(Not) Talking About Things Taboo:  NAFTA, Corn Farmers, US Employers, and Drug Gangs in Mexico

The North American Free Trade Association, NAFTA, still viewed in some circles as a crowning achievement of the Clinton administration, did increase interaction between Mexico and the United States.  But not all of it was beneficial to the whole, and some was catastrophic for sectors of the population in both countries.  Since NAFTA was a bipartisan sacred cow for many years, rigorously enforced by our news media industry, public debate about these catastrophes never emerged, and when Trump blasted a hole in the NAFTA sacred cow, he limited his attack to blaming wage stagnation within his famous "base" to "bad deals" and the arrival of undocumented workers, part of his attack on immigration.  Below are two negative consequences of NAFTA, both of them pretty much taboo on national media.

Corn and Undocumented Migration:  Agricultural products were included in NAFTA, including corn.  US corn producers, subsidized by US taxpayer welfare checks to corn farmers to the tune of about $10 Billion per year (year after year, half the cost of what Trump wants for The Wall, in direct payments to corn farmers), flooded Central Mexico with corn at prices below the cost of production.  Three million corn producers in Central Mexico, most of them mini-farmers, were unable to compete (in an area that has grown corn for 10,000 year) and only one million have been able to survive.  What happened to two million corn farmers in Mexico?

Many of them took readily available jobs in the US.  Employers who needed cheap labor, like the hotel industry, air conditioning firms in Phoenix, meat packers, construction crews, etc., simply let it be known they were open for business to our neighbors to the South.  Transportation networks were set up to pick them up at the border and transport them to work.  It was, of course, illegal to knowingly hire undocumented workers.  So of course employers never knowingly hired them, and law enforcement simply looked the other way, lest they get nasty calls from congressional offices complaining about overly aggressive enforcement.  When someone without documents gets a job, at least two sides have broken the law.  Ignorance is no excuse applies only for the worker, not the one who hires.  And, as we all know, some of the children of these families are now facing deportation, held hostage by a dysfunctional Congress and unsympathetic President.

Corn and Drug Gangs:  Many other Mexicans who lost out to Iowa corn farmers got into another, growing enterprise:  the multi-billion dollar drug traffic.  This is a complex business, requiring connections with foreign countries, elaborate transportation systems, constant laundering of money, extensive warehousing of the product, political connection-building, marketing new products to the larger cities, intermediaries to cut deals with law enforcement agencies, the alteration of automobile and truck body parts, the creation of tough security units, including assassin squads, and, of course, persons willing to risk crossing the border.  On the US side, parallel organizations distribute the goods to market.  In the case of central Mexicans impoverished by cheap US corn, many of them filled these jobs.  During the past five to ten years, the know-how to run a successful drug gang has spread, and there has been a major proliferation of drug gangs throughout Mexico.  And a huge proliferation in extortion, gang-related violence, and murder, including a recent trend upwards in the use of beheading as a signature assassination.