Chiapas was also marginalized during the industrial boom that Mexico experience after the World War II.

Because it never industrialized, income generation in Chiapas is still based on agriculture (45% of the state GNP is concentrated in farming), and in the exploitation of its abundant natural resources.  Successive waves of men and companies have taken the riches that technology, or the fashion of the moment, have selected as the most profitable, leaving very little in its place, sometimes nothing, for the Chiapans.  In this sense Chiapas continues to be, more than 180 years after Mexico’s independence from Spain, an internal colony of both the country and major corporations.  Francisco Lastra says of the region including Chiapas:

The southeast has functioned as a colony: it supplies energy and cheap primary goods, and receives manufactured goods and expensive services.  Its principal wealth is extracted, petroleum, and in exchange it receives limited resources that do not provide economic development for the region.  (cited in Montoya y Mijangos, 2002)

As a result of this process of mining, Chiapas is today, of the 32 entities in México, the state with the lowest index of human development (figure composed of the index of life expectancy, education, and GNP per capita)  (UNDP, 2003).

Its poverty contrasts with the abundance of products that Chiapas contributes to the country every year.  In recent years, Chiapas has occupied first place on a national level in terms of coffee and African palm production, second place in livestock, and third in corn.  Chiapas is also the principal producer worldwide of organic coffee.  It supplies 45% of Mexico’s hydro-electric energy.  And it is the richest site in biodiversity in the country, and one of the most important in the world.  The state has 33% of Mexico’s rivers, receives 50% of its rainwater, and contains 25% of its surface water.  There could be as many as 50,000 species of plants, mushrooms and animals in Chiapas.  (Governmental Work Group, 1999)

The service sector, principally in tourism, is that which contributes most to the state GNP after agricultural activities.  Tourism reports a healthy development in recent years and occupies 21% of the economically active population, generating 21% of the state GNP.  (State Government of Chiapas, 2004)  But the level of industrialization in the state is very low; even most of the industrialized companies produce agricultural products.  Direct foreign investment is concentrated in just 33 companies located in 8 municipalities.

On the subject of liberalization in Chiapas, Villafuerte and Garcia are convincing:

Neoliberalism in Chiapas, far from having generated a process of productive investment, has contributed to the extension of levels of sub-development in all economic and social sectors; the poverty has increased significantly and all levels of unemployment and sub-employment are worrisome, even when the official statistics tell us otherwise.  The slow and silent death of important segments of the population, as a consequence of the effects of the neoliberal model, by condemning them to misery, lack of jobs, and the impossibility of counting on the most elemental means of life is as lacerating as the tragic occurrences of Acteal […] The greatest investor in Chiapas was the State, so that its reduction has contributed to the spread of the crisis, dragging the “business sector,” to the rural producers to the great mass of peasants who, worse than well, through subsidies, could provide for their precarious means of life.” (Villafuerte and Garcia, 1998)

To understand the complexity of the situation in rural areas, examine the data in Table 3, and you will see the land sowed of ten crops in Chiapas, during a period that includes the years before NAFTA and after it took after on January 1^st, 1994.

TABLE 3: Evolution of the Land Sowed in the Primary Crops of Chiapas, 1992 to 2002 (Hectares Cultivated)

Source: Anuario Estadístico de Chiapas y de México, varios números, INEGI.

There are many aspects of the table on agricultural production in Chiapas:

·         Despite the entry of subsidized grains and with the effect of the US’s “dumping” under NAFTA, the sowing of corn and beans has not diminished and there are important increases in the area farmed.

·         Rice has not been able to overcome foreign competition and is being abandoned.

·         Despite the dramatic fall in the price of coffee (more than 70% since the 1996-1997 cycle), coffee has maintained a moderate growth.

·         Tropical products (sugarcane, plantains, and mangos) have maintained or increased their production, with the exception of avocado and cocoa, which have not recovered after a major fall in production in the 1990’s.

Some tendencies, like the collapse in rice production, were expected, due to the opening of markets to the importation of cheaper prices from the exterior (at dumping prices).  Surprisingly, nonetheless, that before the same foreign competition, the production of corn, beans, wheat, and taking into account their particular problems, even coffee and sugarcane production have held strong.

These tendencies have the following possible explanation.  On the one hand, the increase in certain tropical products, especially fruits, are understood by the elimination of taxes and other barriers to their exportation in the US and Canada.  The production and industrialization, for example, of dried mango, is primarily in the hands of private corporations and, because they are tropical, they are products that do not have competition in the North.

As for corn and beans, we can postulate that their production does not generally enter into the markets, because most peasants, the principal producers of these crops in Chiapas, continue with these crops as a survival strategy that guarantees nourishment independently of prices.  The stability in coffee production, despite the crash in price, could be explained by the fact that 26% of production is of organic coffee, which receives a higher price than non-organic coffee, and that is also destined for fair trade markets that guarantee a minimum price, higher than the costs of production.

