Mexican Labor News & Analysis

Mexican Women 2005: Their Condition an Indictment of Neoliberal Capitalism and Free Trade

by Dan La Botz

Mexican President Vicente Fox and the Mexican Congress hosted official celebrations of March 8, International Women’s Day, and the National Action Party administration claimed that women were gaining equality, opportunity, and advancement. But other women mourned the hundreds of women killed in the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez (across from El Paso, Texas) and others expressed outrage at the poverty and oppression of indigenous women in the southern border state of Chiapas. In any case, the fact was inescapable that half of Mexico’s women live in poverty and almost half suffer violent abuse in their own families. The on-going economic and social crisis in Mexico expresses itself in the desperate situation of so many Mexican women. We dedicate this issue to looking at the situation of women in Mexico, particularly that of working women. – ed.

The deplorable condition of women in Mexico today calls into question the whole social and economic system under which the people of North America live today. While the governments of the United States, Mexico and Canada have argued that neoliberal capitalism and free trade should bring prosperity and democracy, it has become clear in the last twenty years that they have worsened the lives of most and have in particular harmed the lives of women. Women in Mexico today endure more poverty, and continue to suffer domestic and social violence, while their needs are ignored, their rights are violated by their both their own government and by national and foreign corporations.

Who is responsible for the miserable condition of Mexican women today? The burden of responsibility must be placed upon the economic and political elite in Mexico and the U.S. that has imposed the neoliberal capitalist economic model on North America. That is above all the U.S., Mexican and Canadian governments, and often pulling the strings behind them the multinational corporations and international financial institutions. The world’s leading economic powers have made the lives of most Mexican women miserable, calling into question not only the rulers’ moral pretensions, but also the very economic, social and political institutions they have created. The condition of Mexican women force us to ask if there must not be a more humane way to run the world.

Poverty, Jobs, Wages

Women make up 52.3 percent of the population of Mexico. A majority of Mexican women live in poverty and more than one fifth in extreme poverty. The United Nations and other organizations report that 50 percent of all Mexicans live in poverty, and that 20 percent of Mexicans live in extreme poverty. Women, however, always suffer greater poverty than men because they face discrimination in employment, receive lower wages, and often have less control over family income and assets than men.

Mexican women today face problems of finding stable employment and living wages. Mexico cannot provide enough permanent, full-time jobs for its women workers. Mexico’s formal sector of legal national and multinational corporations has not been creating enough full-time jobs to absorb the expanding population, creating temporary or part-time jobs. Today in Mexico somewhere between one-third and one-half of all jobs exist in the informal economy, that is, companies which have no legal existence, make no social security contribution, pay no benefits, and often pay substandard wages. Many such companies are fly-by-night operations that may close up at a moment’s notice leaving workers in the lurch.

When women do find jobs, they may not find a living wage. While the Mexican Constitution Article 123 says that all workers shall have a decent wage, the country does not make good on its promise. The Mexican minimum wage adopted in December 2004 is $47 pesos per day, or about $4.50, not enough to provide for an individual much less to support a family. Yet many Mexican women must attempt to live on such wages. Such low wages represent the primary reason for female poverty in Mexico. While many women earn higher wages than the minimum, they are more likely than men to be forced into low wage jobs.

Rural women, women who work in agriculture, or the million women who work as domestic workers in other peoples’ homes may earn less than the daily minimum wage. Lack of jobs and low wages also lead some women to take dangerous jobs as prostitutes where they may suffer exposure to HIV or violence from clients or police.

Women and Labor Rights

Women, like other workers, do not enjoy basic workers’ rights. Women workers find it nearly impossible to organize independent labor unions, to strike for higher wages or to negotiate freely with their employers. Where unions do exist, in 80 percent of the cases the employers and union officials have conspired to write substandard “protection” contracts. The Mexican governmental labor authorities, corrupt “official” labor unions, and employers collude to fire and sometimes to physically threaten or assault women labor union leaders and activists.

Women’s organizations and women legislators have put forward some 30 proposals to reform the Federal Labor Law (LFT) to protect women at work, but those proposals have yet to be adopted by the Mexican legislature, according to National Institute of Women (Inmujeres). These provisions seek in particular to eliminate discriminatory restrictions which limit women in pay and promotions. Women also seek to enhance flexible scheduling so that they can work around school hours and domestic responsibilities.

