Mexicans Are the NAFTA Winners? It's News to Them Azam Ahmed and Elisabeth Malkin - The New York Times
go to original January 5, 2017

Abby Martin outlines the disastrous effects of so-called "free trade" policy NAFTA, including the ejection of over two million Mexican farmers, a surge in sweatshop labor and the destruction of Mexico's food sovereignty. (Empire Files)

Here in Mexico, there is an increasing belief that Nafta, despite drawing an enormous amount of investment to the country, has been a big disappointment.

“At the end of the day, as a development strategy, it should have led to higher sustained growth, generated well-paid salaries and reduced the gap between Mexico and the United States,” said Gerardo Esquivel, an economist at the Colegio de México. “It has remained well below what was hoped for.”

Mexico’s economy has grown an average of just 2.5 percent a year under Nafta, a fraction of what was needed to provide the jobs and prosperity its supporters promised. More than half of Mexicans still live below the poverty line, a proportion that remains unchanged from 1993, before the deal went into effect.

Wages in Mexico have stagnated for more than a decade, and the stubborn gap between the nation’s rich and poor persists. A majority of workers in Mexico toil in the obscurity of under-the-table jobs at workshops, markets and farms for their survival.

New technologies, meanwhile, have cut many jobs while increasing productivity, which is good news for businesses but a blow to the work force.

“Mexico is seeing exactly the same phenomenon as in the United States,” said Timothy A. Wise, a research fellow at Tufts University. “Workers have declining bargaining power on both sides of the border.”

In part, Nafta’s failure to achieve its potential falls on the Mexican government’s shoulders, experts say. Rather than use the agreement as a launching point to grow and invest in many sectors of the Mexican economy, successive governments viewed the trade deal as a silver bullet for the country’s economic woes.

All of this is not lost on Mexicans, despite their government’s defense of Nafta. A recent poll by Parametría, a respected Mexican pollster, found that more than two-thirds of respondents believed that Nafta had benefited American consumers and businesses, while just 20 percent believed it had been good for them. The poll, consisting of 800 interviews in people’s homes, had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

“There is a grand narrative in the United States that Mexico was the great winner of Nafta,” said Fernando Turner Dávila, the secretary of the economy and labor in the industrial state of Nuevo León. “Meanwhile, here in Mexico, they only see the benefits, which are glorified. They never see the downsides, much less talk about them.”

Read the rest at The New York Times

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