Globalization, Maquilas, NAFTA, and the State

Mexican Labor and The New World Order Saul Landau* ABSTRACT
This article examines the latest wave of neoliberalism and globalization through its impact on border regions of the US and Mexico, especially the urban sprawl and squalor that has resulted from the manufacturing centers in Mexico known as maquilas. The maquilas, typically non-Mexican owned, take advantage of cheap Mexican labor and proximity to the US markets to find a niche in the new globalization. However, the pollution, corruption, violence, heavy-handed control of labor, and vulnerability to even cheaper labor in Asia has caused a wide array of very serious problems for the peoples who left their homes in other parts of Mexico and who actually work in the maquilas. These workers in the globalized world live lives quite different from the promised land that was supposed to be achieved through further globalization and neoliberalism. Keywords: Ciudad Jurez, maquila, Mexico, NAFTA

One of the fundamental demands of globalization and the new world order is a cheap, disciplined labor force that is too needy or too repressed to unionize and demand better conditions and more rights. In addition, the multinational corporations seeking this labor also look for other advantages such as special deals on taxes (little or no taxes), weak environmental laws, and a state strong enough to assure order and thwart challenges to the right of the investors to do pretty much as they please. Mexico has long afforded such conditions for both national and international companies. The state controls workers with a clenched st that is always ready to smash them, and the workers know this. Weak environmental laws, or weak enforcement of such laws, is the order of the day. When favors are needed, bribes usually sufce to assure companies a relatively free hand in running their corporations. This situation, along with its proximity to the US, made Mexico an important center for globalizing companies seeking to avoid the high domestic wages and regulations of the developed world.

Cal Poly Pomona University, USA.

Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications www.sagepublications.com (London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi) Vol 21(34): 357368. DOI: 10.1177/0169796X05058293

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Mexican border regions, with their backyards practically in the US, were especially favored by these companies. The factories they established are known as maquilas. With the push for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1990s, and accompanied by a new wave of neoliberal free trade, the maquila industry in Mexico boomed. Hundreds of factories opened and tens of thousands of hungry and hopeful workers were attracted to the maquilas. All was not paradise, however, for either the workers or the companies. Focusing on the maquila industry in Ciudad Jurez, a Mexican border city across the Ro Grande from El Paso, Texas, this article examines the impact of the maquilas on the people who work in them and live near them, as well as the maquilas impact on the environment. At the same time it gives special consideration to the rise of Chinese industry on Mexico, the impact of 9/11, and the general economic downturn of the last few years. With the passage of NAFTA in 1993, investment in Mexican maquilas became the United States most intimate experience with economic globalization. US Customs adjusted its rules to permit the rapid entrance of trucks into the United States carrying goods made by US-owned companies located across the border in Mexico. US companies ship raw materials to Mexico and then import nished parts or assembled products tax-free: electronics, electrical goods, automobiles, trucks and trailers or their parts, wood, plastic products, and textiles. After 9/11, however, security concerns began to clash with the rational norms of free trade. The large corporate and banking interests and the interests of the newly empowered security elite came into conict: inspecting the cargos of incoming trucks meant costly delays and reduced prots. In addition, 9/11 and the corresponding US economic dip revived xenophobic movements whose leaders began to press Congress for increased restrictions on illegal Mexican immigration. Now, more than a decade after NAFTA became law the maquila economy merits an assessment. As 2004 ended, the maquilas remained an important sector of the Mexican economy that could provide jobs and attract larger-scale foreign investment. The maquilas also functioned as tension-relievers, absorbing over a million people from the rural areas who might well have developed into a major problem if they had been without jobs. For the United States as well, the maquilas helped deect illegal immigration by providing a Mexican safety net of jobs.1 On both sides of the border, residents understand globalization not as a theory, but as a result of living the experience. In the last four decades, tens of millions of Mexicans have moved from the impoverished countryside to the overcrowded cities, where they could nd work in or around the mostly foreignowned maquilas the foreign-owned factories that export parts or nished goods. From the building of the rst such factory in Ciudad Jurez in 1965 to the present, this low wage and relatively productive workforce has attracted signicant foreign investment. In 1993, with the endorsement of NAFTA (the

