In Chiapas, the maquiladoras haven’t arrived as quickly as had been hoped nor at the accelerated rate at which indigenous and campesino peoples are migrating to the United States; nor at the same rate as the strong, growing rate of indigenous autonomy.

In the context of looking for alternatives and exchanging experiences, four indigenous and campesino people from Chiapas, two men and two women, travelled to the north of the country – the land of the maquiladoras -- in November 2004, in order to participate in the 15^th Anniversary of the Coalition for Peace and Justice in Maquiladoras (la Coalición por la Justicia en las Maquiladoras – CJM).  After this great experience, one of the women affirmed:  “This is like a prison.  I prefer a few tortillas in my community to living in the maquiladoras”. 

In the northern border of Mexico, in the state of Tamaulipas, the marquiladoras corridor is amazing enormous.  In the city of Reynosa alone, there are ten industrial parks with 170 maquiladoras miserably employing 73 000 workers, the majority originating from the state of Veracruz.  Most of this is electronics and automobile industry.  These same maquiladoras make steering wheels for different brands of vehicles. 

The government makes all of its services available to these industrial parks using money from the public treasury: lighting and electric installations, water, streets and paving, drainage services or draining of rivers or nearby neighbourhoods and ejidos, telephone services, construction of the buildings where the factories will set up; they don’t pay property taxes and they even install security stations with police officers who control who enters the area.  Meanwhile, in the nearby neighbourhoods and ejidos, people live in misery, pay taxes and rent for their homes, they lack water and electricity services much less police patrols or presence to bring public security.  In the maquiladora in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, it’s the same.  The millionaire owner doesn’t pay salaries nor property taxes.  These are paid for by us, the citizens, with our taxes.

With the experience in Reynosa we became aware of the misery in which the people, the majority of them, women, live in the hell of the maquiladoras.  In these maquilaordas, people older than 30-35 years old are not accepted for employment, so they are condemned to unemployment.  They also don’t hire people with a high degree of education because they fear their capacity to organize or defend their human rights.  That is, they want people to be ignorant as if only an education were required to know what is unjust.  There are even maquiladoras that hire girls as young as 13 years old.  Women are required to undergo a pregnancy test when they apply for employment and, once hired, they are examined every menstrual period to ensure that they are not pregnant.  Many maquiladoras change their name constantly in order to create “another” maquiladora and in this way they can avoid paying profits to their workers at the end of the year.

Workers at the maquiladoras are not permitted to drink water on the job in order to avoid having them leave their work posts (moreover bathrooms and water are scarce).  If they do leave their post, the workers only have five minutes permission to go to the bathroom and another person must cover their post during that time so that production is not delayed.  The women must meet their cuota each day or else they are fired.  So, they must maintain continuous production repeating the same movement all the time in order to put a handle on a bag or sew a certain piece of an article of clothing.  This is also reflected in the fact that maquiladoras exports in the first five months of 2004 were 21.8% greater than the for the same period in 2003:  Total sales have grown 21.2%.

These workers earn 250 pesos a week or at most, 400 pesos.  At the same time, they must pay to rent their houses which generally range around at least 1 500 to 2 000 pesos per month and they spend another 500 pesos per month to get to the industrial park where the maquiladora is located.  Everything they earn is spent on rent and transportation.  With good reason the concept of “Maquila” is now understood – it comes from Arabic and it means, “the portion of the grain, flour or oil that belongs to the grinder for the grinding.”

The profits of the companies given what they pay their workers is immoral.  For example, a person in Canada will pay $34 for a GAP shirt and the worker that makes it in El Salvador earns 27 cents of a dollar to make it.  The Maquiladora Solidarity Network in Toronto, Canada, calculates that the president of Nike earns $215 million dollars per year which is equal to ten times the earnings of all of its 55 000 Indonesian workers.

If one of the employees works more turns and hence earns more money, various deductions are invented to lower the pay to the minimum required in order to avoid having the company make greater social loans or tax payments.  For example, they can deduct a fee for the rental of the space used to work, or they deduct the cafeteria or meal services of the workers – even if they haven’t used the service and they take their sandwiches to work each day.  They are given just half an hour for meals.  And, as if that weren’t enough, workers are required to sing the Japanese company’s anthem or whichever company’s anthem before beginning work or during working hours.  Not doing so gets them fired.  With these anthems, the goodness of the company to the workers is emphasized.

Workers in the abrasives maquiladoras have black hands for two months after having left their job.  Generally security equipment is null.  There are women who have been left with amputated fingers due to the machinery and who were never compensated and who continue to work in the same maquiladora.  In the case of pregnant women, the doctors lie to them about the expected birth date so that the women will keep working as long as possible, losing the paid work days to which they are entitled.  “There are women who have given birth at the maquiladora and from there, they went off to the hospital”, says one of them.

