deletetheborder.org

Web users worldwide will be able to watch the Texas border
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5040372.stm
A US state is to enlist web users in its fight against illegal immigration by offering live surveillance footage of the Mexican border on the internet.
The plan will allow web users worldwide to watch Texas' border with Mexico and phone the authorities if they spot any apparently illegal crossings.
Texas Governor Rick Perry said the cameras would focus on "hot-spots and common routes" used to enter the US.

A Marshall Plan for Mexico
The Wall Street Journal published a perplexing article on Monday, the kind of story that purports to offer a contrarian take on conventional wisdom but then ends up completely undermining its own thesis by the end.
The conventional wisdom: Rising levels of prosperity in poor countries will ease the flow of emigration from those nations.
The Wall Street Journal's Joel Millman: Not so fast -- evidence shows that economic growth may actually lead to more emigration, as workers learn skills that are more highly valued abroad, and are able to earn enough money to ease their passage, legally or illegally, to richer countries.
So, in the case of Mexico, the quickly growing "maquiladora" border region is transforming into a kind of training camp for laborers who acquire some skills and some cash and then head north.
But "Prosperity in Home Countries May Not Stem Tide of Migrants to the U.S." does a pretty good job of shooting down its own thesis. First, Millman notes, prosperity does not occur in a vacuum. Relative prosperity is what counts. Wages have grown in Mexico since 1994, but wages in the United States have grown faster. And as long as that wage gap exists, and indeed, increases, the North will suck labor from the South, no matter how many politicians fulminate.
Second, Millman notes that, ultimately, enough prosperity actually will stem the tide. If Mexico achieved rough parity with the U.S. undocumented migration would undoubtedly decrease. Granted, there's quite a long way to go before Mexico comes anywhere close to U.S. living standards, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Millman notes, at the tail end of the article, that before Spain, Greece, and Portugal joined the European Community they were the biggest "sender" nations in Europe. But after "rich" Europe poured billions of dollars into public-construction projects in the poor countries, living standards converged, and emigration slowed to a trickle.
I've discussed the European Union example here before a couple of times, and Millman's reference to this latter-day Marshall Plan inspired me to dig up some more information. I struck gold with "Towards a North American Community" by American University professor Robert Pastor, which devotes a chapter to studying how the E.U. helped Spain, Ireland, Greece and Portugal achieve significantly higher economic growth. That in turn led me to a report written by Pastor in 2005: "A Proposal for a North American Investment Fund: Adapting Europe's Model and Avoiding Its Mistakes."
http://www.american.edu/internationalaffairs/cnas/pdfs/NADBank.pdf
Free trade agreements are not enough. Trade between Mexico and the U.S. has boomed since the passage of NAFTA, but economic growth in Mexico has been nothing to shout about, and the relative position of Mexico vis-à-vis the U.S. and Canada hasn't budged -- it's gotten worse. Pastor crunches the numbers and declares that only a significant flow of foreign investment into infrastructure and education in Mexico will make a difference. And he wonders, if Europe's rich countries could make the commitment to pump $35 billion into their poorer neighbors, why can't we come up with a lousy $20 billion?
"The premise of the European Community was that its people shared fundamental interests, and therefore progress should be measured in terms of lifting the entire community in a fair and equitable manner," writes Pastor. "'Imbalances,' the E.C. report on cohesion writes, 'do not just imply a poorer quality of life for the most disadvantaged regions ... [but also] an underutilisation of human potential and a failure to take advantage of economic opportunities which could benefit the Union as a whole.' The operational definition of 'economic cohesion' was convergence of basic incomes, rates of employment, and competitiveness. 'Social cohesion' could be measured in universal systems of social protection and mutual support. This would mean a reduction of the incidence of poverty and improvements in productivity and the quality of life."
Whoa, sounds like some pie-in-the-sky big-spending liberalism there, doesn't it? But chew on this. Mexico right now is at about the stage that Portugal and Spain were when they joined the European Union.
