NAFTA vs Mexico

NAFTA was bad for the Mexican people too? You'd have never know that if you listened only to the US Media.

Free trade, fenced people

Many recent migrants had been farmers prior to NAFTA, when heavily subsidised US agricultural products flooded the Mexican market, destroying their livelihoods.

By 2004, ten years after the agreement was signed, 1.3 million farm jobs had disappeared in Mexico, according to a study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"Operation Gate Keeper [an earlier phase of border militarisation] was launched in 1994 when NAFTA went into effect and I don’t think that was coincidental," Boyce said.

"If you look at the impacts of NAFTA on the majority of people, especially on the demographics who are crossing the border, the arguments for NAFTA have been demonstrably unfounded."

Perhaps, the most lucrative legacy of NAFTA has been the expansion of the drug trade. And the drug gangs are following the basic premises of free trade style capitalism to their logical conclusion: buy low, sell high, make profit, and eliminate your competitors.

US drones prowl Mexico bicentennial