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Last Updated: Oct 10, 2008 - 12:44:22 PM |
The initiative, heralded as the next step in regional
integration within the "NAFTA Plus" agenda, is described on its Web
site (http://www.spp.gov) as "a White House-led initiative among the
United States and the two nations it borders—Canada and Mexico—to
increase security and to enhance prosperity among the three countries
through greater cooperation." The official description of the SPP adds
that it is "based on the principle that our prosperity is dependent on
our security."1
In April 2007, on the eve of the North American Trilateral Summit,
Thomas Shannon, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for western
hemisphere affairs, described the SPP's purpose with remarkable candor:
The SPP, he declared, "understands North America as a shared economic
space," one that "we need to protect," not only on the border but "more
broadly throughout North America" through improved "security
cooperation." He added: "To a certain extent, we're armoring NAFTA."2
Mexicans and other Latin Americans have learned that adopting the
U.S.-promoted neoliberal economic model—with its economic displacement
and social cutbacks—comes with a necessary degree of force, but this
was the first time that a U.S. official had stated outright that
regional security was no longer focused on keeping the citizens of the
United States, Canada, and Mexico safe from harm, but was now about
protecting a regional economic model. Of course, Shannon didn't list
political opposition as one of the threats to be countered; he simply
argued that the new "economic space" needed to be protected against
"the threat of terrorism and against a threat of natural disasters and
environmental and ecological disasters." But the
counter-terrorism/drug-war model elaborated in the SPP and embodied
later in Plan Mexico (known officially as the Merida Initiative)
encourages a crackdown on grassroots dissent to assure that no force,
domestic or foreign, effectively questions the future of the system.
By extending NAFTA into regional security, Washington decided—and the
Mexican government conceded—that top-down economic integration
necessitates shared security goals and actions. Given the huge
imbalance of economic and political power between Mexico and the United
States, that meant that Mexico had to adopt the foreign policy
objectives and the destabilizing, militaristic counter-terrorism agenda
of the U.S. government. The Mexican government has received this new
mandate with ambivalence, seeking, in the words of one official from
the Foreign Ministry, to move the focus away from security and toward
development, while at the same time welcoming the military and police
aid offered in the Merida Initiative.3
This "securitization" of the trilateral relationship under NAFTA has
profound implications for Mexican civil society. By furthering Mexican
President Felipe Calderón's strategy of confrontation, it blocks
avenues for development of civil society institutions, criminalizes
opposition, justifies repression, and curtails civil liberties. At this
critical juncture, Mexico's shaky transition to democracy could regress
to presidential authoritarianism, with explicit U.S. government support.
When NAFTA went into effect on January 1, 1994, then-president Carlos
Salinas de Gortari hailed it as Mexico's entry into the first world.
Although many trade barriers had already been eliminated, the
agreement—a treaty under Mexican law—established Mexico's full
commitment to economic integration as defined by the Washington
Consensus. NAFTA locked in the fundamentals of neoliberalism: an open
market; an export-oriented economy; privileges for transnational
corporations; withdrawal of the state from social programs to promote
development; international labor competition and downward pressure on
wages and conditions; and the commoditization of natural resources.
The agreement, hammered out behind closed doors and imposed on an
uninformed society, led to the dismantling of many of the basic
institutional relationships that had united Mexicans in the past. Even
though a new generation of rulers from the Institutional Revolutionary
Party (PRI) ushered in the neoliberal model, notably presidents Carlos
Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo, the neoliberal model attacked the PRI's
corporatist base. The corporatist social compact—administered by the
PRI through its system of political patronage via national
organizations of farmers, workers, and the popular urban sector—began
to crumble as the abstract market replaced the state as the entity
responsible for improving social welfare. Structural adjustment
conditions by international finance institutions and the rules of NAFTA
and the World Trade Organization (WTO) reduced the state's capacity to
broker clientelist relationships with organized sectors of society,
since it had fewer resources for special subsidy and support programs.
Social benefits emanating from a paternal state began to disappear with
the growing dominance of the international market.
The division of the economy into those who participated in this market
and those who did not added structural exclusion to the age-old problem
of poverty. Changes in laws preceding and following NAFTA, and the
practical impact of the trade and investment agreement, eroded the
ability of the poor to fight back by eliminating their social and
territorial bases. Campesinos migrated off their land as much of it was
privatized and as producer prices fell with the inflow of cheap
agricultural imports. Workers were shunted into the atomized and
insecure informal economy as small- and medium-size national businesses
closed their doors.