Maquiladora workers, most of whom are women, still labor in an especially oppressive and exploitative sector. Maquiladora wages still begin at about $4.50 per day and seldom get to $10 per day for women. Work in the maquiladoras is intense, and sometimes unsafe and unhealthy, and in some cases the health and safety situation is egregious with exposures to dangerous equipment and toxic chemicals. Women who work in maquiladoras, despite years of protest, may still be required to take pregnancy exams or to show their sanitary napkins to their supervisors. Supervisors’ sexual harassment on the job also remains a problem. The living conditions in the border cities where most maquiladoras are located are poor and sometimes atrocious. Maquiladora workers have no independent labor unions to represent them.

Women Migrant Workers

Women make up a large proportion of the nearly six million undocumented Mexican immigrants who live and work in the United States because they are unable to find work in their own country. Because of the difficulty of finding stable jobs and decent wages, women have migrated to the United States in increasingly large numbers. Every year somewhere between 500,000 and one million workers cross into the United States to work, hundreds of thousands of them women. Women migrants suffer great difficulties arranging to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to coyotes, and often suffer robberies, beatings and rape at the hands of coyotes, Mexican police officers or other migrants.

Mexican migrant women finds low-paying jobs in the United States as domestic workers, factory and service workers, but because of their mostly undocumented status, ignorance of U.S. labor law, and unfamiliarity with language and customs, they have difficulty exercising the labor rights to which they are entitled. Consequently they make only slow improvements in wages, benefits or conditions, which remain far below those of other U.S. workers.

Women in Precarious Social Situation

Mexican women live in a very precarious situation, a result of changing social institutions, government policies, and values. Today women make up over 40 percent of the workforce, and women head 20 percent of all Mexican households or 6.7 million. Yet over 90 percent of working women must also do housework: clean, wash, prepare meals, and care for children. The double duty of work inside and outside the home takes a heavy toll, and stress contributes to emotional and psychological problems.

While the Mexican Federal Labor Law calls upon employers to create for childcare centers for the children of working mothers, few do so. Public childcare centers take care of only one-fifth of all children between infancy and six years old. Without adequate childcare women must leave their children with family and friends or, in some cases, leave children alone in the home.

Violence and Reproductive Issue

Mexican women suffer extremely high levels of domestic violence. Mexican government authorities report that twenty percent of Mexican women suffers sexual, physical or economic violence from their spouse or partner. Mexico’s government also reports that fourteen women die each day from domestic violence. However the United Nations reports 46 percent of Mexican women have suffered such domestic violence, while in other Latin American nations about one-third of women suffer such violence.

Mexican women are also victims of rising levels of social violence. The unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Juarez over the last 10 years, now appears to have expanded to several other border cities and to the interior. Women are also frequent victims of crime: burglary, robbery, and rape.

Most Mexican women have taken control of their own reproduction, but some serious problems still remain. While 71 percent of Mexican women of childbearing age (11.6 milion) use some sort of contraceptive, still in rural areas only 45 percent of women use contraceptives, either because of lack of education, lack of financial resources, or lack of health care facilities. Between 10 and 12 percent of adolescent students in high school in Mexico City have to drop out because of pregnancy. Women in Mexico do not have the right to abortion, largely because of the position of the Catholic Church.

Political Representation

Mexico’s women do not have adequate political representation. Mexico’s two most powerful political parties the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) have been responsible for the neoliberal capitalist political polices which have so adversely affected women. While they give lip service to women’s concerns, they are not a priority. The left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) has generally taken more progressive positions on issues affecting women. Only 22.6 percent of women in the Mexican legislature and only 18.8 percent of those in the Senate are women, less than the goal of one-third put forward by the United Nations. At the municipal level, only 3.7 percent of all municipalities are headed by women mayors.

Social analysts have long argued that the status of women represents the best measure of the health of a nation. In this case, the status of Mexican women indicates that the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Mexican and U.S. governments, and multinational corporations have created a political economy that is unjust and inhumane. The system has failed, and most of all, it has failed women.

Working Women Fight to Improve Lives

Against their government, their too often corrupt labor union officials, and against the corporations or bosses that employ them, working class women throughout Mexico organize to improve their lives. The Authentic Labor Front (FAT), an independent labor federation, organizes women in unions, cooperatives, and communities to fight for the right to independent labor unions, higher wages and better conditions, decent treatment and dignity, and for a better society and world.

Organizations such as the Comite Fronterizo de Obrer@s (Border Workers Committee) organizes women workers in maquiladoras located along the U.S.-Mexico border around labor rights issues. The Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras has brought together women from both sides of the border to improve not only labor but also environmental conditions. Enlace promotes solidarity between working women on both sides of the border. Many other organizations, and many other groups of women, and women as individuals work and struggle every day for justice. These women work sometimes quietly and sometimes openly, sometimes spontaneously and sometimes quite consciously, to construct a better Mexico and a better world. The future lies not with the world we have, but with them.

