The neighborhood where I live in Nogales
is called Bella Vista (“Beautiful View”).
The view disappears in the haze on these winter mornings as desperate
impoverished people burn whatever they can to ward off the cold. This toxic reality of corporate “free trade”
was not addressed during the recent “Climate Change Conference” in Paris.
The U.S. government demanded that the
emissions reduction targets set by individual countries not be legally binding,
and that countries harmed by climate change should not be able to take legal
action for that damage. As reported by
Naomi Klein, that’s exactly opposite to the U.S. stance on “free trade” agreements
which are legally binding.
The North America Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) that converted Nogales into a sprawling industrial city enables
corporations to sue governments if the corporations feel they’re not being
treated fairly. The Trans-Pacific
Partnership trade agreement that was signed by the Obama administration in
October, and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership that is
currently being negotiated, both include legally-binding provisions for
corporations to sue governments.
Prior to the implementation of NAFTA, there
were trees on the hills around Nogales.
Twenty years later, there are nearly 100 “maquiladoras” (assembly
plants) and the trees are gone. The
products made in those plants can not be ones that are needed by the people of
Mexico but, by law, have to be exported.
The largest plant in Nogales is Chamberlain which employs more than
3,000 workers that make garage door openers.
There is only one house in our neighborhood with a garage, and it doesn’t
have a door.
Chamberlain; Kimberly-Clark; Master Lock;
Becton, Dickinson and Company; and other U.S. corporations have plants here to
take advantage of the cheap labor. The
minimum wage in Nogales, Sonora is $4.25 per day as compared to $8.05 per hour
in Nogales, Arizona.
The maquiladoras have access to all the
water and electricity they need to make products that freely cross the border
but the workers do not enjoy that same privilege. The water in our neighborhood is purchased
from tanker trucks that fill storage tanks located on the rooves of homes. Drinking water is bought from pick-up trucks
that drive through loaded with 5-gallon jugs.
The price of electricity explains the haze in the air and the occasional
house fire in winter.
The U.S. government recently spent $187
million to modernize the port-of-entry to make it easier for hundreds of diesel
trucks to cross the border daily with products from the maquiladoras, and produce
grown in the states of Sonora and Sinaloa.
The government also spent tens of millions
of dollars to install a taller, and stronger, border wall to ensure that
workers do not leave the maquiladoras in search of higher pay in the U.S.
As long as “free
trade” is protected more than the environment and workers, corporations will
continue to warm our planet to dangerous levels. However, as Naomi Klein writes in her book “This
Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,” “Climate change – if treated
as a true planetary emergency – could become a galvanizing force for humanity,
leaving us all not just safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are
safer and fairer in all kinds of other ways as well…It really is the case that
we are on our own and any credible source of hope in this crisis will have to
come from below.”
