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Repealing Article 27 changed everything for what the Revolution had "giveth," Carlos Salinas had "taketh" away by ending land distribution to the landless. His action drove a "final nail in the revolution's coffin" polarizing indigenous peoples and igniting the uprising beginning the day NAFTA became law. Rewriting the Article was a key condition of NAFTA that would henceforth deny indigenous peoples' right to the land so the state could sell or lease it to private investors (aka corporate predators), mostly from el norte.
Mexico's poor, including its rural indigenous population, suffered terribly in the last generation from the disastrous effects of global restructuring tight monetary and fiscal policies, unfair "neoliberalized trade laws, privatizations of state enterprises, and abandonment of earlier economic and industrial development strategies. The result was regional growth collapsed throughout Latin America. From 1960 - 1980, regional per capita GDP grew 82% falling to 9% from 1980 - 2000 and 4% from 2000 - 2005.
It meant trouble always affecting the most vulnerable poor the most. It hit Mexico with falling oil prices, high interest rates, rising inflation, an overvalued currency, and a deteriorating balance of payments causing capital flight that by 1982 saw the peso collapse and economy hit hard. IMF and World Bank-imposed mafia-style loan arrangements followed imposing their special kind of austerity to people least able to tolerate it. It included structural adjustments with large-scale privatizations of state-owned industries, economic deregulation, and mandated wage restraint allowing inflation to grow faster than personal income with the poor feeling it most again.
As predicted, things got much worse under NAFTA-imposed trade rules. They hit the rural poor the hardest especially the country's farmers crushed under the weight of heavily subsidized Northern agribusiness they can't compete against including for corn, "maiz," the sacred crop, the struggle for which went to the root of the Zapatista rebellion also against made-in-the-USA neoliberal new world order rules of the game rigged against them.
They include Washington Consensus market uber alles diktats that led to Mexico's growing dependency on capital inflows with lots of "hot money" free to enter and leave the country under its deregulated financial markets. Again it caused an unsustainable current account deficit and peso collapse in early 1995 resulting in the country's worst economic depression in 60 years after experiencing the same type collapse 14 years earlier.
The Zapatistas got hammered by it with no relief when economic conditions improved. It caused mass discontent and anger making the country ripe for rebellion as an elite few grew rich at the expense of the great majority sinking deeper into poverty and no where more than in indigenous rural areas like Chiapas.
The Oakland Institute think tank specializing in social, economic and environmental issues documented the harm done. Their researchers reported heavily subsidized US corn exports to Mexico tripled after NAFTA and in 2003 topped 8 million tons. It came at the expense of Mexico's farmers where corn is the country's staple. It drove over two million of them off the land that was predicted in advance and allowed to happen anyway. It ruined lives and led to suicides but not like in India where WTO-imposed trade rules caused 100,000 deaths because of farm foreclosures from indebtedness.
The worst is still to come in Mexico if UCLA professor and Research Director of the North American Integration and Development Center Raul Hinojosa's worse case prediction comes true. He believes NAFTA will eventually force 10 million poor farmers off the land with Ross saying it's already over 6 million people in a country where farm families average five members and they're all counted in the bloodletting.
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