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North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico) by the US Congress, investors received an extra incentive: the equivalent of the US Governments Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. The contemporary maquilas constitute another industrial revolution. Tijuana or Jurez today is the equivalent of Manchester or Leeds in the 1840s. Likewise, the modern equivalent of a Dickensian cultural saga centers around the maquilas of today. Country folk, forced to move to cities for jobs, play out their human dramas against this ugly, chaotic industrial landscape. Police authorities in Jurez claim that in the last 10 years they have found the remains of more than 300 women all raped and mutilated. Almost all of them were under 30 and worked in maquilas. Police have arrested more than a dozen people, but the slaughter continues (El Paso Times, 2004).2 When families moved from tradition-bound rural communities into non-community urban life where each person must suspect his neighbor they also became actors in this new stage of Mexican and developing world history. This historical process, however, parallels earlier ruralurban population transfers in pre-industrial Europe. Ciudad Jurez, across the once mighty, but now only trickling, Ro Grande River from El Paso, Texas has grown without control or planning. From barren, sandy hills have sprouted unplanned colonias (euphemism for hideous slums). Rural families leave the land that no longer supports them. They nd jobs in the export factories, patch together what they hope are only temporary homes from pieces of wood, metal and plastic, and nd ways to tap into the power lines (some of them get electrocuted). They wait for the water and gas trucks, blasting La Cucaracha on their speakers, to bring the needed material for life and cooking. The families often store the drinking and washing water in old metal chemical barrels. The air, once just dusty during the season of high wind, now reeks of emissions from factories and the stench of un-mufed auto exhaust. Since 9/11, the United States has tightened border security (Watson, 2002)3 which means that the vehicles with their inadequate or non-existent exhaust controls sit two to three times longer on the bridges connecting Jurez with neighboring El Paso while local residents are forced to suck in the fumes. In colonias like Anapra and Lago Poniente, rural folk rapidly acquire urban ways. They aspire to raise their children to become academic achievers, but they also need to send them into the maquilas in their mid-teens in order to contribute to the scarce family income. Alarming numbers of young people turn to drugs, prostitution and gang delinquency. Some of the young men play soccer after work and on Sunday on a pebble-strewn dusty eld. The city government has not built parks or athletic elds, but they have catered to every conceivable potential need a maquila investor might have. They emphasize how well-built are the factories of Jurez and how the local authorities will provide security over potentially rebellious workers who might want genuine unions. In contrast, shacks in the colonias have unpaved streets where mangy dogs drop their loads

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and little kids run barefoot through the summer dust and excrement. For all the horrors of life in the slums, at least prior to 9/11, being in Jurez meant certainty of employment. In 2000 most of the maquilas boasted help wanted signs and ran three shifts a day. Employment neared 100 percent. An unhappy worker in one factory could quit and nd work in another factory across the street where the wages were a few centavos an hour more, or the cafeteria food was better. Workplace mobility slowed down with the onset of recession in the United States. The economic downturn, followed by the Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington, were contributing factors in bringing recession to the maquila industry. By mid-2003, more than 400,000 factory workers lost their jobs in Mexico. Ironically, some of the very factories that moved from the United States in the 1980s and 1990s to take advantage of cheap labor, now found compelling reasons to lower wages even further and some began shifting their operations to Asia (Jordan, 2002). Scores of workers have recently received pink slips. Once buzzing factories have almost overnight been transmogried into industrial cemeteries. Creeping weeds and blowing plastic and paper litter now cover once crowded parking lots. At one closed factory the lone security guard shared the space with a scruffy cat and an elusive bird. Its difcult, the guard told me, to see maquilas shutting down, moving to China, or wherever. He blamed the economic downturn in the US for putting Mexicans out of work. But, thats the way it goes, he concluded with a sigh. Chihuahua sociologist Victor Quintana says that, On the surface, the job losses come from the US recession and the post 9/11 shocks, but in reality thats a smoke screen for deeper causes. The US recession was hardly a cold, while we in Mexico developed full pneumonia. The maquila model, Quintana predicts, has exhausted its potential. Mexico cannot compete with China.4 The maquilas still account for about half of Mexicos $150 billion annual exports. But efcient as Mexican labor has proven to be in global competition, they fall far short of Chinese workers for the title of low wage labor champion. Quintana sees further erosion in the maquila sector as Asian nations offer equivalent productivity for one fourth the wages of Mexican workers. According to Quintana, the model has done its damage. Two years ago, he says, Chihuahua led Mexico in high employment; today, Chihuahua leads in unemployment. Thanks to lay offs from factory shut downs or factories moving or reduction of shifts, Chihuahua has lost more than 100,000 jobs.5 According to a 20 June 2002 Washington Post story (Jordan, 2002), in a little over two years more than 500 foreign-owned assembly-line factories in Mexico moved to China. The company accountants at the home ofces concluded that the wage differential between China and Mexico more than outweighed the increased costs of shipping and the inconveniences of distance. In a Jurez maquila, where cost of living runs about 7580 percent of that of El Paso across the river, a beginning machine operator earns less than $8 a day,