In international relations, NAFTA ushered in political and economic
dependency to a degree not seen since Spanish colonialism, with more
than 85% of exports and the majority of imports oriented to the U.S.
market. This form of dependent, neoliberal integration between a
superpower and a developing country was bound to cause some conflicts
and also inevitably dominate the political realm. The Mexican
government, especially under the administrations of the conservative
National Action Party (PAN), responded to this dependency by protecting
"Americanized" interests, sacrificing Mexico's historic doctrine of
neutrality, and dropping issues that caused friction with the Bush
government, most notably support for Cuba and the regularization of
migration to the United States—though it is worth noting that not even
Fox could stomach the invasion of Iraq.
The NAFTA model exerted significant political pressure on Mexico in the
international sphere to toe a U.S. line. But more devastating was what
it did in the national sphere. The agreement presented constituted a
grave threat to traditional concepts of national sovereignty and
reweaving an already frayed social fabric. NAFTA dictated a
sink-or-swim strategy of pushing Mexico into the world economy that led
to the disintegration of many social-sector organizations. The few that
refused to swim, or even get in the water, were forced to the fringes
of political and economic life.
Rules against government intervention made it very difficult for the
government to negotiate solutions to popular demands as it had in the
past. Neoliberal policy makers' "market fixes all" ideology precluded
attempts to help economic actors successfully negotiate the transition
to a more competitive framework or to compensate the "losers" in the
new economic wars. Migration was transformed from a temporary or
cyclical escape valve to the motor of many local economies; families,
along with entire communities and regional organizations, fractured.
When the Zapatista Army for National Liberation rose up on January 1,
1994, the rebels protested the social exclusion and marginalization of
indigenous peoples and the poor, an exclusion that would later be
exacerbated by the agreement. Social movements since then have drawn
the lines of battle. There have been mobilizations against
privatization, calls for national programs to recognize and support the
contributions of "non-competitive" sectors, defense of indigenous
rights and decision-making over ancestral territory, and demands for
inclusive democracy. Although these movements for the most part lack a
permanent and solid organizational structure and tend to coalesce on
specific issues at specific moments, taken together they constitute a
fundamental challenge to the NAFTA model and an alternative course for
the nation.
No wonder, then, that NAFTA promoters saw the need to shield the
agreement from potential attacks. As evidenced in Assistant Secretary
Shannon's remark about "armoring NAFTA," the three North American
governments have found it necessary to invent a mechanism to protect
their "shared economic space": the Security and Prosperity Partnership.
Although some SPP working groups have addressed natural disasters and
health issues like bird flu, the "partnership" emphasis is on
protecting property rather than people. Inexplicably, neither
"security" nor "prosperity" is seen to include problems of
malnutrition, infant mortality, or other human security issues critical
to Mexico.
Aside from real doubts about their effectiveness, these programs also
raise serious questions of national sovereignty and national
priorities. There are simply few reasons to believe that U.S. security
is synonymous with a strategic security plan for Mexico. In general, no
one would deny that fighting international terrorism and organized
crime requires mechanisms of global cooperation, intelligence sharing,
and coordinated actions. But these mechanisms must be developed in the
context of each country's national security agenda and defined by the
confluence of particular priorities.
The SPP was born post-9/11 and reflects the priorities of the Bush
counter-terrorism agenda. For Mexico, these priorities are expensive
and politically threatening. Mexico has historically been reticent to
allow U.S. agents to operate in its territory due to a history in which
the United States itself has posed the greatest threat to its national
security. Given the lack of threats from international terrorism in the
country, the war on terrorism is not a security priority.
But economic dependency and the military superiority of the United
States have forced NAFTA's junior partners to adopt Washington's
priorities. Measures designed to "push out the U.S. security perimeter"
under the SPP have pressured Mexico to militarize its southern border
and adopt repressive measures toward Central and South Americans
presumably in transit to the United States, going against a history of
relatively free transit, and increasing tensions with its southern
neighbors. Another problem is the way the false conflation of
undocumented immigration with homeland security in the United States
has led to measures that have little or nothing to do with regional
national security and have led to the deaths of thousands of Mexican
migrants. Nonetheless, the Mexican government has implicitly accepted
this conflation by accepting "border security measures" aimed at
migrants in both the SPP and Plan Mexico.
