Monopolies and 'Free Trade'

Twenty years after NAFTA, what did Obama, [Canadian Prime Minister Stephen] Harper and [Mexican President Enrique] Peña come together to celebrate? Commissioning the appropriation of national heritage sites and strategic resources from large semi-public organizations to their oil, electric, railway, mining, agribusiness and service industry monopolies? Or doing all this in the shadow of “free trade” and an intermittent war inflicted upon the people of Mexico under the auspices of the Merida Initiative?

The United States’ hegemony is plummeting in the face of its collapsing “moral and intellectual leadership,” as evidenced by the brutal attack on Iraq and the “American Gulag,” the heap of weekly drone assassinations, the NSA spying on the world and the coup operations against [President Nicolás] Maduro in pursuit of the great oil reserves of Venezuela. The imperial coercion is growing with the support of, as André Gunder Frank would say, the corrupt “lumpenbourgeoisie.”

The “free trade” that Peña celebrates (as the hero of Big Oil companies like Exxon, Chevron, BP and Shell for delivering Mexico’s petro-electric complex to them) undermined the foundations of social peace, threw the country into a storm of unemployment, economic insecurity, widespread social breakdown, violence and crime. Daily, the U.S. exploits the structural violence of its economic design that stands as the main challenge for Mexican national security, resulting in more than 100,000 dead, 26,000 missing, and thousands dispossessed and displaced.

The George W. Bush / Barack Obama continuity is a major issue. With anti-ballistic deployments and “Obama’s addiction to special forces,”* according to The Washington Post, international law is shattered. This poses a great risk to world peace, while at a national level the rights of workers, teachers, indigenous peoples and farmers are all under attack. Environmental regulations and protections are being dismantled, as well as consumers’ rights and the rights of the middle class, precipitating domestic unrest.

NAFTA, despite having an impact on many countries, was negotiated in secret, as happened with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as Jeff Faux emphasized in “NAFTA and Narcos” (The Huffington Post, Feb. 10, 2014). The secretive nature matters, especially if you remember that in 1995 Jack Blum, then chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and student of corruption and drug money laundering, revealed links between the CIA, drug trafficking and the underworld, and indicated that the White House under Bush Sr. “… was convinced that if the American public found out that in Mexico drugs and corruption were increasing, NAFTA would have never been ratified …”*

For Blum, the basis of the U.S. economic policy toward Mexico, with a focus on free trade and privatization, was wrong. They assumed that a free market economy and free trade automatically solve the problems of corruption. Far from doing so, they exacerbate these problems.

At about the same time we learned of an FBI study — “The Political Economy of the Drug Trade,” by J. Moody, chief of the Organized Crime division — that detected an unusual level of corruption in Mexico ever since a package of incentives had been offered to attract foreign capital to the sell-off of hundreds of public companies, many of which were solvent and very profitable. One of these incentives, cited in a substantial article by Dolia Estévez about the privatizations and “narco-money laundering,” was the sale “of semi-public institutions to private investors, including important financial institutions, factories and cutting-edge service providers worth billions of dollars.”

It was confirmed that the Department of the Treasury, through the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, was investigating the matter. Although it was the “most forceful indictment by a U.S. official” on the workings of the privatizations, the investigation remained frozen. Most importantly, according to Blum, the privatizations were commissioned as part of a plan encouraged by the United States and other international financial institutions — that is to say, by the Treasury Department itself (which is in charge of the “investigation”) and its corresponding agencies: the IMF, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Whether in the sell-off of a thousand semi-public organizations, the Mexican rail system or the petro-electric complex, these international institutions act as persuasive de facto oversight committees for the giant monopolies and their local partners.

While Peña is celebrating NAFTA with Obama, deputies (including members of the PRI) are reporting serious pressure from Obama’s ambassador, Anthony Wayne, and from Ernesto Zedillo, who commissioned the sale of the railways and now works for Union Pacific. The deputies have been threatened into not approving the Railroad Service Regulatory Law that would limit monopolies. “‘Free trade’?” asked one deputy. When “they set the prices they want and charge what they want?”

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.