Story summary:
One of the most beautiful places in Mexico, Oaxaca has a gorgeous main plaza and never-ending market, but 75 percent of its people, most of them indigenous, suffer grinding poverty, thanks to NAFTA and multi-national corporations. The plight of Oaxaca, of course, symbolizes the world. While the average yearly income of U.S. households is $60,528.00, nearly half of the world’s six billion people live on less than $2 a day. The U.N. estimates that some 900 million people are currently starving. Perhaps 100 million people have joined the ranks of the starving this year alone, the U.N. says. That number will continue to climb as long as U.S. policies support the greedy multi-nationals, and their total disregard of the world’s poor and the environment.
A few weeks ago, I was in Oaxaca, Mexico, on retreat with Maryknoll Lay Missioners who serve and accompany the poor. One of the most beautiful places in Mexico, Oaxaca has a gorgeous main plaza and never-ending market, but 75 percent of its people, most of them indigenous, suffer grinding poverty, thanks to NAFTA and multi-national corporations.
Two years ago, 70,000 pre-school, primary and secondary school teachers staged a sit in protest for higher wages in the downtown area (about 50 city blocks surrounding the main plaza). Before long, traffic came to a standstill. Banks, highways and government offices were blocked. And the city shut down.
In response, the government cracked down, and the movement grew. Soon there were 100,000 people in the barricaded streets. So the government through the police created death squads who randomly assassinated 25 people, including a young New Yorker, Bradley Will, who had journeyed there to document the unfolding events.
My hosts Kathy and Phil Dahl-Bredine walked me through the now quiet plaza, and pointed out where the stunning protests and horrific government repression took place. While the people exercised their power, the violent repression shocked the world. Today, government corruption, multi-national corporate oppression and widespread poverty grind on.
But Kathy and Phil testify to the amazing strength of the struggling people. They too are amazing. In the 1960s, they raised their seven children in Chicago, while serving the inner-city and marching for justice and peace. Friends of Dorothy Day, they moved to New Mexico in 1979 to live off the land. Eight years ago, as Maryknoll lay missioners, they moved to San Isidro, Tilantongo, a tiny village in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca. There, they went deeper into voluntary poverty and began living in solidarity with their campesino neighbors. They’ve learned first hand how U.S. corporate greed strangles the world’s poor, beginning with our neighbors to the south, and how the struggling poor continue to point a way out of global injustice.
They started talking about the global economic collapse the minute I arrived, telling me about its local impact, most dramatically in the astronomic rise in price for a bag of fertilizer, from $25 a year ago to $80 today. Indigenous farmers can’t afford that, so their livelihood and culture, based on traditional corn-growing and selling that dates back thousands of years, now faces extinction. So do they.
“As a result of free trade policies and market liberalization doctrines, agricultural and food prices worldwide are now at the mercy of a few mammoth agro-business and agro-export corporations and speculative investors,” Phil wrote in a recent e-mail, summing up the grim situation. “Conventional farming has been made economically unfeasible here by the international oligopolies that manipulate markets, and this will surely translate into a new wave of migration of small farmers to Mexican cities and to the U.S.”
The plight of Oaxaca, of course, symbolizes the world. While the average yearly income of U.S. households is $60,528.00, nearly half of the world’s six billion people live on less than $2 a day. The U.N. estimates that some 900 million people are currently starving. Perhaps 100 million people have joined the ranks of the starving this year alone, the U.N. says. That number will continue to climb as long as U.S. policies support the greedy multi-nationals, and their total disregard of the world’s poor and the environment.
Small farming communities are folding everywhere. Global food prices are skyrocketing, in part too because of increasingly chaotic weather and the shift from growing grain for fuel. Rice used to be $300 a metric ton, but now it’s well over $1,000. Meanwhile, profits for agro-businesses and exporters (such as Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland) have soared.