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/
-- Andrew Leonard

Border Arrests Rise as U.S. Debates Immigration Issue

New York Times
SAN DIEGO — Outside a shelter for migrants in the teeming Mexican city of Tijuana, Jesús Lugo Díaz clutched a creased paper with names and numbers of people in the United States scrawled over it — and clung to the hope of sneaking across the border.

It would be his fifth try.

"One way or the other you're going to cross," Mr. Díaz, 36, said as he waited for the shelter to open and offer him a bed and food for the night, a few days after the United States Border Patrol had last caught him and sent him back.

Thanks to all the 100,342 People join Cinco de Maya VR Sit-In!
Update - Friday May 5, 10:00 pm
Marcos has just arrived in Atenco with 4000 individuals representing students, workers, farmers, teachers and and community organizations. Mexican mainstream media is reporting agression on the part of the marchers - the truth appears otherwise . The Other Campaign will stay in Mexico City indefinitely. A peaceful meeting is scheduled in Atenco tomorrow at 12 noon.
The Indigenous Congress is holding a meeting in this moment with over 800 attendees.
Live web streams are available from: Radio Sabotaje

Marcos Reappears in Atenco and Challenges Commercial Media to “Tell the Truth”
http://narconews.com/Issue41/article1773.html
Holding Up Bullet Cartridges Used by State Police in Atenco, “Delegate Zero” Offers Interview to Any Mass Media that “Guarantees it Will Be Uncut and Unedited”
By Al Giordano
The Other Journalism with the Other Campaign in San Salvador Atenco
May 5, 2006
SAN SALVADOR ATENCO; STATE OF MEXICO, FRIDAY, CINCO DE MAYO, 2006: Holding up a shiny bullet cartridge into the evening drizzle of raindrops, Zapatista Insurgent Subcomandante Marcos tonight challenged the Commercial Media — by name, Televisa and TV Azteca, the twin antennas of disinformation in Mexico — saying, “We, the Zapatistas, have always told the truth.”

The Precarity Map is online!
http://www.precarity-map.net/
It is the first step of The WebRing for Communication and Militant
Research on Precarity which intends to produce and share knowledge, experiences
and materials among labour conflicts and life struggles around precarity.
The P_WR is an open platform and an evolving network connecting
activism already involved in the EuroMayDay mobilisations. Its main aims are: to
visualize and intensify the density of militant groups and struggles, to outline a
space for debate, research and political action, and finally to construct
common practices, concepts and notions for developing a militant co-research
“with” (instead of “on”) precarious subjects and their/our struggles.

"Take Back What Belongs to Us!":
Marcos Previews the Other Message of May
1st
The Zapatista Subcomandante Makes
a Prosecutor's Case that Workers Have a
Right to Expropriate the Means of Production
By Al Giordano
The Other Journalism with the Other Campaign in Mexico City
April 30, 2006
NarcoNews
http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1749.html
MEXICO CITY, APRIL 29, 2006: As in other lands, the union movement in Mexico
has been sold out by corrupt leaders, repressed by a violent state, and
filleted - that is to say, left without a spine - by reformers that have
reduced worker power to fighting for larger crumbs, or to defending to
maintain the size of those crumbs from the owner's table. In Mexico City, on
Saturday, April 29, Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos made a prosecutor's plea
to workers and labor leaders to forget about the crumbs, to throw over that
table, and to start anew.
In the Union Hall of the National Union of Uniroyal Workers, Marcos spoke to
more than a thousand - and listened, one by one, to more than a hundred of
them - mineworkers, soft drink bottlers, tire makers, municipal, state and
federal employees, industrial and sweatshop workers and others who came from
the Mexican Southeast, from Tijuana and from so many other provinces and
cities to the nation's capital. Here, at the First National Workers'
Gathering, a stone's throw from Mexico City's largest cemetery, they
discussed how to remake the workers' movement from below into an
anti-capitalist force. "The fight against the market and for a fair salary
is fundamental, but it is not enough," said the Zapatista spokesman. "We are
asking you, respectfully, at this meeting to decide to fight with us to
destroy the capitalists and take back, now, the means of production."