In many ways, by taking on the U.S. security agenda Mexico puts itself
at greater risk and violates historical precepts of international
relations. The country has a policy of neutrality in international
affairs that preempts its governments from becoming embroiled in
conflicts that do not directly affect the nation. When the Mexican
Congress dutifully presented a revised counter-terrorism law in
Congress this year, an opposition congressman argued against the
imposition of the vaguely defined category of "international
terrorism," saying, "We don't want to be immersed in a cycle where the
enemies of other nations are automatically put forth as our own
enemies."4
The latest step forward in "integrating" regional security is Plan
Mexico. This U.S. initiative, passed by Congress on June 26 and signed
into law by Bush, allocates $400 million to Mexico for 2008-09. The
original plan foresees about $1.4 billion over a three-year period to
the Mexican military, police, and judicial systems for training and
equipment.
A close review of the detailed proposal presented by the administration
reveals that the basis for the new "Regional Security Cooperation
Initiative" comprises three Bush policies that have utterly failed to
meet their objectives in other settings.5 These are (1) militarized
border security that indiscriminately targets immigrants, drug
traffickers, and terrorists; (2) unilateral, pre-emptive
counter-terrorism measures; and (3) waging the "drug war." In Mexico,
the first two objectives, which are widely viewed as counter to Mexican
interests, have been downplayed and the initiative is billed
exclusively as a counter-narcotics plan.
The irony is the United States' long history of failure in fighting its
own drug war. It continues to be the largest market for illicit drugs
in the world, and its burgeoning demand supports Mexico's ever more
powerful drug cartels. While touted as a giant step forward in
bilateral cooperation, the final bill contains no U.S. obligations or
benchmarks to prevent illegal drug use, increase rehabilitation of
addicts, stop the flow of contraband arms to Mexico, or prosecute money
laundering.
The model of counter-narcotics work focused on the supply side through
interdiction and enforcement measures was applied in Colombia beginning
in 2000. Nearly seven years and $6 billion after Plan Colombia began,
the result is no appreciable decline in production of illegal drugs or
in the flow to the U.S. market.6
Support for the use of the armed forces in the drug war within Mexican
communities creates a situation in which counter-narcotics programs
extend into counter-insurgency efforts. The expansion of NAFTA into the
security arena, first through the SPP and now through its offspring,
Plan Mexico, indicates that the Calderón administration has chosen a
path of authoritarianism and rule by force over one that might
strengthen the country's democratic institutions. Instead of looking to
overcome the polarization left in the wake of his questioned election,
the president has set a course that relies on the armed forces for
bolstering his presidency.
Three examples of the "collateral damage" to society under the drug-war
model embodied in Plan Mexico suffice to demonstrate the risks at
stake. First, there have been increased attacks on autonomous Zapatista
communities in Chiapas, which have been documented by the International
Civil Commission on Human Rights (CCIODH). The commission reports a
rise in military incursions, arrests of community leaders using
fabricated evidence, and physical abuse and torture of Zapatista
militants. In an incident on June 4, more than 200 soldiers and police
tried to enter the Zapatista regional government seat La Garrucha and
then went into the villages of Hermenegildo Galeana and San Alejandro
supposedly in search of illegal drugs. The pretense was both
predictable and preposterous: Zapatista communities have a strict
policy banning drugs and alcohol, and the armed forces did not produce
any evidence of having found such substances. In addition to military
activity, there has been in recent months a buildup of paramilitary
activity against the Zapatista communities, related to attempts to take
back land the Zapatistas had won in the period following the 1994
uprising. These attempts have been particularly intense in areas like
ecotourism sites, water sources, and zones believed to contain
important biodiversity resources, all of which are of interest to
developers.7 An increase in militarization of Mexican society will very
likely lead to an increase in the scope and activity of both the army
and of paramilitary groups.
Second, there has been a countrywide increase of attacks on women by
security forces. For decades, the relationship between war and violence
against women has been documented and understood as the result of power
built through force rather than social consensus. Rape and murder of
women has been seen as both a symbol of conquest and the spoils that go
to the victor. In the context of impunity in Mexico, where accusations
of attacks on women by people with ties to power rarely make it inside
a courtroom, the practice has been spreading since the war on drugs
sent the army out into the streets.8 A particularly outrageous case is
the rape and murder of an elderly indigenous woman in the Sierra
Zongólica, proved by initial investigations and later covered up by the
Calderón government and higher-up members of the security forces.9
There have also been numerous rapes of women by army agents in other
parts of the country, including the western state of Michoacán and the
northern border state of Coahuila.10 The lack of prosecution for the
rape and abuse of women protesters in police custody following the
conflict in San Salvador Atenco also demonstrates that Mexican women
and their rights are suffering heavy casualties due to a spreading war
mentality in Mexico.