[The statistics given here come from the Mexican government, the United Nations, or reputable academics and non-government organizations.]

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World Terror War on Women Begins on U.S.- Mexico Border

By John Ross

CIUDAD JUAREZ (Jan. 25)--When US Department of Homeland Security honchos contemplate domestic terrorism, they conjure up an all-star rogues gallery of evildoers ranging from Bin Laden and Al-Qa'ida to Carlos the Jackal and the shadowy Earth Liberation Front. But to too many working women on both sides of the US-Mexican border, the term “domestic terrorism” stirs bitter images of black eyes, broken bones and strangled corpses tossed away with the garbage. For them, terrorism begins in the home. On the frigid morning of Jan. 5 a stone's throw from the US border, the battered, still-breathing body of an approximately 25-year old woman was retrieved from a back-alley garbage container in downtown Ciudad Juarez--the victim died en route to the hospital. She measured 65 centimeters and had long black hair and a scar from a recent Caesarian across her abdomen. She carried no identification and had no name. She was the first muerta (“dead girl”) found in Juarez in 2005.

The battered woman retrieved from the garbage Jan. 5 joins a roster of 417 women murdered in Ciudad Juarez since 1993. Many of the victims--beaten with bottles and fists, butchered with kitchen knives, shot and pistol-whipped, raped, burnt, tortured, stomped on, sliced up, throttled, or else kidnapped for satanic rituals and snuff movies or overdosed with drugs or hacked down to torsos with handsaws--eventually turned up out in the desert beyond the city limits. Others on a list of more than 4,100 disappeared women kept since 1993 have never shown up anywhere. (The Mexican government's special prosecutor, Maria Luisa Urbina, insists that only 35 women are unaccounted for.)

Over the past decade, Las Muertas de Juarez have been tabulated and studied, dissected, analyzed, eulogized, reviled, mourned, protested and celebrated. This mean stretch of
industrial desert has come to symbolize maximum evil for feminists and human rights activists all over the globe. On the 10th anniversary of the first registered killing in 2003, Amnesty International director Irene Khan came to Juarez to present AI's definitive report, “Ten Years of Disappearances and the Killing of Women in Ciudad Juarez,” a closely written expression of the international human rights community's outrage at the continuing massacre. Actresses Jane Fonda and Sally Fields marched here with the mothers of the victims on Valentine's Day 2004, and Eve Ensler's V-Day Foundation plows “Vagina Monologue” profits into projects like Esther Chavez's “Casa de la Amiga,” one of the only battered women's shelters in town. Las Muertas de Juarez are now the stuff of books and movies (Lourdes Portillo's estimable "Senorita Extraviada" brought Las Muertas into US living rooms in 2004) and even a mural on Hollywood Boulevard dedicated last spring by Salma Hayek. But despite the public glare, Las Muertas of Juarez just keep dying: the Amnesty total when the report was completed in mid-2003 was 370 murdered women. Forty-seven have been killed since, 24 slaughtered in 2004, 10 more than in 2003.

The attentions lavished on Las Muertas de Juarez are well merited. The city, a grimy scar upon the high desert whose only resource is cheap labor to be fed into the maw of the maquiladora industry (Fortune 500-owned assembly plants) churning out consumer goods for US markets at minimal wages, is itself a kind of crime against nature poisoning the region with toxic effluvia and urban catastrophe. The huge migrant flood from the south that exhausts all city services is made up of people who live in cardboard shacks out in the desert and scramble for jobs in the maqs, where whole workforces can turn over in a single week. Many of Las Muertas worked in the maquiladoras, and down the years, several corpses have been found still wearing their work aprons, or batas.

Juarez is a throw-away city, riddled by drugs and prostitution, where life is cheap and violent for women and men alike--a look at the daily papers during a recent stay here suggested that many more men than women die violent deaths on this mean stretch of the border.

The body count in Juarez is mind-boggling, but it is not nearly the worst Mexico has to offer. Throughout this nation of 105 million souls (55% of them of the female persuasion), domestic terror stalks the lives of Mexican women.

The family is often exalted as the crown jewel of Mexican society, the extended clan that sticks together to forge ahead and make a better life for its members--but a recently issued national report by the government's Integral Family Development agency (DIF) tends to debunk this mythology: two-thirds of all couples interviewed had suffered domestic abuse at one point in their marriages, and in one of five, physical violence was a daily presence. Half the women reported that they had been threatened by their partners with a gun, knife or fists. Nationally, two children die each day as the consequence of abuse. 80% of male inmates in Mexican prison respond that they were beaten as children.