From the table and other studies (see, for example, Polasi 2003) we detach the Chiapan peasants’ strategy of survival from a model that has condemned them to what Villafuerte and Garcia call a “slow and silent death.”  The peasants’ strategy to survive the hounding of neoliberalism consists of:

a) expanding the agricultural frontier, particularly in basic grains and other products for family consumption.  Such expansion is happening increasingly on marginal lands, and in general with poor yields per hectare.  But by working towards self-consumption, far from the market oscillations, everything produced is consumed and used;

b) the peasants are sowing various products for sale and/or export that give a modest profit, as could be with coffee and other non-traditional products (flowers, exotic or introduced fruits, macadamia nuts, etc.);

c) the ranching borders in the hands of indigenous peasants has expanded to new and marginal lands with lower profit margins, but that do generate at least a minimal income;

d) the peasant takes advantage of the natural resources around him (particularly forests), tilling the earth for survival, even though there is no way to guarantee its long-term sustainable exploitation;

e) some crops of marginal profitability will possibly become viable if they are taken into account with limited subsidies granted by the State to certain products and crops; and

f) at least part of the peasant family is obliged to migrate to urban areas within México and to the United States.

As for the last part, today Chiapas has converted itself into one of the principal departments that sends its labor to the United States, according to a study by the Colegio de Mexico (Dávalos, 2004).  According to official data, 90,000 Chiapans leave the state annually in search of better opportunities.  The money they send home has become an important transfusion for the Chiapan economy, since the US $380 million dollars sent to Chiapas constitute 4.5% of the state’s GNP (Gonzalez, 2003), or proportionately more than military spending of the total budget of the United States.

As is the case on a national level, the state government does not have plans to respond directly to the problems of poverty in Chiapas.  There are declarations, diagnostics and analysis, but no programs focused on resolving the problems detected.  The current governments in Mexico and Chiapas are limited to implementing neoliberal policies, including legislative and constitutional changes that facilitate the transfer of state resources to private entities.

By Way of Summary

Today the federal government has renounced what was called in Mexico the “autonomous state economy.”  Its intervention will continue to be limited to using measures that promote the spread of liberalization, on the one hand, and greater integration to the United States, “profound integration,” on the other.

The abandonment of the autonomous economy also signifies the renouncement of all structural measures that could correct the fall in standards of living of the Mexican people.  There is some limited assistance to assist families in extreme poverty, but this assistance does not deal with the factors that create inequality and poverty.  The abandonment of the State of its post-revolutionary responsibility has in some cases dramatic appearances, because it has meant a progressive obliteration of diverse indigenous cultures.  When the peasants and indigenous Chiapas, forced by hunger and lack of opportunities, abandon their communities, some forever, the cosmo-vision is undone, an identity, a history, and finally, a part of the Mexican nation’s cultural richness disappears.  We call this the economic path to cultural genocide.

To the misfortune of the Mexicans, the current government only offers the spread of a model that has worked poorly for the majority of the population.  In this insistence the government guides itself by ideological concepts that, as Dussel points out, work perfectly within their own schemes, but that are, in the literal sense, destroying communities and nations.  The Mexicans have an invading sense of loss of direction when they lose their identity.

Profound Integration

Certainly, the country is not headed towards a future that sounds attractive for the majority of all Mexicans.  But the country does have a path, and it is determined by the elites.  Already integrated into the United States, the Mexican economy could not possibly seem to be more dependent on its neighbor, and nonetheless, for the political-economic elite of the country, it would lack one more possibly definitive step, its eventual “profound integration” with the United States.  It is already a topic of concern and debate in Canada, since the private initiative, through the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the rightist think-tank C.D. Howe pleaded that Canadians abandon notions of autonomy, and above all, independence, with respect to the United States.  The inevitable, they said, is just around the corner, and it is better to be prepared.  What is coming, they say, is a common border, a common currency, a North American military force, homologation of security, immigration and refugee policies, the expedition of a unified identification card – that is to say, the fusion of the two countries.

