This week marks the 20th anniversary of the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. NAFTA made the United States, Canada, and Mexico the largest free trade area in the world, linking 450 million people producing $17 trillion worth of goods and services.

Now joining us is David Bacon. He’s an award winning photojournalist, author, immigrant rights activist, who spent over two decades as a labor organizer. His most recent book is The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration.

DAVID BACON, AUTHOR, JOURNALIST, PHOTOJOURNALIST: Thank you.

NOOR: So, David, this 20-year anniversary of NAFTA has been both celebrated and sort of mourned, depending on what side you lie on this debate. I wanted to get your response from this quote in The Economist that was just published earlier today. The quote goes:

“… Mexico—an emerging market hitched to two larger, rich ones—has been NAFTA’s biggest beneficiary. Import competition has improved Mexican manufacturing productivity; foreign direct investment has surged. More important, membership of NAFTA has shored up Mexico’s domestic political commitment to open markets, and provided a template for the country’s other free-trade agreements. . . . The deal has not closed the vast income gap with Canada and America … but it has helped make Mexico more stable and prosperous. That should be a cause for celebration on both sides of the border.”

David Bacon, what is your response?

BACON: Well, actually, I think that’s a pretty honest quote, because what it’s really saying is that NAFTA was a source of profits because of the way the markets in Mexico were opened to large corporations, especially U.S. corporations. So there were some people who benefited from the last 20 years of the agreement. And they include Mexican billionaires. Mexico created a large number of billionaires, especially during the first ten years of the agreement. One of them, Carlos Slim, went on to become the world’s richest person for quite a while. And U.S. corporations also did very well in Mexico because of this opening of the market.

Ordinary Mexicans, however, did very poorly as a result. And I think the best and the most telling statistic is that during the period of NAFTA, from ‘94 to the present, about 12.6 million people from Mexico are now living in the United States. When the treaty went into effect, it was only about 4.6 million people. So 8 million people came to the United States overwhelmingly because they had little alternative to doing that if they wanted to survive economically. So NAFTA produced changes in Mexico which affected drastically the lives of ordinary working people and farmers.

This opening of the market essentially led to, for instance, Mexico losing a lot of its auto parts industry [that were] producing for auto manufacturers in Mexico. Mexico became an export platform, where the purpose of auto plants, assembly plants, parts plants was to produce for the U.S. market [inaud.] because [incompr.] other Mexican market, when in effect the income for most Mexicans really went down during the NAFTA period.

So what NAFTA did was it made Mexico even more of a kind of a lo-wage reserve area in which U.S. corporations could then relocate production in order to make goods not for the sake of sale in Mexico, but for the sake of sale in the United States. So Mexico became tied very tightly to the U.S., but not in a way that benefited ordinary Mexicans. It benefited people at the top, but did not benefit people at the bottom. NOOR: And you’ve done a lot of reporting on the conditions at the Mexican side of the U.S. border.

Often when NAFTA is discussed, we only talk about the impact on the U.S. itself. Talk about what–talk about the factories that have been created on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border and the conditions that workers endure in those factories.

BACON: Okay. Well, NAFTA accelerated the development of these factories called maquiladoras along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Those factories existed there before NAFTA went into effect. But the number of factories and the number of workers in those factories mushroomed as U.S. corporations–and not just U.S. corporations, but other corporations wanting to use Mexican labor to produce for the U.S. market located factories there.

So the average wage in a Mexican maquiladora stayed flat during the entire NAFTA period. So workers in a maquiladora today are making maybe $6, $7 a day.

The price of a gallon of milk in a Mexican supermarket is not very much different from what it is on the U.S. side of the border. So a woman working assembling televisions for Sony or Sanyo or Panasonic in a maquiladora in Tijuana, for instance, has to work half a day just to buy a gallon of milk for her children.

So you find hundreds of thousands of workers who are living in neighborhoods, barrios, in which people are–the streets are unpaved, there’s no sewer system, people are stealing electricity from the wires because there are no social services or electrical services. People couldn’t afford to pay for them even if they could. And this is when people are working.

And, of course, by tying the Mexican economy so tightly to the U.S. one, what also happened is that when we went into a recession in the United States, we  stopped buying what those factories were producing, which meant that hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs in those factories.

Since the border was right there, a stone’s throw away, many of those workers really had no alternative but to cross the border and look for work in the United States if they wanted to survive.

So NAFTA led to increased displacement of people, it led to increased migration because of these poor working conditions.

Those working conditions and those low wages were the selling point, really, to get corporations to build those factories and to invest in Mexico. So what NAFTA did was it created an incentive on the part of the Mexican government for holding incomes down, actually, for the vast majority of Mexican people as a way of kind of encouraging corporate investment.

And it wasn’t just holding incomes down and wages down. Other things happened as a result of this policy of trying to do anything to encourage corporate investment.