Mexico State is the most densely populated in the Mexican union. A little less than half of the thousand plus violent deaths recorded in the state in 2004 were of women, 497 murders to be precise, more than Juarez has recorded in a decade. Unlike Juarez, where serial killers are thought responsible for many of the killings, the killer in Mexico state lives at home—state prosecutor Alfonso Navarete Prida tells reporters that 90% of Las Muertas of Mexico state are victims of domestic abuse. According to the local DIF, a third of Mexico state's 4.6 million households are hosts to domestic violence. In 147,000 of them, women are subject to regular beatings by their partners. In another 14,000 households sexual abuse has been recorded. Navarete Prida conjectures that only 10% of all physical and sexual abuse cases are being reported.

Borders are high-kill zones for women. Thirty have been murdered in Sonora in the past two years, in Tijuana the numbers are into the hundreds, and a dozen women have been dispatched by unknown hands in Chihuahua city 100 miles south of Juarez. The trail of feminicide extends from Chihuahua to Chiapas on the southern border. Thirteen women had been murdered in San Cristobal de las Casas in 2004 through October, a city where the largely Mayan Indian Zapatista rebellion has raised the consciousnesses and expectations of Indian women. While most of the San Cristobal murders have been committed in private homes, investigators report that incidents of male-to-female street aggression have tripled in the past year, with incidents of gang rape and muggings being noted for the first time. Extrapolating populations, the 13 women murdered in San Cristobal through October would be equivalent to 130 in Ciudad Juarez. Across the Suchiate and Usamacinta rivers, which separate Chiapas from Guatemala, the kill rate is even more staggering.

"They tell us there have been 370 murders in Ciudad Juarez in the last 10 years, but we had 373 here last year alone," Yonana Lemus, director of the No Violence Against Women network, told United Nations investigator Yakin Erturk.

The 2004 statistics are even grislier. Of 4,376 violent deaths recorded in Guatemala in the past year, 527 were women. Since 2000, over 1,500 women have been murdered in Guatemala--40% of them by someone they knew in their own home, according to health secretariat forensic experts. Many of the Muertas de Guatemala, like 2004's final victim, a young women in Quiche province killed this past Dec. 24, are not readily identifiable--"It was not possible to recognize her," one newspaper account read. Guatemalan women are victimized by the "maras," or street gangs, the drug dealers, the “polleros” (human traffickers), the military and the police, freelance psychos, and their own parejas (partners).

The soaring kill rates may be the continuing outfall of decades of brutal civil war--in El Salvador, next door, another traumatized post-war society, women homicide victimization rates are rising alarmingly. Both Guatemala and Salvador—much like Juarez—are maquiladora economies employing large numbers of low- wage “throw-away” women. Machismo in the Latin world is frequently cited as the source of all this brutalization. “It's like the more violent a man is, the more of a man he is,” an indigenous women who had been repeatedly battered by her husband told a San Cristobal investigator.

In Spain, the cradle of machismo which imposed this misogyny upon the Americas half a millennium ago, 300 victims of feminicide have been tallied since 1999—55 through August in 2004, most of them the handiwork of their domestic partners or boyfriends. After a spate of spouse killings in late June, freshman prime minister José Luis Zapotero proposed new laws against what he called "criminal machismo." Zapatero's task is complicated by Spain's swelling Muslim population--four Maghrebi women were found butchered outside Malaga in 2003-2004. Just down the coast, the imam of Fuengirola has even written an instructional manual for Muslim husbands describing how to beat their wives without leaving telltale bruises as evidence for prosecution under Spanish domestic abuse laws.

But despite the terror war against women on the Iberian Peninsula, Spain is in the lower echelon on the women-kill flow charts of the European Union. Some 150 Brits blow away their mates yearly in the UK, according to Madrid's Queen Sofia Foundation. In Germany, the murder rate is 3.8 women killed per million, a mark doubled by Finland (8.6), closely followed by Norway and Denmark. Back in the Americas, 297 women have been murdered since 1990 in Puerto Rico. Between June and August of 2003, 49 women were violently separated from life in the Dominican Republic.

But this is a unipolar world where the USA is always #1 with a bullet on the homicidal hit parade. Upwards of 4,000 women are murdered annually in the US, 32% of all homicides, 11 each and every day of the year, five times the kill rate for the other top 24 industrial nations combined. In 2004, according to the Journal of the American Women's Medical Association, 84% of the victims were shot during domestic disputes--the spectacular body count is closely tied to the high level of firearms ownership in the US.

