By David L. Wilson, Truthout
Monday, August 21, 2017
The North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect at midnight on January 1,1994. That night,
thousands of Indigenous Mayans rose up in arms in the southeastern Mexican
state of Chiapas, seizing at least five towns and declaring NAFTA a "death
certificate" for people like themselves. This was just the beginning of
Mexico's troubles in a year that brought countless protests, hotly disputed
elections and the assassinations of two of the then-ruling party's leaders.
1994 ended with a sudden devaluation of the peso, the start of an economic
collapse from which the country didn't recover fully for years.
NAFTA is back in the news this
month: On August 16, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer met with his
counterparts from Canada and Mexico, the other two NAFTA nations, to open talks
on renegotiating the pact.
While it's true that NAFTA was just
one of the many problems Mexico had in the 1990s, we have to wonder, given the
renewed focus on the trade accord, why US mainstream media have carried so
little discussion of the events that accompanied NAFTA's rollout in Mexico.[…]
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