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whereas his counterpart in China makes only a quarter of that pathetic wage. Before the US recession hit, maquila developers promoted a bullish sentiment to foreign investors and Mexican ofcials. In 1999, Federico de la Vega, one of Jurezs leading developers of maquila parks, predicted that maquilas would be the cornerstone of the Jurez economy for the next 50 years.6 Quintana doesnt mourn what he believes is the end of the maquila era. He thinks that NAFTA and the whole free trade model launched the equivalent of a cultural offensive against the majority of the worlds poor. Quintana insists that the maquila represents a form of terrorism, which leads people to ways of avoiding life; booze, crack and cult religions arising from maquila work. The maquila, asserts Quintana, has its own discourse, one that mocks traditional values like cooperation and solidarity. Its only values are individualism and competition. Quintana has little patience with the rich and powerful, like President Vicente Fox himself, who wring their hands about our losing our traditional values while they eagerly bring the value-destroying maquilas into the country for economic growth. Maquilas offer high economic growth rates, but also high crime rates. Quintana adds, Those who preach that we should respect Nature bring in the maquilas. They destroy Nature, people and their natural bonding.7 Leticia Ortz exemplies Quintanas point. She came to Jurez from the countryside 19 years ago and worked her way up the ladder in a large maquila to become head of personnel. Then, without warning, in 2000, she was unceremoniously dismissed. The CEOs located in some First World city she wasnt sure which one had decided to move their Mexico-based plants to China where they would pay signicantly lower wages while productivity would remain equally high. When asked if she was bitter, she responded, No, just disappointed. After working my way up for all those years I guess I foolishly developed a sense of loyalty to the company, a sense that was not reciprocated. They didnt even pay me what they owed me, according to the law, for severance. But it would take too long and it would be too expensive to ght it, so I accepted their less than generous offer. After receiving her pink slip, Leticia said she went home and cried for hours. Then, she said, I basically slept for the next six months. I guess you could call it depression. She smiled. I dont think I smiled for an entire year, she said. My self-esteem seemed to drain from my body. Each day I would tell myself it will get better, but it didnt. Maybe now [in the summer of 2002] Im starting to regain some of my equilibrium.8 The History of Maquilas in Jurez Jurez opened its rst maquilas in 1965. For decades, Mexicans had crossed legally into the United States under the Bracero Program to work in the Texas cotton elds. By 1964, however, these workers found themselves replaced by a newly-designed machine that picked cotton faster and cheaper than people.

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Faced with this displaced labor force of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers, Mexican leaders adjusted their laws to allow foreign capital to enter in hopes of providing work and maintaining social stability. US investors quickly learned of the lucrative possibilities for investment on Mexicos northern border. Mexican developers, working hand in glove with government ofcials in Chihuahua, offered low wages, a non-unionized productive workforce, low taxes and no environmental regulations or costs such as is the case with OSHA-like agencies in the US, features that made Mexico attractive. But, gradually, a few independent labor organizations, backed by some AFL-CIO unions, began to organize in the Mexican border cities. Add to the unions organizing efforts a steadily rising cost of living and the employers felt an impact on wages. Although the maquilas offered no drastic pay raises, some maquila owners did feel the social pressure to raise their wages and to improve working conditions. Despite these minor concessions to workers, investment in Mexican maquilas continued to rise, until 2002. In 1994, NAFTA had provided formal US government backing for wary investors. The rate of maquila growth had reached double digits. NAFTA offered tax-free incentives for maquila owners and facilitated plans for efcient corporate integration. When the maquila experiment began in 1965, Jurez attracted only a handful of factories. Nearly 40 years later, almost 4000 of these mostly foreignowned export production plants dotted the landscapes of border cities like Jurez, Tijuana, Mexicali, Nogales, Matamoros, Piedras Negras and other border towns. Indeed, many maquilas have moved further into the interior of Mexico as well. Some Jurez plant owners, anticipating labor problems, built automated, even robotized factories. An Italian-owned factory manufactures TV and computer chassis made in a mold and extracted by a robot. The plant uses comparatively few workers. Pasquale Galizzi, an Italian plant manager, said it made strategic sense to open a plant in Jurez, given its proximity to the US border and the wages we pay here are about one fourth of what we would have to pay in Milan, he explained.9 Just as the multinational corporation found it necessary to globalize or die, in Galizzis words, so too did rural Mexicans come to Jurez out of necessity. No longer able to eke out a subsistence livelihood on the land, they came to the place where the maquilas promised permanent, albeit low-level, job security. However, even this proved to be illusive. According to Quintana, some unemployed workers return to the villages they were forced to leave to nd gainful employment, others try to traverse the difcult obstacles of the US border. Since 9/11, however, near El Paso the INS reports far fewer attempts to cross the border. US high technology and vigilant patrols act as a pervasive form of deterrence and sectors of the US public have traditionally responded to economic downturn by resorting to xenophobic actions.

