Global Policy Forum

By Janette Habel

Along the frontera, an economic area that is home to some eight million people, lies the great market of a world in breakneck industrial expansion - the world of the twin bi-national cities that are the prototypes for a globalised economy. On the Mexican side, exploitation of the workers is normal practice in the subcontractors' factories, or maquiladoras. Streams of immigrants from the interior, especially the deprived regions of the south, arrive there, then find themselves caught in a trap. Once they have realised just how wretched life is going to be, they have only one way out - to cross the border. But while goods and finance circulate freely, the US is taking serious steps to stop the passage of people.

The red trolley-car from San Diego (in the United States) to Tijuana (in Mexico) takes 45 minutes to reach the border crossing-point. The Spanish names of the tram stops (Chula Vista, San Ysidro, El Cajon, Morena Linda Vista) are reminders that in the 19th century this was Mexican territory. The well-kept greens of San Diego's 70 golf courses give way to the scruffy streets of Tijuana, crowded with itinerant sellers pestering the tourists. There is no break in the built-up area, and you are hardly off the tram before a Mexican bus takes you on to the city centre without even having your ID checked: the formalities are cut to the minimum. But on the way back, if there is the slightest thing wrong with your papers, the US Customs doesn't play about.

Since the 1970s Mexico's northern frontier has undergone enormous changes. Population growth has transformed small towns into large conurbations; that of Tijuana has jumped from 65,000 inhabitants in 1950 to 1.3 million today - a rise outstripping that of its (American) twin, San Diego.

The border area draws people in because it has become one of the country's main industrial centres. Since 1965, but even more so since the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) (1), a great many American, Japanese and Korean multinationals have set up in clusters in the industrial parks of northern Mexico. From 1970 to 1975 production rose by an average of 4.9% a year, and then by 12% in the following decade. The growth rate today is around 11%, due entirely to the maquiladoras (2). More than a million people work in this assembly industry, sited along the frontier and enjoying special tax breaks that allow manufacturing costs ten times lower than in the US. In 1998 these factories exported $55bn worth of goods.

It is a dynamic picture of production. A 1996 survey showed 719 maquiladoras in 25 industrial parks. At Tijuana - nicknamed TV-juana because it specialises in making TV sets - Samsung, Sony, Hyundai and Sanyo are all hiring. The area acts as a magnet for the have-nots of Mexico and Central America (see the article by Marie-Agní¨s Combesque). Driven by unemployment and low wages, the inhabitants of the poorest countries form the bulk of the migrant workers; 35-40% of them are native Mexicans.

This pool of cheap labour looking for "migradollars" to send back to families serves a purpose. It makes it possible keep the rise in productivity separate from that of wages, which run at 450 to 675 pesos ($48-$73) for ten hours of work a day over a six-day week (3). With a very high turnover of labour (which is young, female and migrant) the wages do not increase. This is helped by the corporatism of the official Mexican trade unions, whose executives enforce a customer-oriented management to ensure good relations in the workplace. Labour flexibility is greater here than in the rest of the country. Usually, union activities are absent from the workshops, and the existence of collective agreements is ignored. Protests by workers are ruthlessly suppressed, and lead to mass sackings and the closing of factories that are then transferred to more cooperative areas.

The capital resources and sheer size of the American market are determining the Mexican economy, which is becoming more and more dependent on the dollar. The Mexican researcher Ramon Eduardo Ruiz (4) rejects the claims made by those who support the theory of a new "north frontier"-model of development, that in the frontier region this is making it possible to integrate modern and backwards sectors in a bi-national economy. The maquiladoras are an industrial ghetto that often has no connection with the local economy and is dependent on international links - in 1998 97.3% of their input material was imported (5) - even if the competitiveness of the regional economy does benefit from labour flexibility and the malleability of the workforce.

