Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is visiting the
Sacramento capitol this week and his publicity machine is in full motion getting
plaudits written by paid publicists. If Governor Rick Perry came to California and made a report on the state of the economy in Texas would you accept his report without skepticism ? As a counter balance, here are two recent
posts on this blog about the actual conditions in Mexico. The first is excepts
from a review of David Bacon’s book and the second is a post by Bacon on the PRI's assault on labor in Mexico. There is much more to say. I recommend Bacon’s book, and the book Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter’s Journey
though a country’s descent into darkness. by journalist Alfredo Corchado. (2013).
From A review of David Bacon’s The Right to Stay Home.
By Duane Campbell
The U.S. public is engaged in a
sustained and divisive debate over immigration. Unfortunately, at the same
time , most in the U.S. do
not recognize that U.S. economic policy, particularly NAFTA created many
of the conditions that produce the very immigration of some 8 million
people that many on the Right and the Tea Party so oppose.
The passage of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 accelerated a neo-liberal form of economic growth in
Mexico that drove poor farmers, particularly in the indigenous south to lose
their farms and their livelihood. In response young men, and
increasingly the young women, made the dangerous trek to the U.S. in
search of work and an income to feed their families and keep their families
from losing their farms.