These were not empty words coming from the military chief of the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation (EZLN, in its Spanish initials) that fought the
1994 insurrection that seized - and still holds today - hundreds of farming
plantations that are now owned collectively by the campesinos that work the
land. The indigenous rebels of Chiapas kicked out the bosses and their
foremen, not just on the farm, but in all aspects of daily life. They took
back what few schools and health clinics dotted their regions, and in twelve
years they have constructed - without accepting a peso from any government
agency - their own education and health care systems, along with their own
local governments, free of political parties or paid functionaries, a task
thought impossible twelve years ago, and still thought impossible by those
to whom the Commercial Media hasn't shared the news.
His message to the workers' meeting on Saturday cuts to the grain of the
Zapatista "Other Campaign." At the epicenter of the brushfire to come is the
spark of Urban Zapatismo, by industrial workers and others, to unite their
pain and rage with that of the rural and indigenous farmers to build a
"national civil and peaceful rebellion to end the capitalist system."
The remarks by "Delegate Zero" came two days before "The Great American
Boycott" by Mexican and other immigrants that will surprise the world and
especially conventional wisdom north of the border in the United States. It
is the closest thing to a General Strike that the U.S. has seen in many
decades, if ever. And as millions march and boycott work and school up North
on Monday, Marcos, these workers, and all the other sectors of the Zapatista
Other Campaign will assemble at noon at the doors of the U.S. Embassy in
Mexico City - in solidarity with the Mexicans and others on the Other Side -
to begin an "Other Workers' March" to the Mexican National Palace.
The Prosecutor from Below
In a land - Mexico - where the public sees that organized criminals, corrupt
law enforcers and mega-millionaires take with impunity what they want, when
they want it, from anyone and everyone who has less, there is no illusion
that a so-called "state of law" or "justice system" can or will right the
wrongs. On Saturday, Marcos made a prosecutor's case against capitalism and
its governments, and pleaded to the jury - on Saturday it was the urban
workers - to deliver the death sentence: the "expropriation of the means of
production" so that, like what occurs on Zapatista farmlands today in
Chiapas, those of us who do the work will own our jobs and earn the true
value of our labor.
Wielding the evidence reported by the Center of Multi-Disciplinary Analysis
at Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM, in its Spanish initials),
the Subcomandante-Prosecutor referred to the "canasta ba'sica," or "basic
breadbasket," that is needed by a family of five to meet its weekly needs
for food, transportation, energy and water. He explained how, today in 2006,
a person must work 47 hours plus 47 minutes per week to earn the 288 pesos
(almost 30 dollars) necessary to pay those bills - not including the extra
hours she and he must work to pay the rent, medicine, health care,
schooling, clothing, shoes or anything else that the family needs.
Marcos compared the staggering cost of living today with that in 1987 (on
the eve of Mexico's slide into a US-imposed "free market" economic system),
when the "basic breadbasket" cost six pesos and 86 centavos (about seven
dollars) per week. The masked prosecutor argued that, nineteen years ago,
"the minimum wage paid 94 percent (of the basic breadbasket) and today it
pays only sixteen percent. More than five minimum-wage salaries are needed
today to be able to live decently. And that supposes that there is no need
to pay rent, that nobody gets sick, that it is not necessary to buy clothes
or shoes, and that the worker doesn't need to have any fun or to acquire any
culture."
As in other parts of Mexico since he began this six-month tour on January 1,
Delegate Zero's presence brought forward the volunteer testimony of
eyewitnesses to the crime that has been committed against most of humanity:
a crime he calls capitalism. (During his fifteen-minute speech to the
workers' gathering, Marcos used the words, "Capitalism," the "Capitalist
system" or other variations of the C-word 36 times, causing headaches, no
doubt, for any Commercial Media reporter prohibited from use of the word.)
