Special to Canadian Dimension
“El Dios es amor,” (God is love), letters unevenly spray-painted sign on the back of the rickety wooden outhouse. I hold my breath to avoid inhaling the stench seeping from under the loosely nailed boards. The alarming sound of a railroad whistle distracts me. Thirty yards from the outhouse, and the slightly larger jerry-built shack in which lives a family of nine, a seemingly interminable Southern Pacific freight train grinds down the tracks. Each freight car carries truck-sized containers, right off the ship with stenciled signs: “China Shipping.” Residents of Anapra, a neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, ignore the sound and sight of the monstrous sectored worm on wheels. The rasp of wheels scraping tracks and the blast of deafening train whistles have become routine occurrences. Super trains loaded with high-tech consumer goods just thirty yards away on the other side of the border from the “God is love” outhouse.
How appropriate the adage: “poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!” Barefoot kids run through the rocky, garbage filled dirt of the barrio. If they look left they see the southeast corner of New Mexico; right is El Paso, Texas. Several hovels in Anapra, and the hundreds of other shantytowns built inside the greater Juarez municipality, contain religious spray painted messages about God, Jesus, salvation and sin – the only one of the categories visible in quantity.
Does China Shipping represent the coded answer to those who believe “God is love?” Do the container cars implicitly tell Juarez workers to take lower wages, like the Chinese do?
From 2000 on, several hundred maquiladoras (foreign-owned, export factories) fled from Juarez and other Mexican manufacturing centers to cities in China. Maquiladora workers on the Mexican border earn about $7 a day. In China, explains Chihuahua sociologist Victor Quintana, workers make $2. China also offers investors a more educated work force and better health facilities than Mexico. China also doesn’t allow union activity while Mexico, although it has tried to smash labor organizing, still retains elements of labor union movement that have eluded eradication.”
Indeed, strikes have broken out in some of the border factories. In the late 1990s, the Korean owned Han Yung plant, a Hundei subsidiary that manufactures truck chassis in Tijuana, pushed its work force to the breaking point. By refusing to provide workers with necessary protective gear and shorting them on pay, while inflicting intimidating Korean black belt supervisors on them, they provoked the employees to strike. It endured for more than two years. Ultimately, the company, with the aid of the local, state and federal authorities and the “official” national union, broke the strike. The labor conflict, however, left a bad taste in the mouths of not only owners, workers, but some future investors as well. The independent union that represented the Mexican workers had even attracted international support – a situation the Chinese government assures potential investors will not occur in Chinese factories.
Roberto Castellon told me he belonged to that laid off work force in 2001. “I returned home after I got my “despidida” (pink slip) from the supervisor and stared at the barbed wire on the fence.” He referred to the barrier between the United States and Mexico. Over that twelve foot, wire topped fence runs the once mighty Rio Grande River – now a trickle. Up the embankment lay the railroad tracks. Thousands have vaulted the fence, torn their flesh and forded the river to hop a freight train. “Some guys make it, some get caught by the migra (border patrol) and some – who knows what happens to them?”
The freight trains stop in El Paso and unload some containers. Those fence jumpers (“illegals”) who hitched rides jump off before the train arrives at the freight yards where the railroad bulls check the cars on the train. Trucks then unload goods from the metallic “China Shipping” boxes and bring them to Mexican cities like Juarez where, ironically, the same goods were recently produced.
At a new mall, middle class shoppers try Sears and Swatch and grab lunch at Appleby’s or McDonald’s. “This is globalization at work,” said Quintana, who in July ran unsuccessfully as a PRD candidate for Mexico’s lower House. ( PRD, the party of Mexican Presidential candidate Miguel Lopez Obredor.) “It’s irrational, except under the laws of capitalism. Imagine, trucks once picked up goods assembled in Juarez, carried them over the border to trains that took them to US malls and ports where ships loaded them for Europe and Asia. They still do, of course. But after 2000, some of those same goods started coming back from China to the stores in the new malls in Juarez. But globalization exists only for goods and capital, not for people,” Quintana explained. “It has also made the immigration issue much more serious as Americans now realize and it has done horrible things to Mexican and Central American agriculture.”
East, in the Juarez Valley, farmland has been covered with working class and lower middle class houses and newly built maquiladoras. The “designers” of the newly built, broad boulevards allowed their environs to be decorated with Wal Mart, CostCo and Home Depot signs – along with ornate billboards advertising Coca Cola and Domino’s Pizza. The amount of farmland has shrunk considerably and what remains no longer contains that familiar rural smell.
Instead of the scent of fresh cut hay or animals, “aguas negras” (sewage) have spewed an unpleasant redolence on both sides of the irrigation canal, a combination of human waste and toxic chemicals treated by other toxic chemicals to remove some of the more acrid smells.
No birds or insects dare approach the scary-looking, frothy foam floating on top of the discolored liquid. Further down along this miles-long canal that quenches the thirst of the crops in the Juarez Valley, loom corn fields, sorgum and fruit orchards.
“It used to be just human waste, not so bad for the crops. The new water is full of factory acids as well,” the old farmer said, wrinkling his nose. “It doesn’t seem to bother the cotton crop.”
His rheumy eyes blinked as he answered my question about the benefits he had received from NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada. “In the early 1990s, when the government promoted the free trade treaty, they said we would be able to buy trucks and farm machinery cheaper. But it didn’t happen. Only the really big companies could take advantage. Not little farmers like me. So, they built more factories that send us more aguas negras with metals and acids in the water. All my kids left for over there,” he pointed north toward Texas. “Two sons in El Paso, one in California; the girls as well,” he said with a sense of resignation. All I have left is my farm,” he nodded his head toward several cows in stalls, a few chickens running around the lot near his house and the several acres of cotton immersed in sewage water next to the canal. “What good is any of this progress to an old man like me?”
On Saturday night, near the bridge that connects downtown Juarez with downtown El Paso, young Americans — some too young to drink in Texas — fill the bars and watch the hookers show their stuff. The blinking red and blue lights of patrol cars adds to the frantic hip hop beat echoing from the cantinas and also warn visitors to keep their good times within legal limits. On some lamp posts, outraged Juarez women have hung pink signs with a cross, symbolizing the hundreds of women that have turned up murdered and mutilated in this swinging maquila border town. These grim reminders don’t seem to dampen the spirits of the bar hoppers or cool the desire of the men’s sex drive, but they do symbolize the time and place.
“The maquiladoras, the unit of production in the age of globalization, have unleashed great violence,” says Quintana. They have changed the culture. Men now must allow their women to leave the homes to earn money and with that comes certain freedoms. And they can’t control their kids either. Put that together with narco-trafficking and police corruption and you get the epidemic of murdered women.
Quintana sees no reason to believe the police will seriously investigate. Indeed, he and others suspect that the police – on the take — have no interest in finding the evildoers. So, Juarez in 2006 represents the new order, an industrial city filled with very poor people, living on wretched slums, brand new malls for the middle class that has benefited from this rapid growth and a culture in which the murder of young working women has become commonplace.
No wonder people paint “God is Love” on their outdoor latrines! There is little spirituality to be found in “China Shipping.” (Keep reading…)
