Thoughts on the Documentary Borderland and the Deadly Choices Facing People in Mexico and Central America
May 19, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
Borderland is a powerful four-part documentary/reality show which aired on the Al Jazeera America network, in which a group of six volunteers from the U.S. with a wide array of views on immigration are assembled for a mission to experience the harrowing trek that hundreds of thousands of people from Central America and Mexico take every year in attempting to enter the United States to find some kind of better life for themselves and their families. The show begins when the six volunteers are gathered inside a morgue in Pima County, Arizona, and shown the awful reality of what this journey actually means for hundreds of people—there the remains are stored of some of the 180 people who die every year [in Pima County alone] attempting to come to the U.S. Confronted first with this brutal reality, the six Americans then set out in pairs to follow the journeys of three of these immigrants—a 13-year-old boy from Guatemala, a young woman from El Salvador, and a young woman from Chiapas, Mexico—journeys which led to their deaths.
In this series you meet the grieving grandfather of the 13-year-old, a coffee bean picker—the boy had set out on the journey north to join his mother in the U.S. and perished in the desert. You meet a woman and her young daughter so determined to leave Mexico that she is willing to take her chances along with the hundreds of others on a potentially deadly journey riding atop the freight train that runs from southern Mexico up towards the border. You meet women who stop in at a pharmacy near the border to purchase birth control pills to prevent pregnancy in case of rape, knowing full well that rape is the likely price they'll pay for making the journey across the border—it's estimated that as many as 80 percent of women crossing the border will be sexually assaulted.
The six volunteers are profoundly affected by meeting these people and hearing their stories and many more—all of a sudden these are not foreigners "invading" their country, but human beings desperately seeking a way to live. But the huge question that screams out at the volunteers and the viewers of this documentary series is: Why are these people forced to risk everything to try to make this perilous journey in a desperate effort to find a better life for themselves and their families? What are the forces at work that make life so untenable in these countries that millions are driven to leave? And why are these the only choices available for millions and millions of people in Mexico and Central America?
One of the six volunteers on the show—a retired Marine who started out the journey with virulently anti-immigrant views—opens up a tiny window onto the realities that are the answer to these urgent questions. Summing up the life-changing experience that he and the other five went through, he says that one of the biggest surprises for him from the whole trip was to learn that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has devastated the Mexican economy, contributing to the impoverished conditions which drive so many to the U.S. This is a reality that very few people in this country know anything about.
During the May Day demonstration in Los Angeles this year a man holds this poster and explains: "Well, this guy went to his country, to Oaxaca, Mexico, to visit his wife and two kids. He stayed there for a month, and then he came back to the U.S. to keep working to keep supporting his family. He came with a group of about 15 people, across the border. One of them was his cousin. And this guy (in the picture) got sick on the way. All the rest of the group kept going, except his cousin, who wouldn't leave him. So his cousin stayed with him, and he got sick as well and they both died. 6 months later we—my organization—we started searching for them in the Arizona desert. After six tries of looking for them, we found them six months later, the way he looks here… We [our organization] search for these people trying to come to the United States, to the American dream. When they don't make it, their family calls us and asks us to go and search, and find them."
I thought I would share with readers a deeper look at some of that reality, which comes through in a book I've been reading, The Right to Stay Home by David Bacon. The book documents how NAFTA, which was advertised as a way to bring jobs and open U.S. markets to Mexico, in fact opened up Mexico to massive amounts of U.S. investment on terms favorable to the growth of U.S. capital and devastating to the Mexican economy and the livelihoods of millions of farmers and small producers throughout Mexico.
One telling example of this is the story of Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer. Shortly after NAFTA went into effect on January 1, 1994, Smithfield opened up a giant hog-raising operation in the Mexican state of Veracruz, and the dynamics that were set into motion have made life there untenable:
- With the massive concentration of livestock set up in direct proximity of a heavily populated area, pools of untreated animal waste and piles of diseased carcasses sit unprotected, polluting the water, spreading deadly disease and fouling the air. Children arrive at school in the morning vomiting from the effects.
- In order to feed the hogs, Smithfield imports corn from the U.S., which is heavily subsidized by the U.S. government allowing it to be priced 19 percent below the cost of production, and pricing the local Mexican corn and hog producers right out of the market.
- Not only does Smithfield import feed for the hogs, but they also import pork produced by its own operations in the U.S. and market it in Mexico, driving down Mexican pork prices by 56 percent.
- Due to these market pressures from this massive U.S. company, farmers in neighboring Querétaro found that the price they could get per hog was $19 to $25 below the cost of raising them.
- Four thousand local pig farms were forced out of business, with the loss of 20,000 jobs, just as a result of this one company's operations in Mexico.
- With Mexican corn producers driven out of the market, the Mexican economy was left vulnerable to the dictates of U.S. agribusiness. When the U.S. adjusted its corn policy to encourage ethanol production, the price of corn in Mexico jumped 100 percent in a year, directly impacting the price of one the major staples of the Mexican diet and contributing greatly to widespread impoverishment.
Smithfield's operations and this whole cascade of dire consequences are only one small part of the totality of what U.S. domination has meant in the lives of the people of Mexico and Central America. In 2010, one half of Mexico's population—53 million people—were living in poverty, 20 percent of those in extreme poverty concentrated in the rural areas.
These are the dynamics that drive people from their homes, destroy whole communities and tear families apart—and then force people to risk life and limb to try to escape, only to be met by the brutal U.S. clampdown on the Mexican border enforced by drones, Border Patrol, detention centers, and a massive fence all aimed at preventing people from leaving these horrors and finding some means to survive. These are the dynamics of a criminal system that needs to be overthrown.
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