In a study published by the Journal this January, persistent batterers who owned guns were more likely to kill their spouses than those whose principal weapon was their fists. “Women are more likely to be killed in the home,” the study observes. “The son of Jack the Ripper is loose in the Americas,” writes novelist Sergio Ramirez—45 women were murdered in his native Nicaragua in 2002-3. “A feminicide is committed whenever a woman is murdered merely for being a woman,” posits feminist psychologist Julia Monarrez Fragoso, a Juarez native who keeps close tabs on the Muertas. “Feminicide is murder whose motive is misogyny. Sometimes I call it patriarchal extermination.” In her analysis of the 370 murders listed by Amnesty International, Monarrez finds 98 victims who appear to be the work of a woman- hating serial killer(s). Criteria for such determination includes similar victim characteristics--the first victims were all slender teenage girls with long hair; the place where the victim was disposed of (the infamous lote algodonero, or cotton field, where eight bodies were found in November of 2001); and the mutilation of the cadavers--in an unspecified number of Las Muertas, a breast was either sliced or severed. Of the 370 victims on the Amnesty International docket, a third were sexually assaulted.

An investigation by FBI agent Robert Ressler in 1998 led the fed to conclude that at least two psychopathic murder gangs were terrorizing the women of Juarez. Another hypothesis chalks the murders up to one or more US-based serial killers who periodically descend into the borderlands for a murder spree--suspects have been traced to El Paso and New Mexico. If indeed a serial killer is responsible for many of the murders, the "Monster of Juarez" long ago left "the Jackal of Quito," who once claimed the murders of 300 women throughout Latin America, far behind in the desert dust.

After 11 years of killings in Juárez, 16 men have been committed to prison for feminicide: an Egyptian chemist with a US green card who was convicted of a murder early in this homicidal skein, eight members of "Los Rebeldes," a Juarez youth gang whose members claim they were working for the Egyptian, and seven ruteros, or bus drivers, held responsible for the cotton field killings. The recent sentencing of the rebeldes and ruteros has Casa de la Amiga founder Esther Chavez fretful that the government of Vicente Fox Quesada will soon close down the investigation into these appalling crimes.

Every week for many years now, the mothers of Las Muertas have gathered in Juarez to remember their daughters. Dressed in black, they perch on street corners like small, sad birds, hoping to remind their neighbors of what has happened to their children. It is a ritual now being repeated in Chihuahua city and Chiapas and Guatemala and Spain, wherever the Muertas have fallen.

Who is killing Las Muertas de America? It is not really much of a whodunit. Just check out who the victims are and where they come from: throw-away women in a low-wage world racing for the bottom line, conveniently packaged up in the maquiladoras, where they provide a pool of fresh flesh for both the bosses and the predators to pounce upon. When they do, you can be assured that it will be Capitalism's savage hand that draws the jagged blade across the throat of the next victim in the world terror war against women.

[John Ross is at home in the old quarter of Mexico City contemplating the reality of four more years of Bushwa in El Norte. See his latest instant cult classic, Murdered by
Capitalism--A Memoir of 150 Years of Life & Death on the US Left, for insights.]

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Labor Law Reform Effort Hits Road Blocks

The Abascal Project, the labor law reform proposal put forward by Carlos Abascal, Secretary of Labor in the administration of president Vicente Fox, seems to be stalled for the moment. The combination of opposition from the independent unions, international opposition from labor unions and human rights organizations, and, most recently, critics in the “official” labor unions have put the issue on hold for the moment.

The National Union of Workers (UNT) and the Mexican Union Front (FSM) have brought together scores of labor organizsations and social movements in the Labor, Peasant, Social, Indigenous, and Popular Front (FSICSP) which opposes the reform.

At the same time over twenty Canadian, Quebecois, Mexican and U.S. unions, came together in filing an objection under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) “labor side agreements.”

On March 8, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur sent a letter signed by 37 members of Congress to U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, urging her to use her authority to accept submission of the petition and initiate a review of the Abascal proposals for reform. It also asks that she contact Minister Abascal to “discuss the numerous, serious issues raised in the petition.” The complete text appears below.

The most recent development is the opposition by the Mexican Mine and Metal Workers Union (SNMMSRM) which came out against the Abascal Project’s flexibilization of labor, criticizing some 60 odd articles in the proposal.

