Migrants and their friends know only what they’ve personally seen and heard of 21st-century migration in the Americas. More distant onlookers know only what the oligarchy’s media tell them.
So here’s the story of the Great Migration, placed in the bigger picture of economics and politics. Here’s why people are compelled to leave their home villages and run the harrowing gauntlet to the north. Take Mexico as an example. With some changes, its story is true for Central America as well.
“The village is almost without people,” an elderly woman told a reporter in tiny San Jeronimo Solola, Oaxaca, earlier this year. “Many houses are empty. The fathers and the sons have gone. If the young people keep leaving, what do you think will happen to us?”
Mexicans have grown corn for thousands of years. The cornbean- squash agriculture they perfected—the milpa system—is perhaps the most successful and self-sustaining in the world. But the capitalist oligarchs of Mexico and the United States are now systematically undermining the milpas—replacing them with large-scale, soil-depleting, irrigated farms—and forcing the small farmers off the land.
A century ago, when the government of Porfirio Diaz concentrated the land into fewer and fewer hands, the forebears of these farmers rose in rebellion against the hacendados—the owners of the great agricultural estates.
Led by Emiliano Zapata in the revolution of 1910-1920, they fought for a redistribution of the land, which was accomplished under President Lazaro Cardenas in the 1930s.
The corn grown by those small farmers created the surplus on which Mexican industry was built. But with the step-by-step dismantling of the Cardenas reforms, Mexican finance, industry, and agriculture are again being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. And Mexico has been thrown open to the capitalists of the world, especially the United States.
At the end of the 20th century, Mexico’s economy became increasingly entwined in the integrated world economy, and Mexico’s small farmers faced the Mexican and North American oligarchies united against them.
In the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexican capitalists, operating through the government of Carlos Salinas, simply abandoned the small farmers. They dropped the tariffs against imports of cheap U.S. corn, knowing full well that doing so would destroy traditional agriculture.
NAFTA (and CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement as well) has been primarily the project of the capitalists of the U.S. They, too, knew that opening Mexico to U.S. corn would destroy small Mexican farmers. But they were hungry for the business.
Operating through presidents George G. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, they were successful in winning NAFTA. And within a few years, U.S. agribusiness—dominated by giant corporations like Cargill—was exporting four times as much corn into Mexico as before.
The U.S. government was actually subsidizing large-scale corn production in the United States and dumping it on the Mexican market at less than it cost to produce. Mexican small farmers could not compete with this, and the exodus began. More than two million people were pushed out of agricultural work, and another five million could no longer live on farm income.
With few jobs to be found in Mexican cities, millions streamed north. Whole villages hollowed out, dispossessed of their traditional livelihood, and, in effect, of their culture and their land.
Like the North Americans, the Mexican oligarchy, too, was quietly but substantially subsidizing its agribusinesses, which erupted into the world market. In the 20 years since NAFTA began, Mexican companies like Grupo Bimbo and Maseca have become dominant players in the global food industry.
But none of this helped the economic refugees fleeing north. True, the Mexican government made a show of extending support payments to small farmers. But in the usual way, most of those payments,
too, have ended up in the hands of the new hacendados.
Does the story end here? Only if the global oligarchy continues to have its way.
Viva Zapata!