One of the things that we saw in the last few years was the Mexican government declaring that the state-owned power and light company in Central Mexico no longer existed, because essentially they were setting up the electricity system in Mexico for privatization. As a result of that, they fired the 44,000 workers who worked for this stateowned power company and destroyed their union.

Now the Mexican government and the Mexican Congress and the new administration there has passed a change to the Mexican Constitution which will now allow for the privatization of Mexico’s number-one economic asset, which is its oil industry, and also the electrical industry. So certainly some people are going to gain by that. You know, you can call that progress or growth if you want to, but in fact for most Mexicans what it really means is that they lose control over the key assets, the key economic assets that the Mexican state and the Mexican government controls, in the interests of selling them off to private investors. And at the same time, the people who work in those industries, they lose their unions, they lose their jobs, their wages go down. So really for most people it results in a loss.

That’s why so many people are coming to the United States, as a result of that.

The mega wind farm project that the company Mareña Renovable wanted to build in Santa Teresa (Oaxaca, Mexico) is dead. This is what spokesman Maurice Wilbrink said, from Dutch pension PGGM – which has a stake in transnational Mareña Renovable – in a January 8, 2014 interview with newspaper De Telegraaf. According to Wilbrink the project, which plans to invest one billion dollars for the construction of 132 wind turbines that will produce 396 megawatts, will be moved from the bar of Santa Teresa (Municipality of San Dionisio del Mar) to the nearby towns of El Espinal and Juchitan.

In December 2012 the Mexican Wind Energy Association (AMDEE), which brings together the leading companies in this sector, already had 15 wind farms in the isthmus. The proliferation of wind turbines in this area known as the Isthmus of Tehuantepec is motivated by the findings of the Atlas of Wind Resources of the State of Oaxaca, published in 2004 by the Department of Energy and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which claims that the wind potential of much of the isthmus is “excellent.” In addition, the atlas asserts that communities would receive social and economic benefits of renewable energy.

However, until now the benefits from the sale of this energy considered “green” did not reach the residents of the area, but the wind companies that sell electricity (Iberdrola, Acciona, CFE, Enel Green Power, Gamesa, Cemex Peñoles, Eléctrica del Valle de Mexico, Renovalia, Demex) and those who buy it. Wind farms working under a “self-sufficiency” scheme, which stipulates that the energy produced is not enjoyed by the local population, but by large corporations such as Nestlé, Coca-Cola Femsa, Bimbo, Nissan and Mitsubishi.

“The companies divided our territory, in the same way the Spanish did when they arrived in America,” complains Bettina Cruz Velázquez, a member of the Assembly of Indigenous Peoples of the Isthmus in Defense of Land and Territory. “I recognize that there is a global concern about climate change, but what drives our business is to turn our air into money. Green energy is a for profit business cheating communities, destroy our way of life and threaten our food sovereignty, forcing displacement”.

The decision to halt the construction of wind turbines in the bar of Santa Teresa, a strip of about 27 km of sand and mangroves, has been adopted because of the opposition by the Oaxacan indigenous communities. For months, the community Álvaro Obregón blocked the only land access to the bar of Santa Teresa, while in San Dionisio del Mar residents occupied the town hall.

“When they started doing studies there was a massive fish kill. Here we live of fishing and we get our daily food from Santa Teresa. We do not want this project and fighting became very strong after the mayor Miguel López Castilian was sold to the company, signing permission for their entry,” tells a commoner of San Dionisio del Mar who preferred to remain anonymous.

Clampdown against those opposing the project has been strong, with the actions by public security forces and shock groups of PRI (affiliated to ruling party PRI). In February 2013, Oaxaca Governor Gabino Cue Monteagudo said that he would make “all necessary action to prevent such a major investment is withdrawn from the state.”

In fact, although the struggle by communities has been successful, the investment has not been removed from the state of Oaxaca, moving the problem only a few miles away.

According to De Telegraaf, statements by Maurice Wilbrink, spokesman of Dutch pension PGGM, in El Espinal the consultation with local residents is more or less complete and in the city of Juchitan it will begin shortly for the construction of the wind farm starting in the first quarter of this year. The lack of consultation with the communities affected by the project – a mechanism provided by Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of the International Labour Organization (ILO), and some national laws – was one of the facts that led a local court to temporarily suspend the construction of the project on October 9, 2013.

In addition, the Mareña Renovable´s wind farm is illegal because, as in many other wind farms in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, it wants to occupy a land that is not private but communal. “This land ownership belongs to the community, families have the usufruct without owning it,” says attorney Raul Gonzalez Rangel. “Only the community assembly can give the company the right to operate.”

Yet there were not community assemblies to authorize the construction of wind turbines: for the right of possession of the land for 30 years, representatives of companies are going house to house, asking peasant families to sign unfair contracts where they fix the amounts for the payment of land lease, promising work, development and investment in infrastructure.