News of violence from the Mexican border in early March was all too familiar. Americans looking for a tourist getaway and cheap cosmetic surgery have found themselves kidnapped, held hostage and victims of a shooting that left three people dead, including a Mexican bystander who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The two American survivors were discovered next to the bodies of their two friends – they were all black – in a shack on the outskirts of Matamoros, a gigantic and poor city near Brownsville, Texas, on the other side of the Rio Grande . That the assassins are adherents of a faction of the Gulf Cartel, a seemingly ruthless narcocriminal gang, is not surprising. What is notable, however, is that this faction, the Scorpion Group, publicly apologized for the killings and allegedly handed over the five kidnappers to Mexican police.
I knew Matamoros 24 years ago, while reporting for a book about NAFTA and its effect on American workers stripped of their factory jobs and Mexicans who got them back with a significant pay cut. My goal was not to explain Mexican sociology — at the time, I wanted to convey the cynicism and dirty tactics of politicians from the United States, Mexico, and Canada who signed into law a “free trade » which announced as program the economic modernization and the enrichment of the three countries, as well as the « stabilization » of Mexico.
According to the neoliberal dogma of Presidents Carlos Salinas de Gortari, George HW Bush and Bill Clinton, and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, everyone would benefit from growth triggered by the magic of markets freed from evil protectionism. All of this was a decoy — apart from the strong protection of the quasi-sacred Mexican corn, Mexican and American tariffs were already low enough not to impede trade. The main purpose of NAFTA was the protection of American investments against expropriation, but also against the blackmail of the civil authorities and Mexican unions not always respectful of the rule of law. The result of the “protectionism” of American goods inserted into Chapter 11 of NAFTA has been the enormous growth of make-up, low-tech, low-wage factories spread along the Mexican border, from Matamoros on the Gulf of Mexico to Tijuana on the Pacific coast.
With the assurance that neither the Mexican government nor the local thugs were going to ransom the owners gringos, the number of jobs in the industrial zone exploded, exceeding one million. Simultaneously, hundreds of thousands of farmers, traditional maize farmers on small plots ejidos (established in the 1930s by President Lázaro Cárdenas, who expropriated large estates to distribute small plots of land to the poor), sold or simply left their communal lands because of Salinas, which privatized them in 1992 in order, in part, to demonstrate to the Americans its commitment to NAFTA and liberal principles. There followed a massive migration northward — it was better to work in a makeup 48 hours a week than competing with factory farms in Nebraska. Once trapped in a factory job for $1 an hour, the former peasant had two choices to get out of it: cross the border without papers to moonlight in America below the minimum wage, or work for the drug traffickers, burgeoning entrepreneurs in fast-growing cities, such as Matamoros, Juárez and Nogales. And that’s the other benefit of free trade: drug traffickers benefit from increased cross-border trade with more trucks and greedy, destitute labor to hide and transport narcotics.
I admit that there is a violent, sometimes random culture in Mexico that has nothing to do with NAFTA or the greedy, blind and arrogant oppression of its North American neighbor. About 100,000 Mexicans have officially disappeared (as well as 550 Americans), a large portion having been victims of the cartels. Among them is my Mexican cousin, Gregorio Cordova MacArthur, lost to sight in April 1973 at the age of 21 while hitchhiking — after his traveling companion’s old car broke down — from Mexico City to San Francisco. Despite the best efforts of my cousin Elizabeth and my father, the investigation did not progress beyond a private detective’s guess that Gregorio was robbed, shot and buried anonymously.
How to explain that there are so many desaparecidos ? In Lawless Roads, his 1938 account of the lasting effects of President Calles’ anti-Catholic purges of the 1920s, Graham Greene described a Mexico with “no hope anywhere”. Greene, a Catholic convert and very biased, said: “I have never been to a country where you are more conscious of hatred all the time. I don’t agree with my literary and political star, but I understand his emotion, and perhaps his confusion in the face of an often hallucinatory culture. Declaring its disapproval of the Matamoros killings in a handwritten letter, the Scorpion Group criticized the “indiscipline” of its employees and demanded respect for “THE LIFE AND INTEGRITY OF THE INNOCENT”. Further, “we are committed to ensuring that Mistakes made will NOT be repeated and that Those Responsible will pay. Whoever they are! “We will never know them.
John R. MacArthur is editor of Harper’s Magazine. His column returns at the beginning of each month.