These places are real ovens when, for example in Reynosa, temperatures rise to 40 degrees Celsius.  Inside the factory building, the heat is even more suffocating and there may be just two or three simple fans for all of the piles of personnel.  If one of the workers “doesn’t cooperate” the “supervisor” simply doesn’t renew the contract that is completed either monthly or every three months.  Sexual harassment is  a daily occurrence.  In some maquiladoras, workers are forced to take the medicine, “Naproxen” (even the pregnant ones) so that their muscles don’t hurt.  At other maquiladoras they are forced to take birth control pills each day or pills that keep the workers’ bodies accelerated so that they can handle the rhythm at work.

The level of dependence is “total”.  In urban zones, it is prohibited to have chickens, pigs or other domestic food animals at home as an alternative food source.  When the workers manage to obtain social interest house credit, they are forced to obey all that the maquiladora company asks of them without asking for anything in return, given that now they must pay for their house.  You have to behave well.  It is a vicious cycle. 

Contamination and pollution of the maquiladora industrial parks is serious.  A Dupont chemical factory leaves its toxic wastes in the open air resulting in children being born with spina bifida.  Deadly illnesses reach all of the people of the ejido that has been fighting, even at the international level, without anybody doing anything.  The maquiladoras enjoy total impunity.

All of the unions have been bought by the maquiladora companies.  The maquiladoras do not take in workers except through the union.  Workers must go through the union which designates the factory and industrial park they will work at and the hours they work (there are three shifts:  7 a.m. to 5 p.m., 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. and 2 a.m. to 11 a.m.).    The unions do not defend the workers but rather the company.  Their bought leaders do the dirty work including using violence to remove workers that are doing some kind of strike or defending the interests of the workers.  In many cases the union does not create the contracts corresponding to its affiliated workers with the maquiladora company and so, when demands are made by the workers, there is simply no contract.

In the case of a worker whose shift begins at 7 a.m., she gets up at four in the morning so that by five in the morning she can be at the place where the bus passes (the maquiladoras pick up their employees) which means walking far; the bus does its route and arrives before her shift.  If she misses the bus, she misses the day as there is no other public transportation to the maquiladoras located several kilometres outside the city or urban zone.  She may even lose her job as each worker is given three opportunities to miss a day of work.

The maquiladora companies often change to other industrial parks in the region or in other border states.  Their machinery is easily dismantled and the building is left so that another maquiladora can arrive at any time.  Or, they may go off to China.  There is no other option.  This is the worst scenario glimpsed for 2005 and with it, an unprecedented employment crisis and increase in poverty.  It is possible that in 2005, now that China enters the World Trade Organization without tariff restrictions, high unemployment will cause a wave of people going to the United States.

If some worker thinks to demand that her human rights and her physical and moral integrity be respected, or if she demands working conditions that are minimally dignified, her contract is simply not renewed and she is “black-listed”.  This black list is shared among the maquiladora companies in all parts of the industrial parks.  These companies meet every week to share information and to develop the same work criteria and policies.  And thus, nobody hires them.  The doors to life are closed because the maquiladoras have become the only source of employment.  “When they realized that I was the sister of someone that had been fired for demanding her rights, they didn’t give me a job in any of the maquiladoras” – said one youth.  Another youth commented that, “My mother is registered on a list with her photograph at the security stations at the entrance to the industrial park”.

In this border region, the members of the ejidos cannot compete with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA – TCL in Spanish).  Without credits for the countryside and without access to water (85% of the water goes to the United States), the campesinos have stopped growing crops and went to work in the maquiladoras.  They sold the land at cheap prices and the new hoarders of the lands are big transnationals that grow corn with great advantages:  water and cheap land.

For three years, the ejido members along the border region did not water their lands due to a supposed agreement that forced Mexico to hand over the water to the United States.  The irrigation channels  were paid for by the ejido members years earlier and now the beneficiaries are the big corporations.  The few campesinos who are still living on the land have to fight continually for the authorities to open the water to their irrigation channels for their corn and sorghum crops which they sell at 1 200 to 1 500 pesos per tonne; or the oranges that are sold for 2 000 pesos per tonne.  The Ejido and Urban Lands Certification Program (PROCEDE is its Spanish acronym), in the region led to an increase in property taxes and the ejido members have left the land that remains in ever fewer hands.

In reality, the neoliberal model and its free trade agreements want a countryside without farmers where only heavy equipment and highly subsidized large corporations fit.  For example, the requirements when applying for “rural financing” credits at Banrural are (what’s written in parenthesis is our own commentary):

1)      Patrimonial relation:  income and expenses in the last cycle (And if there was no income from past harvests?  And if the people are so poor that they can’t even dream of an income?)

2)      Proof of residence:  electricity, telephone, property tax dated no later than the past three months (And if the campesino does not have electricity or a telephone/  And if they don’t want to participate in PROCEDE?)

3)      Personal identification.