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Congressional Letter to Elaine Chao Condemns Mexican Labor Law Reform

March 8, 2005

Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao
U.S. Department of Labor
200 Constitution Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20210

Dear Secretary Chao:

We write to you to express our deep concern about the Fox Administration's efforts to pass a sweeping labor law reform package that will substantially weaken basic labor and employment protections for all workers in Mexico. The Abascal Project, as it is commonly known, will roll back laws protecting the right to freedom of association, to organize and bargain collectively and to strike. It will also create new labor "flexibilities" that will substantially eliminate overtime pay and weaken employment security. Moreover, the Abascal Project fails to correct many of the existing problems in law and in practice, previously criticized by the U.S. and Canadian National Administrative Offices (NAOs), the International Labor Organization, and the U.N. High Commission on Human Rights.

On February 17, 2005, over 20 U.S., Mexican, and Canadian labor organizations, filed a comprehensive, 20-page petition with the U.S. (NAO) alleging that the Abascal Project violates the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC)(attached hereto). As you know, the NAALC obligates all parties to "ensure that its labor laws and regulations provide for high labor standards, consistent with high quality and productivity workplaces, and [that it] shall continue to strive to improve those standards in that light." The Abascal Project will significantly worsen those standards, not improve them.

Indeed, the former Director of Labor Law and Economic Research for the Secretariat of the Commission for Labor Cooperation, established under the NAALC, recently summarized the principal objections to the Abascal Project as such:

"The proposal would tighten government control of union formation and collective bargaining while granting employers new unilateral powers to sidetrack unions...The Abascal proposal would do nothing to increase transparency in union affairs [and] rejects independent unions' long-standing demand to list local unions and collective bargaining agreements in a public registry available to all citizens ...The Abascal proposal would also create enormous obstacles to workers' right to organize."1

Mexico simply cannot be allowed to repeal those laws that protect workers and replace them with laws that plainly violate the terms of the NAALC, ILO Conventions and the Mexican Constitution. Inaction would no-doubt signal the death knell of the NAALC and would send a strong message to other countries that the labor clauses they are negotiating in U.S. bilateral trade agreements will simply not be enforced.

We also wish to point out the contradiction posed by the fact that the Fox Administration is urging that the U.S. Congress approve temporary guest worker legislation extending employment rights to Mexican citizens in the U.S. at the same time it is seeking to curtail rights for Mexican workers in Mexico. All workers have internationally recognized labor rights no matter where they work. We should let Mexican President Vicente Fox know that the rights of Mexican workers should be respected on both sides of the border.

As the Abascal Project may be submitted to the legislature for a vote at any time, we urge you, under the authority granted to you under Section G (1) of the current submission procedures, to immediately accept the petition and to initiate a review of Mexico's labor law reforms. We also urge you to contact Minister of Labor Carlos Abascal as soon as possible to discuss the numerous, serious issues raised in the petition.

Thank you for your prompt attention to our concerns.

Marcy Kaptur Raul Grijalva
Sherrod Brown Bernard Sanders
Peter DeFazio George Miller
Tim Holden Dennis Kucinich
Tim Ryan Frank Pallone
Bill Pascrell Hilda Solis
Barbara Lee Tom Lantos
Stephen Lynch Maxine Waters
Lane Evans Henry Waxman
Janice Schakowsky Robert Brady
James McGovern Joe Baca
James Oberstar Pete Stark
Julia Carson Major Owens
Louis Slaughter Neil Abercrombie
Brian Higgins Linda Sanchez
John Tierney John Conyers
Michael Michaud Ted Strickland
Lynn Woolsey Donald Payne
Dale Kildee

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Fox Fails Again in Meeting with Bush

Mexican President Vicente Fox failed again to make any foreign policy gains in his meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas on March 23. While President Bush promised to continue to push immigration reform in the U.S. Congress, Fox left the meeting with no more than a promise of support.

The three heads of state agreed to continue to deepen economic relations on the basis of the existing North American Free Trade Agreement, and to cooperate on security issues. Martin, however, refused to enter into the Ballistic Missile Defense system being pushed by Bush. Both Canada and Mexico had refused to support the U.S. war against Iraq. The meeting represented no important change in relations between the three countries, though it was clear that the U.S. had lost some of its ability to cajole and coerce the other two most important nations in North America.

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North American Social Networks Critique NAFTA on Eve of ‘3 Amigos’ Summit

On March 23rd NAFTA's 'three amigos' will be meeting at the Bush ranch in Texas. Paul Martin, George Bush and Vicente Fox met on March 23 at the Bush ranch in Texas to hold a private discussion about actively promoting a deeper integration agenda for North America.