Yet the abundance of cheap labour is not a comparative advantage matching the inflow of capital, technology and buying power of the great American market. Claiming that this is reciprocal benefit and a rewarding interdependence is pure myth. "The reality of the north frontier", says Ruiz, "is dependence, a permanent built-in dependence" - and the exact opposite of lasting development. Far from initiating a productive restructuring that prefigures a new North-South relationship, as Mexico's neo-liberal economists would have it, this is in fact international incursion based on the competitiveness provided by under-development (6), and on the imbalance between the most powerful economy in the world and that of a semi-industrialised country. The effect of the absence of rules and standards is a disintegration with incalculable social costs.

Cross-frontier integration, for instance, is exacerbating the amount of ecological damage. While Mexican factories do not hesitate to tip their bacteria- and virus-laden waste water into the sewers of California, American companies are, whatever the Nafta rules say, sending 30 times more toxic waste back to the south (7). The Samsung factory in Tijuana alone consumes 5% of the annual water supply, creating a chronic shortage in the town. At Ciudad Juarez/El Paso, atmospheric pollution covers the two towns in a thick blanket of fog. The problems are so severe that bi-national arrangements for treating waste water and analysing air quality are starting to be set up.

On top of the deterioration in living conditions come smuggling, delinquency and insecurity. Cross-border networks organise the traffic in drugs and prostitution. Although the towns on the frontier have long had their brothels and networks of pimps in this "tolerance zone", crime and violence have taken on new forms (8).

The cartels based in Tijuana and at Ciudad Juarez - the two most important centres - control the export of drugs to the US. At Tijuana, drug traders were held responsible for 600 murders in 1997. According to the local newspaper Zeta (9), the war between the Tijuana Cartel run by the Arellano Felix brothers and the Sinaloa mafia had by July 1999 already led to more than 300 killings in Baja California. For this unseen government is becoming transnational. The two groups are in a fierce battle for control of the coastal road. On 23 March 1994 Luis Donaldo Colosio, the Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate for the Mexican presidency, was murdered in Tijuana, and the mercenaries of the Arellano Felix cartel who assassinated Cardinal Posadas Ocampo at Guadalajara were recruited from the ruling gangs in San Diego (in the US). The police in the countries involved, Zeta says, do not investigate the murders, either for fear of reprisals or because of complicity in them.

Yet on both sides of the linea (the legal frontier) the two governments are beefing up their military presence. For while in the world of Nafta merchandise (and pollution) can circulate freely - barely five kilometres along from the San Diego/Tijuana customs post, streams of gleaming freight trucks carrying various merchandise cross the border with no problem - the same does not go for people. The region's increasing and anarchic urban sprawl stretches along a hilly plateau that slopes down to the shores of the Pacific. There, a metal fence some three metres high that runs along part of the frontier and keeps the twin cities apart plunges down to the ocean like a new Iron Curtain.

Since a law on illegal immigration and the responsibility of emigrants was approved in 1996, those who enter the US illegally and without papers risk fines or imprisonment. In February of that year the US decided to recruit 1000 extra agents each year, to reach a total of 10,000 men guarding the frontier. The budget of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service was raised to $2,600m, an increase of 72% over the budget Clinton found when he came to power in 1993.

Since Operation Gatekeeper was set up, it has brought about an unprecedented clamp-down and militarised the frontier. Jeeps cruise along the border day and night, and helicopters fly along the coastline. With help from the Pentagon, seismic detectors have been installed that make it possible to sense the slightest movement. One young Mexican who managed to get through after five attempts explains how, with infrared cameras, computer operators can track migrants on their screen just like a video game. The information is passed on to police on the ground equipped with radios, so that the illegal immigrants can be pinpointed.

Putting the army on the job has not stopped the flow, though the number of clandestine border crossings in California has certainly dropped dramatically: while 531,689 illegal immigrants were caught at San Diego in 1993, the figure for the first eight months of 1999 has been 166,151 (10). Nonetheless, the total of those who entered the US clandestinely in 1998 is still put at more than half a million (11). In the same year, the US returned 20,000 Mexican minors who had entered its territory illegally.