A third example involves the murders of grassroots leaders in the state
of Chihuahua. Shortly before the government's anti-drug Operation
Chihuahua began, Armando Villareal, leader of the rural movement for
fair electricity rates and against the privatization of fertilizer
production, was assassinated.11 When the operation began, four farmers,
members of Villareal's organization Agrodinámica Nacional, were
apprehended by officers of Mexico's Federal Agency of Investigation
(AFI) and accused of "electricity theft" and later released thanks to
pressure from the organization. Just days later, Cipriana Jurado
Herrera, a social activist and adviser to families of women killed in
the border area, was violently detained and accused of "attacking
general communication pathways" on the basis of a bridge protest in
October 2005. Several other rural leaders have been picked up on the
same charge and members of the social movement fear a general crackdown
on social movement activists.
State representative and human rights activist Víctor Quintana calls
this wave of criminalization "an attempt at threatening the leaders of
three movements that have been at the forefront on a national level:
the rural producers' movement to get electricity at competitive prices
and renegotiate NAFTA's agricultural terms; the women's movement
against femicide; and the movement of indebted people against the banks
and mortgage companies."12 Like the attacks on women, the repression in
the context of an operation that has some 3,000 extra army and police
members in the streets of northern cities sends a signal that
dissidence will be harshly treated as delinquency.
Mexico's U.S.-style anti-terrorism laws have already been invoked
against members of social movements, since the definition of
"terrorism" is sufficiently vague to lend itself to a broad range of
activities.13 The war on drugs/counter-terrorism model embodied in Plan
Mexico invariably extends into repression of political opposition in
countries where it has been applied, blurring the lines between the war
on drugs, the war against terrorism, and the war against the political
opposition. A 2004 report documents the impact of U.S. increased
military aid in Latin America and concludes that "too often in Latin
America, when armies have focused on an internal enemy, the definition
of enemies has included political opponents of the regime in power,
even those working within the political system such as activists,
independent journalists, labor organizers, or opposition
political-party leaders."14 Moreover, curtailing civil liberties
weakens, rather than strengthens, both institutions and the public's
faith in legal channels to resolve differences.
On June 23, a group of Mexican intellectuals published a letter
containing a laundry list of the country's social woes.15 The list did
not make for comfortable reading: "Drug-related violence with an
exceedingly high cost in lives (not only those directly involved); the
crisis of the national security apparatus; the destruction of the
social fabric; the expansion of fear and panic in broad sectors of
society; the unsustainable high cost of living, the
disaster—universally recognized—in public and private education; the
eagerness to reduce the electoral process to vote buying; an
accentuated crisis in the judicial branch; officials' support of
ecological death (over-exploitation of water, destruction of forests,
pollution) that ratifies the monstrosity of neoliberalism; impunity of
the powers that be, who hold themselves up as the new 'moral
authority'; an intense campaign to privatize energy resources;
officials whose continued presence in office constitutes a major
challenge to legality (Juan Camilo Mouriño, Ulises Ruiz, Mario Marín);
moral lynching campaigns against the opposition ..."16
The country's weak democratic institutions have been shaken and
discredited by their evasive or downright duplicitous responses to the
electoral conflicts of 2006, to powerful politicians who openly defy
the rule of law, and to the inequality of daily life generated under
the neoliberal economic model. The justice system remains bound to the
interests of a weak federal government that fears popular protest, and
to state and local governments in many cases controlled by despots.
Every day the newspapers report incidents and declarations that reflect
a loss of faith in the system and the loss of credibility of the
institutions charged with upholding and extending it.
Mexico is thus at a critical juncture. It can either take up the
challenge to strengthen democratic institutions, or it can fall back
into rule by force and authoritarianism. So far, the federal
government's response has been to defend the neoliberal model that has
played a major role in leading to the crisis and extend it into
security issues in a closer alliance with the U.S. government and the
Bush administration's counter-terrorism strategy. Particularly in a
nation that is deeply divided both politically and economically, the
defense of neoliberalism not only further divides society, but
threatens the legitimacy of the state.
