Buried History, Part II

NAFTA (or North American Free Trade Agreement) created the climate where many Mexican Nationals, Central and even Southern Americans have no choice but to come North, to Gringo-land, in order to secure some sort of future for themselves and their family.

Smiles all around as they're thinking of the orphanage they'll soon visit for a private 'fun d raiser'

Comin' or Goin'?

One simple example: In the Veracruz region of Mexico, prior to NAFTA, many families were in the business of raising, slaughtering, and selling pigs. The area's proximity to Mexico City allowed families to provide for themselves on small family owned plots of land by helping to feed the largest city in North America. 

A typical Mexican family farm. Some Maize, a few cattle, a good dog.  A few chickens and swine not shown (but members of Congress were unable to make it for the photo shoot)

 Then came Smithfield Farms and NAFTA: "In 1993 Carroll Foods, a giant hog-raising corporation, partnered with a Mexican agribusiness enterprise to set up a huge pig farm known as Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM) in Veracruz’s Perote Valley. Smithfield, which had a longtime partnership with Carroll Foods, bought the company out in 1999.  By 2008  the Perote operation was sending close to a million pigs to slaughter every year—85 percent to Mexico City and the rest to surrounding Mexican states. Because of its location in the mountains above the city of Veracruz, Mexico’s largest port, the operation could easily receive imported corn for feed, which makes up two-thirds of the cost of raising hogs. NAFTA lifted the barriers on Smithfield’s ability to import feed. This gave it an enormous advantage over Mexican producers, as US corn, heavily subsidized by US farm bills, was much cheaper. “After NAFTA,” says Timothy Wise, of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, US corn “was priced 19 percent below the cost of production.”

Bargain 'Holiday Hams' by Smithfield

But Smithfield didn’t just import feed into Mexico. NAFTA allowed it to import pork as well.

According to Alejandro Ramírez, general director of the Confederation of Mexican Pork Producers, Mexico imported 30,000 tons of pork in 1995, the year after NAFTA took effect. By 2010 pork imports, almost all from the United States, had grown more than twenty-five times, to 811,000 tons. As a result, pork prices received by Mexican producers dropped 56 percent. US pork exports are dominated by the largest companies. Wise estimates that Smithfield’s share of this export market is significantly greater than its 27 percent share of US production.

Imported pork had a dramatic effect on Mexican jobs. “We lost 4,000 pig farms,” Ramírez estimates, based on reports received by the confederation from its members. “On Mexican farms, each 100 animals produce five jobs, so we lost 20,000 farm jobs directly from imports. Counting the five indirect jobs dependent on each direct job, we lost over 120,000 jobs in total.”

In a 2005 study for the Mexican government, the World Bank found that the extreme rural poverty rate of 35 percent in 1992–94, before NAFTA, jumped to 55 percent in 1996–98, after NAFTA took effect. This could be explained, the report said, “mainly by the 1995 economic crisis, the sluggish performance of agriculture, stagnant rural wages, and falling real agricultural prices.”

By 2010, according to the Monterrey Institute of Technology, 53 million Mexicans were living in poverty—half the country’s population. About 20 percent live in extreme poverty, almost all in rural areas.

The growth of poverty, in turn, fueled migration. In 1990, 4.5 million Mexican-born people lived in the United States. A decade later, that population had more than doubled to 9.75 million, and in 2008 it peaked at 12.67 million. About 5.7 million were able to get some kind of visa; another 7 million couldn’t but came nevertheless.

Simultaneous changes in the United States also accelerated migration. The Immigration Reform and Control Act, passed by Congress in 1986, expanded the existing H2-A visa program, creating the current H2-A program, which allows US agricultural employers to bring in workers from Mexico and other countries, giving them temporary visas tied to employment contracts. 

It's one of those 'coincidences' I'm sure, but first Congress (the body many Americans still trust represents their interests) passed laws opening up migration to foreigners who were allowed to stay in the US as long as employed. This allowed some corporations to eliminate union wage and benefit positions and later reconstitute and fill those same positions paying these immigrants a fraction of the previous wage and with few or even none of the benefits previously afforded. 

Shortly thereafter Congress changed the immigration law, Carroll/Smithfield move operations into Mexico and, in another coincidence, soon thereafter NAFTA was passed. (By both republicans and democrats - it's when they have bi-partisan support for an issue or bill that you really know you're gonna be screwed.) Smithfield was able to both export subsidized corn (subsidized means: partially paid for with your tax dollars) into Mexico to feed its pigs and produce the 'Other White Meat' below cost, thereby driving the small family farmer in Mexico out of business and leaving the young men and women with no choice but to set off for America (usually entering illegally) and then going to work at Smithfield's N Carolina facilities and of course this (and other) mass migration further inflamed the American people against both political parties causing them to march on Washington and, while shouting 'General Sherman burned the wrong city!' set DC aflame, driving all politicians and lobbyists and intelligence officers into the Atlantic where a gigantic once in a century storm was raging and sucked them all below water, never to be heard from again! no, that wasn't it... rather the immigration inflamed the American people against the damn illegals who continued pouring into America because they want to steal our jobs! Misplaced anger as the American people were LED by the media and their favorite politicians into believing hoards came here just to screw Gringo and Negro out of a job, when in fact, Gringo and Negro's supposed government, hand in hand with Ottawa and Mexico City, wrote and signed into law legislation and agreements that not only made immigration possible, but a forgone conclusion! 

So what happened when the children of Veracruz moved North?

