Mexican economy.”[28] Though weakened by constitutional amendments made by Salinas before NAFTA came into effect, communal landholder organizations, including ejidos and comunidades índigenas, have not been totally undone by neoliberal reforms. By the end of 1994, Mexico had signed on to the North America Free Trade Agreement, witnessed the Zapatista uprising, and undergone another major currency devaluation, but by the turn of the twenty-first century, Mexico’s territory and economy still weren’t fully open to foreign investors. In 2000, Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) was elected president, interrupting the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) seventy-one years of rule, and some say, returning democracy to Mexico.
But there is more than not-yet-privatized corporations that make Mexico interesting to transnational capital: take Mexico’s strategic geographical location, for example. The Mexico-US border spans nearly 2,000 miles, a line that runs from Pacific to Atlantic, from Tijuana–San Diego to Juarez–El Paso and Brownsville–Matamoros. Along some stretches, the border is fenced, in other places the unforgiving desert polices it.[29] The US border with Mexico can and should be considered a valuable economic resource; low-cost labor on the south side of the border, within spitting distance of the United States, is a winning combination as transportation costs are also reduced. As such, Mexico is becoming an increasingly significant player in US and global manufacturing. For example, in the automobile sector, located along the border as well as in the country’s interior, “Mexico is becoming the export hub for the Americas—not only North America but also South America,” according to Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn.[30]
One afternoon while driving through the border city of Nuevo Laredo, a local activist pointed out an overpass and mentioned that bodies had been hung over it more than once. I remembered the site from photos that appeared online, but there was one big difference seeing it in person: behind where the photograph was taken, a Sony factory dominates the block, with Japanese, US, and Mexican flags hoisted at the entrance. It seemed to me a crucial bit of context that Sony operates a factory literally a stone’s throw from where human bodies have been publicly displayed. Knowing that the overpass isn’t in some abandoned part of town, but rather is meters away from a bustling assembly plant, means knowing that the workers coming in and out of the factory at dawn, when bodies tend to be hung, would all have witnessed these gruesome scenes. As we shall see later on, while the violence in Mexico has generally not deeply impacted the owners of multinational corporations, it does impact the workers. These workers’ decisions of whether or not to carry on working in hostile environments, where terror is used against residents, can impact the labor supply available to the assembly industry. According to a 2010 report by the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, in Juárez alone “estimates place the number of people who have fled their homes at around 230,000. Roughly half of those are thought to have crossed into the United States, which would leave about 115,000 people living as internally displaced people (IDPs).”[31] The fact that violence can impact the size of the labor pool in these areas means that it can also prevent labor organizing, which keeps wages depressed along the border—both important factors in determining the future of a vital sector of the US economy.
Then there are the natural resources. Mexico has only recently been opened up to modern mining. According to data from the Mexican government, Mexico produced about twenty-two tons of gold in 2001, and ten years later, it produced eighty-four tons, most of which was extracted by Canadian mining companies. Silver production doubled over the same period. According to Mexico’s National Chamber of Mines, Mexico is the fourth destination worldwide for mining investment, after Canada, Australia, and the United States. Looked at in terms of the US government’s more general foreign-policy goals, the condition of Mexico’s large economy, driven by a handful of profitable, state-owned corporations, and the country’s mineral-rich territory (much of which remains communally owned by peasant farmers) means there are attractive money-making opportunities to be had. William I. Robinson, author of A Theory of Global Capitalism among other books, explained the overarching goal of US foreign policy during an interview in 2010: “All the evidence shows us that what the US is doing is playing the lead role in organizing a new globalist capitalist system, a new epoch of global capitalism.” According to Robinson, world capitalism was a system in which circuits of production existed first within and later between nations. Global capitalism, which is the current system, consists of transnational circuits of production and trade, in which manufacturing takes place across nations rather than within them. As an example, under world capitalism, clothes were sewn in Mexico from fabric made of Mexican-grown cotton, and under global capitalism, fabric is imported, clothing is partially assembled in Mexico and exported for completion in the US.
In his 1996 book Promoting Polyarchy, Robinson explains that “political and economic power tends to gravitate towards new groups linked to the global economy, either directly or indirectly through reorganized local state apparatuses which function as ‘transmission belts’ for transnational interests. In every region of the world, in both North and South, from Eastern Europe to Latin America, states, economies and political processes are becoming transnationalized and integrated under the guidance of this new elite.”[32] Elsewhere, he notes that “‘going global’ allowed capital to shake off the constraints that nation-state capitalism had placed on accumulation and break free of the class compromises and concessions that had been imposed by working and popular classes and by national governments in the preceding epoch.”[33] In Mexico, as we have seen, many of these compromises and concessions survived the imposition of NAFTA and the onset of neoliberalism into the twenty-first century.
In Mexico, something more than an economic shock was in order: a comprehensive strategy proven to increase foreign direct investment was needed. Among other things, this strategy had to ensure that local police and the army, and eventually the entire legal system, would operate according to US standards. A similar strategy had already been developed via Plan Colombia—a carefully planned, US-backed war on drugs. For example, over the past years in Mexico, the privatization of large state companies has taken place alongside attacks on the working population along the US-Mexico border and the displacement and murders of communal and small landholders. The drug war can be understood as forming the basis of a permanent shock in Mexico.
In December 2006, immediately after he was inaugurated, President Felipe Calderón launched a new phase of the war on drug cartels and organized crime in Mexico. It was a high point in social mobilization in Mexico City and throughout the country, as Calderón’s inauguration took place amidst massive protests against election fraud, which brought over two million people, including left-wing candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, into the streets of the capital. Also that year, the Zapatistas carried out their Otra Campaña, consulting with Mexicans around the country from below and to the left. “There was also the Popular Revolutionary Army [EPR], there were movements like that in Atenco, which was repressed and which provoked important solidarity actions, and also between June and November 2006 in Oaxaca an important social movement against then governor Ulises Ruíz rose up,” said Carlos Fazio, a professor at the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM). “In 2006 we could say that there were large mass protests by systemic and anti-systemic social forces, by people who wanted change.”
Since 2006, social movements have not mobilized with such a vengeance, and the violence and terror in Mexico have instead taken center stage. The social costs of the drug war have been enormous: one of the few independent counts, carried out by Molly Molloy, a librarian at New Mexico State University, affirms that since December 2006, over 153,000 people have been murdered in Mexico.[34] At a March 2012 press conference, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta stated that the violence was tremendous, and that Mexican officials had told him there were 150,000 people dead because of drug violence.[35] The body count reported in the mainstream media is much lower, often referring to 60,000 dead as a result of drug war violence.[36] This is a misleading figure since it is known that less than 5 percent of all crimes in Mexico are investigated. As well, some bodies have been secretly disposed of in mass graves, while others are dissolved in chemicals; these bodies have not made it to the morgues to be counted. The number of murders increased sharply when US military aid came online—rising from 10,452 to over 25,000 in 2010 and over 27,000 in 2011.[37]