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In the hottest and remotest sections of the Arizona desert, where summer temperatures top 115 degrees, coyotes offer their crossing the border services for a price to those desperately wanting to reach US territory. The coyotes assure their clients of plentiful water, but often abandon their charges just at the point when the water runs out and the temperature becomes inhospitable for human life. Through mid-June 2003, more than 20 Mexicans, including an 11-year old girl, died trying this route. Likewise, stories regularly appear in the media about speeding vans carrying undocumented workers crashing and killing the occupants in attempts to elude border patrol chasers (Washington Post, 2003).10 Since October 2003 more than 50 Mexicans have fallen trying to make it to the Tucson area. US immigration laws are death laws, said one Mexican border resident. Thanks to the newly militarized border patrol vigilance, the traditional ow of Mexicans into the United States has noticeably decreased. The usual zones have too many patrols, so the perilous desert has become the choice of the truly desperate and adventurous. As a result of this crackdown on braceros or mojados, most of the newly unemployed remain in Jurez. The population here may have reached 3 million, speculates Jurez environmentalist Felix Perez. No one has counted. Each day hundreds, maybe thousands arrive at the bus station, looking for work in the maquilas. Im staying in Jurez, said Ana Maria, a worker who had come from a rural area of Mexico. Its rough here, but its impossible in the countryside where I came from. Some of the newly arrived women and men send part of their wages back to their families in the rural areas. Indeed, many families that cling to their inadequate land holdings that still serves as a source of identity and some income depend on Jurez or Tijuana factory workers to provide the meager monthly subsidy that keeps the bank or the money-lender from seizing the traditional family plot. This pressure acts as a disciplinary factor on the maquila worker. He or she knows that the familys survival depends on those remittances. Maquila promoters use this example when they preach to potential investors about the reliability of Mexicos workforce. Thanks to such cultural force, they argue, Mexico can still compete for low wages and high productivity with other developing world countries. To them this is the essence of global competition in a free market. It boils down to which country can offer its people as laborers in primarily foreign-owned factories for the lowest wages, can promise these industries with all the pollution they create the least environmental regulation, the least monitoring for health and safety in the workplace, and, of course, the lowest taxes and the least prospect for unionization. This is the seamy side of the free market. In the ofcial discourse of President Bush or President Fox no reference is even made to the labor, environmental and social horrors that have developed alongside what has become known euphemistically as free trade. Indeed, the so-called Fast Track