4)      Federal Registry of Causantes Document (Causante is a legal term referring to a person from whom a legal right is derived.  The Spanish acronym for this registry is RFC.) (Will a campesino or ejido member have this?)

5)      Unique Code from the Population Registry (CURP  is its Spanish acronym)

6)      Marriage certificate if relevant

7)      Property deed or legal title with the date it was recorded on the public registry of land ownership or the equivalent.

8)      Police background check certificate.

9)      Recent tax record on property and guaranteed goods.

10)   Birth certificate.

11)   Three bank references. (????)

12)   Bank appraisal. (????)

13)   Opening of an account with the participating banks. (????)

14)   Power to release goods. (????)

15)   Judicial authorization to encumber the goods of minors, as required. (????)

16)   Payment of water, as required.

17)   The balance and results of analyses for the last two years with the examination having been no more than three months earlier, for credits greater than $70 000 U.S.. (????)

18)   Quotation of goods to purchase with renovation credits and a report on the useful life of used machinery. (????)

19)   Consultation with the executive committee or representative of the credit receiver and his/her spouse. (????)

20)   Social security application.

So it is obvious that for an ejido member campesino it would be very difficult to meet all of these requirements.  In the case of the government’s PROCAMPO program financed with loans from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, the ejido member must provide the following requirements:

1)      The green sheet demonstrating inscription standing with PROCAMPO.

2)      Birth certificate.

3)      Marriage certificate.

4)      Official identification.

5)      RFC

6)      CURP

7)      The opening of a bank account with Banorte.

8)      Notary power in the case of not being the part of PROCAMPO.

9)      A minimum site size of 30 hectares, individual or in group (Who has 30 hectares now that the campesinos have sold their lands to the corporations?).

After learning about these experiences, one thing was certain for the campesinos and indigenous visitors from Chiapas, “Hopefully the maquiladoras don’t ever arrive in Chiapas, we will fight so that it does not happen.  Wouldn’t it have been great if more of us had come to see this misery.”  Another thought, “we must look for alternatives in the countryside so that we don’t leave the land.”  At the present time, the last spoonful and antidote for fighting neoliberalism is autonomy, rooted in the land and achieving alternatives for a better life.  For this reason, the indigenous and the campesinos are now the main obstacle and enemy of big business and their allied governments.

DELPHI WORKERS IN RESISTENCE

One example of the fight for justice in the maquiladoras is that of the workers of the transnational company, “Delphi, TRW and the Border Industry” which also works for General Motors, Mercedez Benz, Cadillac and Pontiac.  The American corporation has had a long record, since the seventies, with respect to the violation of the human rights of its workers.  Recently it fired five workers, among them three women, for demanding the distribution of the profits that the company had denied them.

In July 2004, the Delphi company in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, declared that it would close some plants and relocate another 1 800 workers to other plants on the other side of the city.  For some workers, that means taking three transportation buses in the middle of the night.  The company only offered the workers on the first shift a 10 000 pesos compensation bonus if they agreed to change over voluntarily.  However the workers say that the government ends up with most of the money since it is subject to tax deductions as well as the INFONAVIT deduction.  The majority of the workers have eight to twenty years of seniority.  The “right-hand workers” of the company [i.e., those normally aligned with the company] united with the union and the company told them that if it didn’t suit them to change plants then they should resign and it wouldn’t pay them compensation.  Being close or reliable didn’t get them any “rights”.  The workers organized themselves and interrupted President Vicente Fox’s tour of Reynosa who told them that he would intervene in the situation.  Finally the workers managed to have the company’s goods legally appropriated and they went to proceed with the seizure as compensation.  However, when the arrived at the plant, nobody was there.  The company had moved everything.

The maquiladoras go to where the greatest profits can be obtained at the expense of the poor.  In the nineties, more than 900 000 employees lost their jobs in the United States in the textile branch and 200 000 in the electronics sector.  These companies moved in search of cheap labour.  In Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama and the Dominican Republic, they employ around 500 000 people.  In Mexico, it is calculated that 25% of the industrial labour force works in the 4 079 maquiladoras located, now not only along the states bordering with the United States but also in the interior of the country.  Large transnationals are already looking for other states in which to exploit cheap labour, infrastructure, resources and “free trade agreements”.  In El Salvador, in 1996, these factories exported around $ 7 097 000 000, but at the same time the companies imported $ 5 415 000 000 worth of goods.

The supposed “development”  of the maquiladoras brings poverty, exploitation, accumulation of wealth, environmental impacts and an increasing lowering of the quality of life.  These are not an option even though the government of Chiapas says that instead of having the indigenous peoples migrating to the north is search of work, it’d be better to bring the factories to them.  Since the end of 2000, 270 000 jobs have been lost.  Between 2001 and 2003 more than 300 production lines left Mexico heading for China and Central America.  There are already more than enough proofs that this economic model doesn’t work.  It’s time to seek an alternative … because another world is possible.

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