One of those whistleblowers who came to speak his word to Marcos and the
assembled workers is Javier Corte's, a soft-drink bottler for the Bonafant
company in Quere'taro, who testified on Saturday that a worker in his factory
earns 83 pesos (about eight dollars) a day, reporting at 8 a.m. and working
until "nobody knows." The worker earns less than a dollar an hour. The
factory, Corte's noted, churns out 6,000 bottles of refreshment per hour and
that each worker produces "256 pesos of product" per shift. "The owner makes
a profit of two pesos per bottle," he noted. "What a huge difference it
makes to be of the class of the owner compared to being in the working
class!"
What Marcos has accomplished already in the first four months of the
Zapatista "Other Campaign" is to connect the dots in the chain of
exploitation: he has received, and given national and international voice
to, the stories of the farmers and workers in the sugar refineries that
supply the soft-drink factories, of the farmers and ranchers whose water is
stolen to make the refreshments, of the truck drivers who deliver the
product, of the street vendors that sell it, and of the consumers who, when
quenching their thirst on a hot day, see their own hard-earned money go the
owners of the company. "We have already seen a lot of suffering and pain
everywhere and we have found many rebel hearts ready to rise up against the
oppression, against the capitalist system," he said.
The Sickle's Argument to the Hammer
"We, the Zapatista men and women, have explained how we see the world," said
Marcos in a reference to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, that
began, last year, this Other Campaign. "We said that under capitalism, there
are those who have, and those who do not. There are those who give orders,
and those who obey. There are those who have banks, factories, large
businesses, lands, money, and there are those who don't have anything more
than their capacity to work. In sum, there are those who possess and there
are those of us, the men and women who are dispossessed, who have nothing.
We explained then that those that have the money and things have them
because they stole them, they looted them, and they took them away from
others."
"The wealthy and powerful are that way because they took away the wealth
from others," Marcos continued, "because they exploit those who work in the
cities, in the countryside, in the mountains, in the rivers, under the
earth, on the sea. We also see that capitalism turns everything into product
and organizes all of society to make merchandise so that it will be bought
and sold. Thus, we, the Zapatista men and women, see that the guilty party
for our pain and disgrace is the system, the capitalist system. We
understand that capitalism is the enemy and that we will not be able to live
in peace and dignity until this system and all that it sustains is
destroyed."
Although speaking to industrial workers, Marcos also made an essentially
environmental case against capitalism, from the point of view of the rural
indigenous that he represents:
"We saw that this capitalist system is taking the land, the water, the
forest, the air, the mountain, the rivers, the seas, from us to turn them
into product. We saw that this system wants to annihilate us as Indian
peoples because we, men and women, are the guardians of the earth and we don
't agree with the capitalists' way of wanting to make product out of
everything, even out of our history. And we see that with their motive of
having a lot of money, the capitalists destroy our nature, they kill it, and
we see that if the land that we care for dies, we will also die."
In the case made to the workers, Marcos took aim at the "nucleus" of
capitalism; "its most capitalist part. the production of merchandise."
Noting that there is where the women and men who are workers are found, he
said that, "merchandise doesn't just need to be produced. It also needs
those who carry and transport it, those who sell it and those who collect."
Sharing his observations based on four months of receiving testimony, Marcos
concluded that, "the majority of people are living with a lot of pain and
sadness."
But "the most important part for the capitalists," he said, involves the
industrial workers. "They are those who can hit the capitalist where it
hurts most and who can do away with him once and for all because, if not, he
will return to do his evil."
The Polemic Over the May Day Marches
Every May 1st, in Mexico as in most of the world, workers march through the
streets. May 1 is, in fact, the most celebrated holiday on earth, crossing
borders of religion, language and timekeeping like no other day on the
calendar. It is celebrated everywhere except the country where it gained its
status as a worker's day: the United States of America (May Day as workers'
day was born from a massacre of workers in Chicago). That's where the
"unions" that sold out long ago acquiesced to change Workers' Day from May
First to a Labor Day in September.
The "unions" up north are still doing what they can to enforce the imposed
amnesia. Even the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), with so many
Mexican-American members, has joined other pillars of Church and State in
waddling away from the immigrants' rights movement and the Great American
Boycott that will slam-dunk on Monday from California to New York Island.