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means that the US Congress will not have a chance to debate the details or implications of economic proposals.11 The Environment and the Maquilas The promoters of the maquila system make claims of rationality and efciency, but maquila production suffers from the inability of their managers to make reasonable, humane judgments about the impact of such rationality on real people. For example, the current mode of global production needs adequate resources, good water, air and land to continue to make products for its prospective buyers. Yet, in order to make these commodities competitively, it systematically depletes and pollutes the earths water, air and soil and destroys prematurely the very people who must work in its factories. In short, it dees the wisdom of the old Arab saying: dont foul the plate you eat from. Ciudad Jurez in the state of Chihuahua provides an immediate illustration. In Ciudad Jurez, a 20-foot wide canal with sewer water (aguas negras) runs through the city. I talked to Osvaldo Aguinaba, an elderly farmer, on the other side of the canal. I tried not to let the stench rising from the rapidly moving stream interfere with my own stream of thought. So, I shouted across the fetid tributary, has this stinky water always run through here? Osvaldo replied, Yes, but it used to pure sewage, you know from human beings. Osvaldo, dressed in white work clothes, nodded his head and pointed at the putrid watercourse. But now its mixed with the chemical wastes from the factories. Yes, those factories make most of this crap. Its ruining the countryside. Another elderly farmer in blue jeans, a red shirt and a baseball hat joined the one in white. He shook his head sadly. The government is allowing agriculture to die, he said, pointing at the aguas negras. From the farmers side of the canal, standing on a ladder, there is Texas, about half a mile away. On the Mexican side of the border, some 25 miles southeast of Jurez, alfalfa, sorghum and other types of cattle feed grow alongside cotton. One interviewee told me regretfully that, They dont let us use the water to irrigate the fruit trees anymore (Thank God, I muttered to myself. But I wondered how much enforcement exists in rural Chihuahua). Osvaldo said that he still grew some wheat. I shuddered. He continued, Yes, the aguas negras drain into the elds. What can we do? Theres been a long drought here. We have to eat. The animals have to eat. We have to grow our crops and sell them with whatever water we can nd. People presumably eat the wheat and the meat and milk from the cows after they eat grains irrigated from this toxic river. A few miles further south a plant converts the solid waste into sludge bars that farmers then use as fertilizer. The worst contaminators are the dangerous metals used in metal processing, says Federico de la Vega, who studied chemical engineering at MIT and went home to Jurez to run a beer and soda pop distribution business and

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lease industrial parks to foreign maquilas. Cleaning metals for locks and other industrial products involves the use of chlorine, bromine and other truly toxic elements and I know that some of the maquila managers dont dispose of these poisonous residues properly. I worry especially about the health of pregnant women who come into contact with these dangerous compounds.12 Even Jaime Bermudez, the father and foremost promoter of Jurez industrial parks, admitted that environmental problems are serious. But these are problems we can solve, he insists. The maquilas bring jobs and without jobs we have nothing.13 This way of thinking is reminiscent of the mantra of some US labor unions a couple of decades ago when their members demanded the right to work at jobs that forced them to have to deal with chemical, nuclear and other workplace hazards. The untenable choice was what was more important, a little poison in the air and water, or a chance to earn a good living for your family? In border cities like Jurez, the extreme levels of pollution affect the eyes, ears, nose, throat, and lungs. First, we have the ancient busses, says Felix Perez, a local environmental activist. These worn out vehicles are the citys basic means of transportation. Not only are they extremely uncomfortable, they emit immense amounts of noxious exhaust. Perez points to the old US school busses which are loaded with workers going to and from the colonias where they live and to the factories where they work. Some busses have little or no shock absorbers or springs as they bounce along with rutted, unpaved streets, lined with ramshackle huts the housing for some of those who produce home furnishings, parts for fancy trailers and new auto and computer accessories. The average ride from the colonia to the factory takes an hour and a half. The fact is, Perez says, that we have no environmentally good transportation system. Add to that the contamination produced by the post 9/11 security measures taken by the US border agencies and you have truly non-breathable air. Then, there is the scarce water issue. The once mighty Ro Grande has been reduced to a trickle in parts of Jurez. Jurez has ve years of water remaining according to Perez. City ofcials have found a new water source in the desert some miles from here, but its located in a nuclear graveyard, where they buried radioactive cobalt, among other things, which may well have leaked into the water. No one knows for sure whether the water would be safe to drink, but industrial planning in developing world countries doesnt take into account human health factors. Those rich enough to afford it will, of course, buy bottled water. The supply of cheap labor in places like Mexico will be abundant for decades to come. Indeed, companies shun older workers in favor of teenagers, most of whose health and energy will prove sufcient for production needs over the next ve years. The cancers, lung diseases and the syndromes associated with repetitive motion will emerge only years later in the bodies of these once youthful and vigorous workers.