Issues such as a North American energy pact, the harmonization of migration policies, and beefing up security under the guise of the war on terrorism figured prominently at this heads of state meeting. These themes represent the slippery slope towards a 'NAFTA plus', representing a general melding of national policies with the aim of eliminating in each of the three countries what the large corporations refer to as those incompatibilities that limit 'economic efficiency'.

However, some 11 years after the implementation of NAFTA, it is possible to measure the impact that this accord has had on the people in each of the three countries. These citizens have the right to expect that their political leadership will now prioritize tackling problems affecting social, cultural, environmental and economic rights that accompany economic integration. Before thinking about deepening the process of integration for the three North American countries, it is imperative that the experience under NAFTA be opened up to public debate.

Putting Human Security First

If Martin, Bush and Fox plan to discuss security issues, they need to discuss human security issues first: Bringing an end to poverty while simultaneously tackling the inequalities that currently exist among the three countries should be at the top of their agenda. Poverty is widespread in Canada and the US, while in Mexico more than half the population (some 53 million people) is condemned to live on less than US$ 3.80 a day. The divide between rich and poor is growing in Mexico and the United States, while only the presence of a more extensive social service net has somewhat slowed the widening chasm in Canada. In all three countries we are witnessing a growing feminization of poverty. On the eve of the United Nations Summit on Poverty to take place in September 2005, North Americans must unite to send a signal to the international community concerning the importance of reaching the Millennium Development Goals to combat extreme poverty.

Protecting and improving the environment. Climate change is recognized by both experts and the public as a major threat to our future. However, the United States has refused to sign on to even the modest targets contained in the Kyoto accord. Canada and Mexico despite being signatories to Kyoto are not pushing rapidly ahead with implementation plans. The three governments cannot continue to ignore the need for a more determined
effort to combat growing environmental problems.

Guaranteeing universal access to health services. In one country, access for all to health insurance and services is guaranteed and a priority matter for state resources and attention, while in the two neighbors millions remain without support. Given the potential and the urgent need to expand the five principles of universality, comprehensiveness, accessibility, portability and public administration to all in North America, the three leaders must commit to a continental strategy for health care.

Food sovereignty. In all three countries, NAFTA has undermined people's food sovereignty by enshrining privileged treatment for predatory multinational agribusiness cartels over the rights of farmers and consumers. Under an avalanche of agricultural commodities - especially corn and beans - being dumped by agribusiness cartels from the North, Mexico's agricultural economy is in the midst of its worst crisis ever with 1.5 million small peasant farmers being forced from the land since the passage of NAFTA. The increased vertical integration of North American
markets under NAFTA has further consolidated market power into the hands of agribusiness, favouring centralized agricultural-industrial production over decentralized farmer-peasant production. This threatens rural economies and the safety of our food supply. The right of all rural and urban people to have their basic needs met is a key consideration that has to be taken up in Texas by the two Presidents and the Prime Minister so as to ensure a decent standard of life for all.

Ratifying and implementing international human rights as the foundation for democratic governance. Talks about hemispheric integration seem to assume that it is a matter for executive decision, whether among political
leaders or the corporate sector. Legislatures are relatively marginalized, citizens even more so. As issues of integration and options for its shape affect all North Americans, why is participation so restricted, debate so
limited?

The obvious foundation for further progress would be a commitment to democratic governance within the framework of international human rights guarantees (economic, social and cultural as well as civil and political), including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the American Convention on Human Rights and the San Salvador Protocol on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the core labour standards established through the International Labour Organization. With ratification and implementation of these fundamentals, debate might be encouraged about the appropriate democratic means of furthering participatory debate and shaping of the relations of all the peoples of North America.

NAFTA is No Model to Build On

If the 'three amigos' plan to expand on the failed NAFTA model before addressing the damage done by this accord, they are definitely on the wrong road. Despite over a decade of the destruction of good jobs and the reduction of environmental standards in all three countries, the US, Canadian and Mexican governments continue to try and lock more and more countries into NAFTA's rules, whether through bilateral accords like the U.S.-Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) or plans to revive the moribund FTAA talks.

Martin, Bush and Fox need to listen to the growing tide of resistance gaining strength in the region, not only among the public but also in the hallways of government itself. The U.S. Congress has so far been unwilling to ratify DR-CAFTA, and many U.S. citizens are concerned about insufficient labor and environmental protections, as has been the case with NAFTA. In the Canadian Parliament, the Sub-committee on International Trade recently adopted a motion that calls for a thorough review of NAFTA chapters dealing with dispute resolution mechanisms and 'investor-state' clauses that have allowed corporations to challenge and even overturn important public health and environmental laws.