But none of that institutional gamesmanship matters. The United States will
live its first taste in a long, long time of what a General Strike looks
like on Monday, and it will be Mexicans and Mexican-Americans leading El
Norte back to authenticity.
South of the Border, the never-ending battle between above and below is also
playing itself out on May Day. The institutional unions are marching early
in the day to the space in front of the National Palace known as the Zo'calo.
For the first time in years they are being joined by the movement's
liberals; those unions and union leaders that have historically dissented,
to varying degrees, from the institutionalists. Their march will occur in a
super-heated backdrop of the tragedy of the collapse of the Pasta de Conchos
mine in Coahuila (death toll: 65) and of recent state violence against mine
and steelworkers in Michoacan that took over a steel mill (see John Ross'
story, "100 Years After the Mexican Labor Movement Was Born, Miners' Blood
Once Again Stains the Nation," Narco News, April 28). It is expected to be,
according to the daily La Jornada, "the largest mobilization" on May First
in recent decades, "without precedent."
But the Zapatista Other Campaign is marching to a different drummer, and
along a different path: heading first to the U.S. Embassy as the official
unions go to the Zo'calo, and then, hours later, marching to the same Zo'calo
after the union bosses have left.
During Saturday's National Workers' Gathering, many speakers touched upon
the mineworkers' conflict in La'zaro Ca'rdenas, Michoacan, a port city named
for the Mexican President who nationalized the petroleum industry. There is,
no doubt, inspiration - and evidence toward Marcos' argument about the
possibilities for expropriation of factories - to be found in the fact that
500 mine and steelworkers repelled 800 heavily armed riot cops to retake
control of the Sicartsa steel mill there. Their demand, though, is not
worker ownership of the means of production, or even directly related to
working conditions or salary.
The strike by the mine and steelworkers seeks to resolve a more narrow
dispute: it opposes the federal government's imposition of one dubious union
leader over another, Napoleon Go'mez Urrutia, repeatedly called a "charro"
during Saturday's workers' gathering. (A loose translation of "charro" would
be "lone cowboy," a kind of ranch hand that goes off alone to become the
right-hand man of the hacienda owner against the interests of the other
cowhands.) The Mexican daily newspapers and TV news are flooded with violent
images from the combat between police and workers at that steel mill. And
added to the tumultuous mix is that the grandson of the Mexican hero for
whom the city is named, today governor of Michoacan, La'zaro Ca'rdenas Batel,
of the "center-left" Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), is on the sacred cow
hamburger grill as it was one of his police officials caught on camera
giving the order for police to shoot at the occupying workers. Two deaths,
and dozens of injuries, ensued.
Mari'a Luisa Marti'nez Sa'nchez, widow of one of the 65 coalminers who died in
Coahuila - the tragedy that created the context for the conflict in
Michoaca'n and for Monday's official May Day march - sat next to Marcos on
the Union Hall stage as one worker denounced the charro leaders for using
the mine and steelworkers as "cannon fodder" in a dispute over power between
individuals.
But even the specter of state violence and death - and the corresponding
media spectacle that swarms from Coahuila to Michoaca'n and Monday's workers'
march in Mexico - was overshadowed by a single concept during Saturday's
workers' gathering: that of expropriation of workplaces. One by one, the
workers took the microphone and gave answer to Marcos' question: Yes, we
want to take back the means of production. And each time the Zapatista
Subcomandante mentioned expropriation, his comments were received with
shouts of "Duro! Duro!" ("Harder! Harder!").
The last commentator of the workers' gathering was a student from the Prepa
2 high school in Mexico City, Antonio Escalante, who mentioned the
necessity - in addition to taking back the means of production - of taking
back the means of communication: the media, and its installations. " !Duro!"
responds your correspondent. See y'all in the streets on Monday.

Immigrants Try to Extend Boycott Momentum
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By GILLIAN FLACCUS Associated Press Writer
May 02,2006 | LOS ANGELES -- Illegal immigrants and their supporters vowed to keep up
the pressure on Congress for reforms after more than 1 million people stepped out of the
shadows and poured into the streets in a nationwide show of economic clout.
