Could a Sudden Collapse of Mexico Be Obama's Surprise Foreign Policy Challenge?

By Bill Weinberg, AlterNet. Posted February 19, 2009.

Arguably, NAFTA is to blame for what could be Mexico's impending destabilization. The largest surge ever in both legal and unauthorized Mexican migration to the U.S. began after the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement took effect.

Sociologist James Russell finds that the percentage of all North America's Mexican-origin persons living in the United States jumped from 13.6 percent to 20.5 percent between 1990 and 2005. Russell argues that "NAFTA allowed tariff-free imports to flood into Mexico, taking markets away from many Mexican peasants and manufacturers. With work no longer available, displaced peasants and workers joined in increasing numbers the migrant route north into the United States."

The privatization of Mexico's communal peasant lands -- the ejidos -- was another NAFTA-related measure that helped force hundreds of thousands from their traditional rural communities. In these same years, Mexico's narco economy exploded, the trafficking of cocaine and growing of opium and marijuana filling the vacuum left by the evaporation of the market for domestic maize and beans.

And when the oil shock prompted the diversion of U.S. croplands of Mexico-bound corn to biofuels, a now-dependent Mexico experienced a "maize shock" in 2008 -- and food riots.

Even amidst the spiraling violence of the narco wars, nonviolent political resistance to policies of free trade and militarization persists in Mexico.

As Obama was taking the oath of office, farmers in Chihuahua state, just across from Texas and New Mexico, blockaded roads and used farm equipment and animals to erect barricades at the entrances of Agriculture Secretariat offices to demand rises in the price of their maize and other (legal) crops.

Days earlier, thousands of fishermen went on strike on Mexico's Pacific coast to protest the rise in the price of diesel fuel. The Zapatistas and related peasant movements in Mexico's south continue to occupy disputed lands and resist their privatization. On Jan. 9, some 4,000 marched in Jalisco to protest the police killing of a local youth. And in December, public-sector workers and students in Ciudad Juarez staged a 24-hour strike to protest the wave of narco-killings in the city.

Obama pledged on the campaign trail to consider a renegotiation of NAFTA. And in his third debate with Republican Sen. John McCain, when asked about the pending free trade agreement with Colombia, he noted that in the Andean nation "labor leaders have been targeted for assassination on a fairly consistent basis and there have not been prosecutions." This won him public opprobrium from Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe, who was Bush's closest ally in South America.

But despite criticisms, Obama supports the Merida Initiative and has spoken of extending it into a comprehensive hemispheric security bloc. Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden support continued military aid to Colombia, albeit with a greater emphasis on human rights conditions.

Apart from the security implications of its mere proximity to the U.S., Mexico is the third-largest oil supplier to the U.S. Free-trade politics helped create a social crisis there, and militarization in response to this crisis may only push it to the point of explosion. If Obama doesn't rethink the Merida Initiative as well as follow through on his campaign pledge to take another look at NAFTA, the prospects for escalation are frighteningly real.

The last direct U.S. military intervention in Mexico was under Woodrow Wilson -- a Democrat who won re-election in 1916 by pledging to keep the U.S. out of World War I, just as Obama won the White House with pledges to get us out of Iraq.

A resurgent American left putting Mexico and Latin America back on its agenda may help assure that this history does not repeat itself.

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Bill Weinberg is editor of the electronic monthly World War 4 Report and author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso, 2000).

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