Global Policy Forum

By John Ross

The maquiladora industry is making the corn cradle run dry.

In the eastern Tehuacán Valley, an altar stands where the world's first domesticated corn was believed to have been rediscovered in 1964 by an Indiana Jones-style paleobotanist. Richard McNeish carbon-dated the cave findings to between 5000 and 3500 BC.

Today, Coxcatlán, the nearby valley town, prides itself for being the "Cradle of Corn in the Americas" and commemorates McNeish's find with a giant bronze ear of corn at the entrance to town. But McNeish's discovery carried a kind of curse. Having carted off thousands of ancient corn specimens without the government's permission, McNeish was declared persona non grata in Mexico, and authorities demanded that he return the cache. McNeish shrugged off the charges and headed for Peru to rediscover the first potato and China to find the first rice, although his findings were often questioned. More precise carbon dating has slashed as much as 3,000 years from the age of his Coxcatlán corn.

Maize cultivation has flourished in the Tehuacán Valley for a millennium or more. After the Aztec conquest in the mid-14th century, the valley kept Tenochtitlan, the seat of the Mexican empire, well fed. Today, however, the tortilla basket of the Altiplano is drying up at a worrisome rate.

Mexico's ancient crop is now cursed by a handful of brand names that are household words in many countries, including The Gap, Guess and Calvin Klein. In the Tehuacán Valley, at least 300 clothing assembly plants or maquiladoras crank out 5 million pairs of jeans a month for the US market. With 35,000 employees, of whom 80 percent are Nahua, Mazateca, Mixtec or Popoloca indigenous people, the industry now dominates the valley's economy.

Laboring nine hours a day, six days a week, for take-home pay of about US$36, it takes workers a month to earn what a consumer in Los Angeles will pay for a pair of the designer jeans they sew. José Méndez, president of the Tehuacán Valley Garment Shop Owners Association (CANAIVES), touts the area's low wages, tax-free environment and government-subsidized infrastructure as perks that lure the jeans giants here.

Still, Méndez concedes that the health of the Tehuacán Valley's maquiladora boom is challenged by both the US economic recession and sweeter offers in Guatemala, Brazil and China.

Tehuacán was once universally renowned for the purity of its water. The city's name is synonymous with commercial mineral waters sold throughout Mexico. But now the region's many springs and its deep aquifer are putting out far more of the precious liquid than gets put back in. Martí­n Barrios, director of a non-governmental human rights commission in the valley, says that some water sources are menaced by contamination due to the blue-jean boom.

With the maquiladoras guzzling up mammoth amounts of water, little is available for the valley's farmland, and the water that remains is so laced with chemicals that it often comes out blue, Barrios says. He adds that 25 laundries, half of them illegal, wash a million pairs of jeans a week, sucking up hundreds of millions of liters of scarce water, none of which is treated or recycled.

Wastewater discharged onto farmland is a witches' brew of non-biodegradable dyes, bleaches, acids and other toxic agents used to produce stonewashed and chemically aged jeans. The outflow, Barrios says, has stained the valley floor blue in places.

Feeding the insatiable US hunger for blue jeans is putting a dent in food production. Maquiladoras and shantytown neighborhoods of underpaid workers are gobbling up the remaining corn-producing lands. The sons and daughters of the campesinos who have tilled this land for centuries are abandoning the cornfields for the maquiladoras, and the rhythm of the agricultural year is now dictated by The Gap's inventory demands."Our old way of living is being erased by The Gap, Calvin Klein and the others," says Gastón de la Luz, a farmer's son from Santa Marí­a Coapán. "Now only the old men work on the land. The young men go to New York or the maquiladoras. Only the old women make and sell tortillas; their daughters all work with denim now."

Even the corn is going downhill, he says.

"I don't know if it's the chemicals in the water or if too much chemical fertilizer has burnt out the soil. The farmers have so little land now that they never let it rest. All I can tell you is that the yields are much smaller, the cobs are smaller and the kernels are not as big as before," he says. De la Luz also frets about the threat of genetically modified corns that have contaminated maize just over the Sierra Negra in Oaxaca (LP, March 25, 2002).

Barrios, the son of Nahua farmers, sees the maquiladora curse as the opening gambit in President Vicente Fox's Plan Puebla-Panama, an ambitious development plan designed to lure transnational investment to Mexico's resource-rich but impoverished and mainly indigenous south (LP, Aug. 6, 2001). The plan will also pave the way for the transfer of the foreign-owned assembly plant industry from the US border to southern Mexico.

"This is ‘Maquilatitlan,' and we're the guinea pigs. Fox wants to see all the campesinos working in the maquiladoras. We won't grow our own corn anymore, but there will be plenty of the transgenic stuff available in the gringo-owned supermarkets," Barrios says.

"It's like some god has put a curse on our maize," Gastón adds. "Sometimes I hear the elders blame it on McNeish. Since he took away the first corn, our maize has lost its power."

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