From Los Angeles to Chicago, Houston to Miami, a "Day Without Immigrants" Monday
meant a day boycotting work and school in favor of rallies and marches with waves
of red, white and blue filling streets for miles.
"We have far exceeded our expectations," said Mahonrry Hidalgo, chairman
of the Immigration Committee of the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey.
"The events are intended to show solidarity and, at the same time, send a message
that injustice against the immigrant community is unacceptable. This is
not the end of our struggle. It is the beginning."
The boycott was organized by immigrant activists angered by federal
legislation that would criminalize an estimated 11 million illegal
immigrants and fortify the U.S-Mexico border.
While some businesses suffered, the marches were festive -- despite
divisions among activists who argued a boycott would alienate
federal lawmakers.
In all, police departments and local officials in more than two
dozen U.S. cities contacted by The Associated Press gave crowd
estimates that totaled about 1.1 million marchers.
Two major rallies in Los Angeles attracted an estimated 400,000, according
to the mayor's office. Another 400,000 marched through Chicago's downtown
business district, police estimated. The list was long: As many as 30,000
in Houston, 50,000 in San Jose, 30,000 more across Florida. From New Mexico
to Tennessee to Massachusetts, smaller rallies attracted hundreds more.
Marchers standing shoulder-to-shoulder sang and chanted and danced in
the streets wearing American flags as capes and bandanas. In most cities,
those who rallied wore white to signify peace and solidarity and waved signs
reading "We are America" and "Today we march, tomorrow we vote."
In Los Angeles, marchers held U.S. flags aloft and sang the national
anthem in English as traditional Mexican dancers and Korean drummers wove
through the crowd. In Philadelphia, about a thousand people from different
marches converged in the historic area near the Liberty Bell.
In Washington, D.C., rallies were scattered but the White House took
note -- spokesman Scott McClellan said President Bush disapproved of the boycott.
While most demonstrations were peaceful, a Santa Ana rally of 5,000 in California
was marred by people hurling rocks and plastic bottles at officers. Police made
several arrests, but it was unclear if they were protesters.
Two people were arrested in Los Angeles on suspicion of assault with
a deadly weapon. Both men had been throwing rocks and bottles at police,
Officer Jason Lee said.
And a march in Seattle was disrupted when a car struck a group of marchers,
though injuries were minor: The driver was arrested, five other people were
arrested for possible weapons violations and one person was arrested for obstructing.
Industries that rely on immigrant workers were clearly affected, though the
impact was not uniform. There was low attendance at hotels in Indianapolis,
construction sites in Miami and plant nurseries and landscapers across a wide area.
Tyson Foods Inc., the world's largest meat producer, shuttered about a dozen of
its more than 100 plants. Eight of 14 Perdue Farms chicken plants also closed for the day.
The rallies shut down 29 branches of Chipotle Mexican Grill, a Denver-based
fast-casual dining chain. Goya Foods, which bills itself as the nation's largest
Hispanic-owned food chain, suspended delivery everywhere except Florida in what
the company called a gesture of solidarity.
In the Los Angeles area, many restaurants and markets were dark and truck
traffic at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach -- the nation's
busiest -- was off 90 percent, said spokeswoman Theresa Adams Lopez.
The construction industry was hard hit in Florida. More than half the
workers at construction sites in Miami-Dade County did not show up,
according to Bill Spann, executive vice president of the Associated
General Contractors of Greater Florida.
"If I lose my job, it's worth it," said Jose Cruz, an immigrant from
El Salvador who rather than working his construction job protested with
several thousand others in the rural city of Homestead outside Miami.
"It's worth losing several jobs to get my papers."
About 35 to 40 anti-immigration demonstrators got into shouting
matches with pro-immigration marchers as they were leaving a Denver
park. Among them were Ron and Marge Mason of Thornton, a Denver suburb.
"We're tired of seeing the illegals coming in," Ron Mason said.