The consolidation of this radical and integrationist discourse of the Canadian elite accelerated after September 11^th, when it became evident that for the United States “security trumps commerce.”  The United States will not skimp in protecting its security, even though this means closing its borders and braking commerce, as effectively occurred at the end of 2001.  Seeing that the “war on terror” was outlined as long-term, the Canadian elite, with established commercial ties with the United States, accepted the necessity of “profound integration” in order to avoid eventual shocks.  In other words, so that commerce does not stop, the two countries would have to be, in essence, one.  The obvious proposal would enormously benefit national security interests of the United States, not only in the obvious sense of shielding together a common border, but also in terms of access to important Canadian natural resources.  This radical proposal would mean the abolition of all of Canada’s control of its abundant natural resources (water, gas, forests, hydroelectric energy and other energy sources), and would open the path to their control by US companies.  (Barlow, not dated)

As an example of the steps that are already being taken, in 2002, Minister of Defense of Canada, Art Eggleton, pushing the project of profound integration, said that the Bush administration would not back down in creating an “American command” that would integrate the armed forces of the United States, Canada and Mexico, and that the sovereignty of the weaker neighbors would run great risk if it rejected the Pentagon’s project.  (Fazio, 2002)

The Mexican elites also hope for something similar to profound integration.  The economist Rolando Cordera says:

Every day it is more clear… that the obligated change of priorities in the American political exterior will affect the strategic design that the [Fox government] had outlined, within which the central role of the decision to “go further” than the Free Trade Agreement, in search of a more solid North American integration, as an inescapable condition to also go beyond the restrictions of economic policies generally associated with the Washington Consensus.  (Cordera, op. cit.)  [emphasis added]

The intention to head towards a greater integration is clear.  One unmistakable sign is the growing integration of the armed forces of Mexico in plans, strategies, tactics, equipment, training, practice, methodologies, financing and logic with the United States.  After a long history of maintaining a distance from their North American counterparts, today the tendency of the Mexican armed forces is one of greater integration and cooperation.  (Sierra, 2000)

Alternatives and Conclusions

Without a State that looks out for the best interests of the majority of the population, the country will continue on the path that the elite take it in their own interests.  The country and its population need and deserve a better destiny.

The Nobel Prize winner in economics Joseph Stiglitz affirms that, to generalize, it is increasingly necessary to push ideologies to one side and recuperate what worked in the past, among those the notion of the autonomous State economy.  (Stiglitz, 2004)  The vindication of a State that promotes the interests of the nation as a whole opens possibilities of re-evaluating what worked in Mexico in terms of job creation, poverty alleviation, and closing the gap between the rich and the poor.

Another fundamental factor in the construction of a different model than the current one will be the reclamation of the lost importance in the past twenty years of production for local markets, without underrating the importance of exporting to world markets.  Among many measures that the reanimation of the local market would implicate, we would have to “create and strengthen productive chains of added value, in particular those that incorporate small and medium businesses” (Dussel, op. cit.).  It would require a long-term outlook and the creation of conditions for local growth.  Fundamental decisions about the direction of the country would have to be revised, including the current version of NAFTA.  Programs designed primarily for companies have drained the country of funds, such as the bank rescue (which in 2002 totaled US $34 billion, or eight times more than the annual budget for social programs) and the payment of external debt that is approximately US $151 billion will have to be reverted.

For the creation of conditions that the country needs to design and implement a different model, it would not be necessary to despise the still weak, and conjunctive, variation in the correlation of forces in Latin America, in terms of governments (Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela), that do not are fighting to the death policies of liberalization and corporate globalization.  Brazilian president Inácio Lula da Silva’s initiatives to unite poor countries to decelerate the advance of the neoliberal project would be fitting for emulation in Mexico.  It is true, the electoral route of raising up “popular” candidates has generated great levels of dissatisfaction, if not deception, in Latin America.  But the growing force and success of tactical alliances and strategies in the FTAA and WTO summits of the countries with governments more in sync with the majority (that is to say, more democratic governments), aiming for the option at the polls, as another front for the struggle that will also have to be re-valued.

As the city of Porto Alegre and the state of Rio Grando do Sul en Brazil, and to a certain degree México City in recent years, have shown, what the federation does is not destiny.  These entities have been able to take new measures to guarantee greater access to education, health, food, transportation and housing.

These macro-level considerations must be combined with others on a global level, the level of millions of people who are looking for ways to live from today to tomorrow.  One of the alternatives on a small scale with greater theoretical and practical support is the solidarity economy.  This alternative is defined as “an alternative strategy of and for the popular majority, in economic, social, political and cultural scores, based on its own organizational and productive force, that has as its purpose resolving the problems of poverty and social marginalization in rural and urban areas, as well as contribute to the elimination of the generating causes of the same problems.”  (Montoya, 1993)

With its variants, the Zapatistas in Chiapas have propelled an alternative created from the base.  When combining autochthonous elements with ideas of the solidarity economy, they have brought a practice with enormous sacrifice that has been praised in the counter-summits and alternative forums: the construction of alternatives from the bottom up.  In the economic, political, social, and cultural arenas, they are creating a national and inclusive project, diametrically opposed to the profound integration of the elites.  They are using the space won by the Zapatistas, not only the physical, territorial space, but also conceptual and political spaces.  The Zapatista autonomy in construction is the realization of collective dreams, not just in the Zapatista cities, but also in growing sectors of the world population.

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