As unrest grew in Veracruz, it was also growing among the company’s workers in North Carolina. When the Tar Heel slaughterhouse opened in 1992, its labor force was made up mostly of African-Americans and local Lumbee Native Americans. Many objected to the high line speed and the injuries that proliferated as a result. The plant kills and dismembers 32,000 hogs every day. People stand very close together as animal carcasses speed by. They wield extremely sharp knives, slicing through sinews and bone in the same motion, hundreds of times each hour. Repetitive stress and other injuries are endemic to meatpacking, and the faster the line runs, the more injuries there are.

The workers’ frustration with the low wages and brutal working conditions produced one of the longest and bitterest fights to organize a union in modern US labor history. In 1994 and 1997 the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) lost two union representation elections. The 1997 election was thrown out by the labor board, but an administrative law judge ruled that in both, Smithfield “engaged in egregious and pervasive unfair labor practices and objectionable conduct.” In 1997 police in riot gear lined the walkway into the plant, and workers had to file past them to cast their ballots. At the end of the vote count, union organizer Ray Shawn was beaten up. Security chief Danny Priest and the other guards were later deputized, and Smithfield maintained a holding cell in a trailer on the property, which workers called the company jail.

Soon to visit the 'company jail'

Even by standards in North Carolina, where union membership and wages are low, Smithfield’s pay scale and reputation for injuries made it hard for the company to attract local workers. In the mid-’90s, Mexicans pushed by the effects of NAFTA to leave the Veracruz countryside began arriving in North Carolina and going to work at the Tar Heel slaughterhouse. All over Veracruz, meatpacking companies were recruiting them, according to Carolina Ramirez. “There were recruiters in many Veracruz towns,” she remembers. “There were even vans stationed in different places, and a whole system in which people were promised jobs in the packing plants. It was an open secret.” Richards, the Smithfield spokeswoman, denied that the company recruited workers in Mexico. “With one exception [a management trainee program], Smithfield Foods does not travel to, nor advertise in, other countries or outside of our local communities to actively recruit employees for our various facilities around the country,” she said.

Roberto Ortega remembers that there were hundreds of people from Veracruz in the Tar Heel plant when he worked there in the late ’90s and early 2000s. “Almost the whole town [of Las Choapas] is here,” he says. “Some are supervisors and mayordomos, and they bring people from the town.”

NAFTA (among other evils) has decimated family farms and family businesses in both the USA and Mexico. 

Now, all this illegal immigration coupled with the '9/11 tragedy' where some cavemen spent a couple months learning to pilot single-engine Cessna's and used their new-found knowledge and some really sharp box cutters to pilot 4 jumbo jets into 3 buildings and a field; really got the patriotic flag waving Fox watching Limbo listening right-wingers into a tizzy. Something just had to be done! "Militarize the borders!

 We need Homeland Security! Strip search my neighbor at the airport!"  Our government, always eager to please, burned the midnight oil writing the Patriot Act which was miraculously completed prior to 9/11!!! (we really have the best government here in the USA!) 

The Miracle created Homeland Security and re-enforced cockpit doors and made little old ladies strip down to their girdles before boarding aircraft and best of all, militarized our borders!

And this folks, is where we are today in this psychotic reservation we call the USofA:

I really feel good seeing our agents ride about with little American flags on the rear of their  4 wheelers

Oops. That's the Berlin Wall! An evil, commie wall! I should know better than to associate that with patriotic American walls... Sorry.

That's the wrong message. Hopefully this farming family has been properly investigated by the Border Patrol, IRS and Homeland Security agencies.  These people make me nervous. Get with the program!! Love it or leave it!

Sorry pal, but you have it backasswards... Your sign should read: Ban Public Ownership of Military Weapons. Why anyone wants to put lethal weapons in the hands of the nutjobs is beyond me. 

And that, my friends, is how the 2 party system works in the USA. Don't think it would matter 

if we had 3 parties (just look at Britain). We could have 100 major parties and have the same 

results. Fact is, all the jackasses you voted for, whether Repub or Demo or Independent or 

Green martians (nearly) all work for the same end - some are so stupid that I'd bet they don't

know it themselves. 

Problem: Reaction: Solution.

They made the problem (massive illegal immigration caused by their actions) 

 The reaction was, as always, orchestrated by the media, in 

this case the 'conservative' (Fox, Limbo, the Savage Weiner 

etc) which demanded : (militarize the 

borders!) and now are ready to implement the solution: "Path to citizenship". I wonder how

the Tea Partiers and bigtits Palin will react to that!  Actually I know. It will be blamed on the 

'Rhino' republicans and those damn democrats. 


More important is this: We are all in the same boat: Mexican, Peruvian, Brazilian, Canadian; 

ditto every black man, yellow man, red man and white man. There are many in this 

movement who want their specific race to be 'special'.  "The Celts are the best and we 

need to throw the rest out along with the Jews! No, it is the Germanic people who's best!  No, 

all Saxons!! 

Please. The jewish con worked just as well on my Irish brothers as it did on your English 

cousins and the Mexican who was forced to immigrate or starve to death.  WE ALL HAVE 

A COMMON ENEMY AND THAT ENEMY IS NOT EACH OTHER! The enemy of all 

things good and noble is the jew. Our grandfathers ceded a great deal of ground to the 

enemy. We need to gain at least a portion of that ground back during our lifetime.  We can 

have much greater success united than divided as the jew wants us to live and fight.

Not sure of what I say?  Ask yourself a simple 

question: Would the jew rather we (all races) be united against our common enemy, or rather we fight amongst ourselves? 

Recognize the enemy. Then work with likeminded men to defeat him. That's what's important. 

Oh, and enjoy your Easter Ham. (Just don't bother visiting 

and reading the second link, unless you're having Roast Beef):

Thanks to the Nation magazine for the quotes in blue above.  Link to the aricle is here
.
Thanks to Jeff Tietz and Rolling Stone Magazine and Michel Chossudovsky for background

(and the one link you really ought to ignore..)