College Republicans at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte
staged a rally of their own Monday, demanding tougher enforcement of
existing immigration laws. The GOP group sold $5 bricks symbolic of a
wall it said was needed to secure U.S. borders.
The impact on some school systems was significant. In the sprawling
Los Angeles Unified School District, which is 73 percent Hispanic, about
72,000 middle and high school students were absent -- roughly one in
every four.
In San Francisco, Benita Olmedo pulled her 11-year-old daughter and
7-year-old son from school.
"I want my children to know their mother is not a criminal," said
Olmedo, a nanny who came here illegally in 1986 from Mexico. "I want
them to be as strong I am. This shows our strength."

No Choice for Migrants
Immigration lessons from the Other Campaign
Znet
by John Gibler; April 29, 2006
Much of the current immigration debate is founded on a deep and
arrogant mistake: the belief that hundreds of thousands of people, mostly
Mexicans, cross undocumented into the United States each year in search of
a better life. This view tells us that men, women, and children risk their
lives crossing the United States-Mexico border because they have chosen to
seek out something better.
After spending over three months traveling through 18 of Mexico's 31
states on the trail of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation's Other
Campaign, I have documented a very different view of the forces behind
mass migration to the United States the view of Mexicans who have migrated
and returned, of those whose families left and did not come back, of those
who have resisted migration, and those who are readying their day packs
for the long walk north.
In their experience, there is no real choice, no search for something
better. There is only the option of playing their lives against the
coyotes and the desert, or betting on the slow but certain destitution of
sweatshop labor, dispossession, and the political violence of the
government and local mafia groups. This is the cruel gamble that the
neoliberal political model in Mexico and the United States calls free
choice.
But the myth has it that Mexicans cross the border to reap the
benefits of capitalism, to work hard and earn enough money to buy nicer
cars and clothes than they could in Mexico, as if Mexico itself were not a
capitalist country. As if Mexico and the United States were not
co-signatories, along with Canada, to the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA).
Since passing NAFTA in 1994 the year of the Zapatista uprising Mexico
and the United States have officially shared the same model of capitalism,
a model that seeks to eliminate communal land holdings in the Mexican
countryside, forcing millions into a homeless flight to the fields of the
United States' multi-billion dollar agriculture, construction and service
industries.
And this is a standard feature of capitalism: the refusal to view and
consider the violence generated by the system, the millions of subsistence
farmers, indigenous communities, and small business people in other
countries as well as the forgotten corners of the United
States reservations, farmlabor camps, ghettos who are cut down and thrown
out. The filter of Free Trade Ideology converts these victims of sweeping
political and economic reforms into "free agents" and "rational actors"
eagerly marching to their home in the market place. That home is not as
empowered consumers, but trapped labor, "illegal aliens," workers without
even the minimal rights of citizenship and collective bargaining.
But the filter is cracked. Migrants across the country are taking to
the streets, exercising their political will. They more than anyone know
that Mexican migration to the United States is the result of economic
policy, not bad weather or the intoxicating pull of bigger trucks and
tighter jeans; that the millions of Mexicans who work in the United
States, building houses, picking fruit, slaughtering cows, packaging
chickens, making beds and serving cappuccinos, are the refugees of NAFTA
and the neoliberal model's unrelenting economic hurricane.
Migration has been one of the principal themes in the Other Campaign.
>From the indigenous communities of far southern Chiapas to the sprawling
state capitols surrounding Mexico City, not a single meeting has closed
without hearing testimonies of the economic and political pressures that
force people to uproot and risk everything on finding work in foreign
lands to the north.
In the high mountain village of La Veracruz, Quere'taro, Dominga
Maldonado took the microphone to address subcomandante Marcos and the two
hundred villagers packed into a school room to participate in the Other
Campaign meeting. Maldonado, a strong woman in her early forties railed
against the federal land reform program that pushes communal land
collectives to convert to private property holdings, forcing rural farmers
and indigenous people to migrate to large cities and, mostly, to the
United States.