In Mexico, there is tremendous pressure to change the unfair U.S. immigration regime. Farm organizations with the support of other sectors as well as legislators are demanding that President Fox keep the written promise he made in the context of the National Accord on the Rural Sector to raise with Bush and Martin the need to revise or strike down the NAFTA chapter on agriculture, and in particular the section dealing with basic grains.

The 'three amigos' of North America should listen to the growing chorus of voices throughout the hemisphere who have said no to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Through their actions they have set back the FTAA
process while simultaneously proposing integration alternatives within a vision that "Another Americas is possible".

For the undersigned North American networks representing a broad diversity of social organizations, a public and thorough review of NAFTA is the sine qua non prior to any new integration initiative.

Common Frontiers-Canada
Quebec Network on Continental Integration
Mexican Action Network on Free Trade
Alliance for Responsible Trade-U.S.A.

[For more information:
IN CANADA AND QUÉBEC:
Rick Arnold
Common Frontiers-Canada
Tel. (905) 352-2430

Pierre-Yves SerinetRéseau Québécois sur l'Intégration continentale (RQIC)
Tel. (514) 383-2266 ext. 222

IN MÉXICO:
Alberto Arroyo Picard
Red Mexicana de Acción Frente al Libre Comercio (RMALC)
Tel. (52) (55) 5356-0599

IN THE UNITED STATES
Karen Hansen-Kuhn
Alliance for Responsible Trade (ART)
Tel. (202) 898-1566

For more information please contact Timi Gerson at tgerson@citizen.org.]

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Be Sure to Visit Our Interactive Page: Shop 'til You Drop on a Mexican Wage

Check it out here!

If you worked at the same job in Mexico, what could you afford to buy?

You probably know that workers are generally paid much less in Mexico than they’d earn doing the same job in the U.S. But do you know how much less? And what difference does that make? Many people imagine that those lower wages go farther, because of lower prices in Mexico.

Using this new interactive feature on the UE International web site, check out that assumption. The site invites you to pick a worker – whether it’s a teacher or factory worker, nurse or plumber, social worker or bank employee.

“Shop” introduces you to real people holding those jobs in both countries, and tells you what paychecks look like for the job you picked. Then, assuming you’re the worker you chose, you’re invited to go on a virtual shopping spree – buy some groceries, appliances, a used car, a pair of jeans, even a month’s rent. Select what you want, and then see how many hours a worker in that occupation has to labor to make those purchases – in the U.S. and Mexico. You might be surprised. (We collected these prices ourselves, by shopping in working-class communities in both countries.)

Go back as many times as you want, pick a different worker, make different purchases. Invite your friends to try it too. If you’re a teacher or otherwise concerned with building understanding, use this site to show what the world economy really looks like, from the point of view of the people living in it. It helps explain why so many Mexicans are risking their lives to come to the U.S., and why American workers fear that they will lose their jobs to international competition -- and the unfairness of a system where trade is “free,” but too many people aren’t free to make a decent living.

Many, many thanks to creative and talented web designer Nancy Brigham who created this page!

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Resources on Women

SOME RESOURCES ON WOMEN IN MEXICO

AFL-CIO “Women in the Global Economy,”
http://www.aflcio.org/issuespolitics/globaleconomy/women.cfm

Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) “Still Waiting for Justice”
http://www.wola.org/Mexico/hr/ciudad_juarez/still_waiting_for_justice.pdf

Mexican National Insitute of Statistics (INEGI), Statistic on Women: http://dgcnesyp.inegi.gob.mx/sisesim/sisesim.html

Madre: Demands Human Rights for Women and Families Around the World
http://www.madre.org/sister/Mexico.html

United Nations – Division for Advancement of Women
http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/index.html

UN Women Watch – Fifth Period Report on Women - 2000
http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N00/784/56/IMG/N0078456.pdf?OpenElement

Amnesty International: “Mexico: Indigenous Women and Military Justice,” Nov. 2004.
http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGAMR410332004

SOME ORGANIZATIONS INVOLVED WITH WORKING WOMEN IN MEXICO

Authentic Labor Front (FAT)
http://www.coalitionforjustice.net/

Comite Fronterizo de Obrer@s (Border Workers Committee)
http://www.cfomaquiladoras.org/english%20site/nuevoasalto.en.html

Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras (CJM)
http://www.coalitionforjustice.net/

Enlace
http://www.enlaceintl.org/wa/enlace/

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