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The border area has become an environmental nightmare: raw sewage without treatment plants and toxic materials unleashed into soil, water and air. President Clinton had allocated $20 billion for border environmental clean-up. By the time he left ofce in January 2001, less than $100 million had been spent and most of this on administrative costs. The lure of employment that attracted millions of people to frontier industrial cities has lost its sheen and many factories are closing. In July 2002, Scientic-Atlanta, the second-largest US maker of television set-top boxes, announced that it had eliminated 1300 jobs in Mexico because of declining demand. Scientic-Atlanta had moved its manufacturing operations from Atlanta to Jurez in July 2001 and after one year it had to downsize. A company spokesman, Paul Sims, warned that more job cuts lie ahead. Scientic-Atlantas problems come from reduced demand after peaking in 2000. The new residents of Jurez, lured by announcements of job certainty, ended up facing unemployment without any safety net and a physical environment that appears unsustainable. Why couldnt the brilliant people who developed the idea of maquilas as an economic base have not thought about some of the worst case scenarios? Their insight into business efciency propelled into place a production system that has caused, and will continue to cause, catastrophic results for people and the environment. Most likely they did think about the negative aspects of their investment on the workers and residents, but they rationalized that the demands of the free market low wages and low costs could not allow such humanistic concerns to jeopardize the bottom line. NOTES
1. President Clinton said that NAFTA had created hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the United States. Bush echoes this line as true. However, thousands of skilled Michigan auto workers, for example, lost their $2530 and hour jobs to Mexican workers who earned $8 a day. For example, a former welder may get another job checking groceries at $89 an hour, and so would his wife, who previously had stayed home and cared for the children. The two now earn around $17 an hour and they have created a third job: someone to care for their small children at less than minimum wage. In Mexico, NAFTA has also created jobs related both to the immediate manufacturing process and the work that naturally derives from setting up factories. Seemingly NAFTA works fabulously, if for speculators investors or for multinational corporate CEOs assuming that the local branch plant was able to survive the US recession and the 9/11 aftershocks and still remained open. A few Mexican developers who lease land for industrial parks and those who feed off contracts to the export factories have also fared well. The maquilas also offered work for architects, plumbers, electricians, construction crews, landscapers, food caterers and a variety of other services required to maintain the plant and the workforce. For

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the vast army of contractors and sub-contractors and the more than 2 million Mexicans working inside the maquilas, those who have not lost their jobs recently, one could say that they survived which they could not have done had they remained on the unproductive land of their origin. 2. According to the 4 June 2004 El Paso Times (Gilot, 2004), in a June 2004 report investigating the deaths of the murdered women in Jurez, Maria Lopez Urbina, the special federal prosecutor appointed by Mexico President Vicente Fox, listed 81 Jurez police ofcers, including 17 detectives, who might have committed criminal or administrative violations. In March 2002, President Bush announced new hi-tech security measures including the use of X-ray machines to examine the contents of lorries crossing the border . . . to stop potential terrorists entering the US along its long border with Mexico, according to the 22 March 2002 BBC News (Watson, 2002). Personal interview, 2000. Chihuahua, Mexicos largest state is located at the northern end of Mexico, on the Northwest Central Plain. It borders the US to the north, the state of Sonora to the west, Sinaloa to the southwest and Coahuila to the east. Personal interview. Personal interviews, 19982000. Personal interview, June 2002. Personal interview, 1999. According to the 4 June 2003 Washington Post, a joint effort by US federal ofcials and the Mexican government called Operation Desert Safeguard, formed in response to the escalating deaths of migrants attempting to cross the border, will add 150 Border Patrol agents along the southern Arizona border, west of Nogales. Two additional surveillance aircraft have also been assigned to look for migrants. Twenty search-and-rescue beacons also are being placed across the desert, allowing migrants in distress to press a button that will summon Border Patrol agents. In the 2004 election, both candidates called for military participation in an effort to exert greater control of the border, in their control the border rhetoric, neither candidate evinced concern for civil liberties. On 6 December 2001, Congress narrowly passed the Trade Promotion Authority Bill, also known as Fast Track.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

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JOURNAL OF DEVELOPING SOCIETIES 21(34) Personal interview, June 2002. Personal interview, 1999.

REFERENCES
Gilot, L. (2000) Jurez Slayings Report Finds Police Abuses, El Paso Times, 4 June. Jordan, M. (2002) Mexican Workers Pay for Success: With Labor Costs Rising, Factories Depart for Asia, Washington Post, 20 June. Washington Post (2003) U.S., Mexico Discuss Trying to Cut Migrant Deaths, 4 June. Watson, R. (2002) US Tightens Mexico Border, BBC News, 22 March.

Saul Landau directs Digital Media at Cal Poly Pomona Universitys College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences. He has written 14 books (The Business of America: How Consumers Have Replaced Citizens and How We Can Reverse the Trend, Routledge, 2004), and has made 50 lms (Syria: Between Iraq and a Hard Place, 2004). Address: Director, Digital Media, Cal Poly Pomona University, 1902 Morgan Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711, USA. Email: [slandau@csupomona.edu]