These eager migrants still are as numerous as they are because of the structure of the Mexican labour market, which each year has a shortfall of a million jobs (12). Nafta has been better for the US than it has for Mexico; its destructive effects on the peasant economy go a large way to explaining the extent of migration from the Mexico countryside to the US. As the Mexican Under-Secretary for Labour puts it, "For the rising generations, the job market has not been as bad as this for decades past" (13). According to the Bank of Mexico, millions of Mexicans who have been forced by poverty to go into exile and live in the US legally or illegally, permanently or temporarily, send home almost $5.5bn a year to make life a little less wretched for the families they have left behind. In 1997 transfers like this were equivalent to 4.5% of all Mexico's export earnings and to nearly 55% of the turnover of the maquiladoras (14).

This attraction of an American Eldorado is a source of wealth for a new kind of syndicate - Coyote Inc. Organising the smuggling of illegal immigrants by using the paid services of coyotes or polleros - networks of cross-border smugglers - has become a business almost as profitable as the drugs trade. For $650 per person, payable on arrival (the minimum tariff on both sides of the border), you cross in a day entirely at your own risk. But from Mexico City to Phoenix in Arizona the cost is $1,200 a head, or $12,000 as a group rate (for parties of at least ten). Then there are the unscrupulous guides who fleece fugitives of $1,500 or $2,000 before abandoning them out in the wild where they will be picked up - and often ill-treated - by the military patrols.

To dodge the controls, and get round the wall of metal erected in the main towns on the frontier, the emigrants take great risks and try to cross in the mountain or desert regions. In 1998 a group of 10 died of thirst in the desert to the east of San Diego. Sometimes the patrols open fire - 89 fugitives were shot dead or wounded in 1998 (15). On the Mexican side, by the Pacific, an enormous white-painted board fixed to the metal barrier lists those who have died since 1995. More than 400 have perished from hunger, thirst or exhaustion; the youngest was aged 15, the oldest 40.

(1) The members of Nafta, which came into force on 1 January 1994, are Canada, the United States and Mexico.

(2) The maquiladoras or maquilas are factories working on contract and belonging to transnational companies, that are able to take advantage of extremely low wage levels, exemption from customs duties, and the proximity of the US to which their products are exported. See Maurice Lemoine, "Central American workers in the hands of the maquilas", Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, March 1998.

(3) El Paí­s, Madrid, 8 August 1999.

(4) Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, "Capitalismo global y la frontera norte", Dialectica, Nº 32, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1999.

(5) Latin American Mexico and Nafta Report, London, 13 April 1999.

(6) "Competitividad del subdesarollo y flexibilidad del trabajo en el norte de Mexico", in Las regiones ante la globalización, Hélí¨ne Rivií¨re d'Arc, Ilan Bizberg, Jaime Marquí¨s Pereira and Carlos Alba, Cemca-Orstom, El Colegio de Mexico, 1998.

(7) Mike Davis, "Magical obsession", New Left Review, London, March-April 1999.

(8) In the Ciudad Juarez region 194 women were murdered after being raped and tortured; 80% of them were girls aged from 14 to 17 working in the maquiladoras. To excuse the lack of official action, government propaganda tried to pass these girls off as prostitutes linked with the drugs trade.

(9) Zeta, Tijuana weekly, 16 July 1999.

(10) Newsweek, New York, 30 August 1999.

(11) El Paí­s, Madrid, 14 August 1999.

(12) Considered as being "happily" now a thing of the past (an outcome that prompts enthusiastic comments in financial circles), the Mexican economic crisis had at the time brought a loss of a million jobs after the disastrous devaluation of the peso in December 1994.

(13) El Excelsior, Mexico, 16 July 1999.

(14) El Paí­s, Madrid, 4 January 1999.

(15)Latin American Mexico and Nafta Report, London, 12 January 1999

Translated by Derry Cook-Radmore

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C íŸ 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.