Thread: How U.S. can help calm electoral crisis in Mexico

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/edi ... 37857.html

July 10, 2006, 8:17PM

How U.S. can help calm electoral crisis in Mexico
Support a recount and then renegotiate NAFTA
By GREG GRANDIN
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

THE Aztecs used to believe that history is not linear but circular, with great events repeating themselves on a regular basis. That certainly seems to be the case with Mexico, which has a revolution once every hundred years.

In 1810, peasants thrown off their land by plantation owners led a violent five-year rebellion that paved the way for Mexico's independence from Spain. In 1910, an instance of electoral fraud ignited an agrarian revolution, which in turn kicked off a decade-long civil war in which millions of Mexicans died.

Nearly a century later, Mexico's current electoral crisis likewise is propelled by rural unrest — this time largely brought about by the anger of agricultural workers displaced by the North American Free Trade Agreement. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the center-left presidential candidate who is contesting the declared victory of Felipe Calderon in last Sunday's election, draws much of his support from this increasingly restive population of rural poor.

Before NAFTA, Mexico was self-sufficient in corn and bean production. Today, one out of three Mexican tortillas is made with cheap corn meal from the United States. In 1993, more than 10 million Mexicans made their living off the land. Today, even as Mexico's population has grown, that number has plummeted to about 7 million.

Mexican farmers simply can't compete with capital-intensive U.S. agribusiness, which continues to enjoy generous government subsidies. Moreover, Mexican commodity importers receive low-interest loans to buy crops from the United States. Every year, nearly 3 million tons of harvested Mexican corn is left to rot because it is too expensive to sell.

Mexicans have reason to worry that this is not all the trouble NAFTA has in store. In 2008, the agreement's final provision is set to go into effect, eliminating the last tariffs on U.S. corn and beans and ending the subsidies Mexico gives to its peasant farmers — all the while leaving untouched the far larger subsidies Washington doles out to its own agricultural sector. During his campaign, Lopez Obrador pledged to renegotiate this provision, but J.B. Penn, the U.S. undersecretary of Agriculture, last month pre-emptively responded by saying that "we have no interest in renegotiating any parts of the agreement."

For the last decade and a half, Washington and its allies in Mexican politics, including Calderon, have promoted a free-trade economic model that has failed to deliver the prosperity its advocates promised. Although the Mexican economy grew by 3 percent last year, the country's poverty and inequality indicators remain typical to bad by Latin American standards, with the richest 10 percent of citizens controlling 43 percent of the country's wealth, while some 40 percent of Mexicans live below the poverty line.

These problems, combined with Mexican anger over the immigration debate in the United States, run the risk of souring relations between our two countries for the foreseeable future.

But there is a way the Bush administration can help to set things on a different course. Although election officials say Calderon won the presidential vote, the United States should not rush to embrace him as the election's victor. The official tally gives Calderon a razor-thin lead, and there are credible reports of significant irregularities that could, at best, weaken the legitimacy of a Calderon presidency, and at worst, lead to escalating protests. The disputed votes include the 904,000 annulled ballots that come primarily from regions that went heavily for Lopez Obrador, as well as discrepancies between the numbers handed in by polling stations and the actual ballots cast.

The best thing the United States can do now is to support the push for a recount and to refrain from calling on Lopez Obrador to concede. Then, no matter who finally wins the election, the White House should renegotiate NAFTA, allowing Mexico to set its own policy in support of its rural economy. If the Bush administration does otherwise, it might help begin yet another season of Mexican upheaval — just as the Aztecs might have predicted.

Grandin, an assistant professor of history at New York University, is the author of "Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism." This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Then, no matter who finally wins the election, the White House should renegotiate NAFTA, allowing Mexico to set its own policy in support of its rural economy.

I have a better idea...kick NAFTA to the curb in its entirety. Mexico can take care of Mexico and the United States can take care of the United States.