"In our communities, we've only got elderly people, young people and
kids," she said, "many stay over there; some die on the way, while
crossing. Over there they are not treated well. They are just cheap labor,
and they are discriminated against. Mexico is becoming just a nursery for
young people who will go to work in the United States!"
In Tepexi del Rio, Hidalgo, Uiciulfo Quijano stood before Marcos and a
small gathering of rural farmworkers sitting on stumps under a tin roof.
Quijano, a stocky man of 42, went to the United States to visit his son an
undocumented construction worker and ended up staying and working first in
New Orleans and then throughout rural Florida for four years. Under the
light of a single bulb hanging by wire from the roof, Quijano came to
"tell a bit about what one suffers in the United States."
"You break your back so much in the long hours of work that all you
want to do is get home and sleep," he said. "Most can take the physical
exhaustion, but it's the emotional... At times I told my wife: I almost
want the immigration police to grab me so this journey can end."
At a five-hour meeting in Tonala, Chiapas, Jesus Pereda fused his
experience with migration into the aphoristic: "In this county they
produce so many poor people, they export them."
The logic is clear: poverty is the result of policies set in place by
the ruling class, and poverty is the motor of migration to the United
States.
But the testimonies are not limited to the Other Campaign meetings;
they sprout up from daily experiences all across the country. Walking into
a pharmacy, ordering coffee at a restaurant, listening to folk musicians
in small mountain towns, talking to fishermen by the pier, migration to
the United States is only a few years or a family member away from nearly
everyone I have met.
In Morelia, Michoacan the state that exports the majority of the
workers in the fields of California's $34 billion a year agriculture
industry I spoke with Arturo Oliveras, a muscular, thirty-five year old
who was walking in the central plaza with his wife and son. Oliveras
worked undocumented in the United States for 10 years in everything from
construction in Houston and Atlanta, to picking peaches and grapes in
California's vast, industrial Central Valley.
Before migrating, Oliveras worked the land with his father. In a year
they produced 16 tons of corn, which they sold for $2,600, half of which
went to pay extra workers. A year's labor earned them a little more than
$100 a month. But after NAFTA, corn prices plummeted and they could not
make it. They lost their land.
I asked him why he, and those he met during 10 years of underground
labor, migrated to the United States.
"Out of need," he said.
And why is there so much need in Mexico?
"Because of the monopolies created by the government, because of the
racism in Mexico, the marginalization and poverty; that is why people have
such a hard time."
Oliveras last crossed the border in 2000 when we went to Houston to
work in construction. He "only lasted a year," he told me, due to the heat
and the relentless pace of the work. But now he's going back.
"In about twenty days I am going to cross again. I'm going to go to
the march," he told me, referring to the nationwide May first migrant
labor strike, purchasing boycott marches. Oliveras does not have the two
thousand dollars necessary to pay the coyote, but he has friends and
family and the other side and is willing to risk it to march with them.
"Mexicans are hot-blooded," he said, "and the government over there
isn't counting on that."
This may be the first time in United States history that migrants risk
their lives to cross the border not to pick grapes for less than minimum
wage, but to take to the streets claiming a voice in a system that has
always locked them out. In fact, in a few short weeks, the migrant labor
movement in the United States has already achieved what years of anti-war
activism only dreamed of: they have put millions in the streets and forced
Washington to pay attention.
Sadly, the attention will most likely take the form of pacification
and deception. Washington knows that an angry migrant labor force capable
of pulling off a day-long national strike would also be capable of pulling
off a week-long strike, which would cause the United States economy
stumble to its knees, if not collapse.
It is now two months before subcomandante Marcos and the Other
Campaign are scheduled to arrive on the United States-Mexico border, first
in Ciudad Juarez and later in Tijuana. And it looks as if the reception
will be even more spirited than earlier imagined. The Other Campaign could
prove to be a major inspiration for the Mexican immigrants in the United
States to further politicize their up-rising, refusing to settle for a
return to the status quo: exploitation and exclusion. The greatest hope
for labor rights and anti-racist social change in the United States is now
riding on this up-rising.

Neil Young"s
Living With War
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