In Chiapas, a state rich in coveted natural resources, the link between
the breakdown of the social compact and the pressures of the neoliberal
model are particularly stark. The Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human
Rights Center reports: "As the neoliberal economic project advances,
which puts the interest of business above those of the majority of the
population and promotes economic projects that seek to appropriate
natural resources, social goods, and communal spaces for the private
sector, the political costs to the State will increasingly undermine
its legitimacy."17
The report also mentions the traditional mechanisms for building social
consensus that have broken down and the way in which they are being
supplanted by force: "The tendency to criminalize and repress protest
and civil acts derives from the slight-to-zero effectiveness of the
mechanisms of control conventionally employed by the State,
specifically those operated through ideological structures such as the
media, schools, the church, culture, and the exercise of politics. When
these mechanisms ceased to be effective to control the widespread
discontent that has been expressed in mass demonstrations and acts of
civil disobedience, the State has frequently and disproportionately
employed the intervention of security forces (army and police) to
exercise social control."
The imposition of the Bush national security-free trade paradigm has
led to a further breakdown of institutional channels for pulling the
divided nation together or deepening a transition to democracy. There
is no clearer example of this disastrous policy than the recent Merida
Initiative.
The extension of NAFTA into SPP and Plan Mexico enforces a strategy of
the current Mexican government to deal with organized crime as a
violent crusade, and to handle opposition through force. The human
rights violations related to this strategy stem from the mentality of
confrontation, the lack of training of security forces in proper human
rights, and the impunity of knowing they can get away with just about
anything as long as the victim is outside the inner circles of power.
In addition to bolstering a weak presidency and suppressing dissent,
the regional security strategy outlined in these alliances pursues the
goal of assuring access to natural resources and "armoring
NAFTA"—locking in the neoliberal economic model that has contributed to
a dangerous disintegration of the social compact in Mexico. It is a
strategy meant to confront head-on the widespread demands for a new
social order based on equity and inclusion.
End Notes
1. See the official Web site, www.spp.gov/myths_vs_facts.asp.
2. Thomas Shannon, speech to the Council on the Americas, April 3,
2008.
3. Alejandro Estivill, conference on SPP, Universidad de las
Américas (Cholula), June 12, 2008.
4. "Aprueban diputados que se penalice el delito de terrorismo ...,"
La Jornada, February 21, 2007.
5. See "A Primer on Plan Mexico," available at
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5204.
6. International Crisis Group, "Latin American Drugs: Losing the
Fight," March 14, 2008, available at www.crisisgroup.org.
7. See the recent report by the International Civil Commission on
Human Rights, available at www.cciodh.pangea.org.
8. See Lourdes Godínez Leal, "Combating Impunity and Femicide in
Ciudad Juárez," NACLA Report on the Americas 41, no. 3 (May/June 2008):
31-33.
9. See Erich Moncada, "Mexico's Military and the Murder at Zongolica
(II)," Narco News , April 10, 2007, available at www.narconews.com.
10. Associated Press, "Report: Mexican Army Used Rape, Torture in
Drug War," September 21, 2007, available at www.usatoday.com.
11. Víctor Quintana, "Drug Trafficking, Violence and Repression," CIP
Americas Program, May 8, 2008, available at
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5218.
12. Ibid.
13. José Galán and Laura Poy Solano, "Abierta violación al espíritu
constitucional: expertos," La Jornada, April 28, 2007. See also
testimonies on the CCIODH video at www.cciodh.pangea.org.
14. Latin American Working Group, the Center for International
Policy, and the Washington Office on Latin America, "Blurring the
Lines: Trends in U.S. Military Programs in Latin America," September
2004, available at www.ciponline.org.
15. "La Consulta, un logro del movimiento ciudadano," La Jornada,
June 23, 2008.
16. Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mouriño has been questioned for
signing contracts with his family's oil company while serving in public
office; Ulises Ruiz, governor of Oaxaca state, stands accused of
authoritarianism and violent repression of the social movement; Mario
Marín, governor of Puebla, was recorded discussing the apprehension and
harassment of human rights defender Lydia Cacho with a Puebla
industrialist allegedly connected to the pedophile rings Cacho wrote
about.
17. Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, "Sobre la
situación de los derechos humanos en Chiapas, Balance Anual 2007,"
available at www.frayba.org (translation by the author).
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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