v/o: These are Mexico’s chosen people.
And this is their promised land.
Each week, thousands more arrive seeking salvation in the foreign owned factories, or Macquiladoras, that fill the border town of Juarez.
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v/o: Four years ago, the people of Mexico and the United States signed a free trade agreement their leaders promised would mean prosperity for all.
Clinton: This is our opportunity to provide an impetus to freedom and democracy in Latin America, and create new jobs for America as well. It’s a good deal, and we ought to take it.
FX: Applause
Bannerman: But a good deal for who? Since NAFTA was signed, over 100 American companies have come to Juarez. And more are on their way.
But they pay their workers just 53 cents an hour, less than $30 a week. Unions here are all but banned. And the vast majority of the people continue to live in grinding poverty.
Hervella: The city that I knew as a kid, that was peaceful, a very nice city, that since this event of bringing in Macquiladoras, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, has turned into a nightmare.
Bannerman: This however, is not a problem simply for Mexicans. For the jobs created south of the border have been torn from the heart of middle America.
FX: Train
v/o: It’s a sound that says good morning.
Here in Bloomington, Indiana, they joke that you don’t need an alarm clock, just the six-thirty freight train.
Everything about this town says middle America. Children here are taught to love the game, to respect the umpire’s decision, and to be team players, of course.
For 50 years the RCA-Thomson plant has been the centrepiece of this town’s economy, churning out millions upon millions of television sets. For the people who worked there it was far more than a job though; they believed they were building an American icon.
Josh: They were central, very central. And a lot of pride
in our community, too. People thought, you know, we’ve got the RCA plant here, we make TVs that are sold worldwide, you know.
v/o: Today the Stars and Stripes still fly over the Thomson plant, but the workers have gone and the factory is silent.
Miller: The union, at the very beginning, tried to tell the people that there wasn’t anything they could do.
v/o: Jim Miller worked was Thomson-RCA all his life. He signed up at 18 and he fully expected to retire from there.
Bannerman: Was it a difficult time?
Miller: It was definitely difficult. At first people didn’t believe it and they tried to convince themselves that it was just a contractual joke.
Then they decided that yes, it really is going to close and they became scared. Myself, I’ve been here for 28 years. I’ve had family members here and I consider most of the people working here as family.
Bannerman: As family? Is it that close?
Miller: It was that close. And you hate to lose a family, and that’s what it’s like.
We had to leave because our competitors, virtually all of them, are in Mexico today. In reality they are paying a far reduced labour rate than we have to pay in the United States.
Radio announcer: This is WFHB, Bloomington, Indiana. My name is Lisa. Now we’re going to play a song that a lot of people have been wanting to here. It’s a song called Letter to Juarez…
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v/o: To say that people here feel betrayed by the closure is an understatement. Families built their homes and their lives around the factory.
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v/o: Three years ago, when management told employees it needed to cut costs, workers agreed to give up more than $200 million in benefits. In return the company promised it would be staying in Bloomington.
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Bannerman: Do you feel that they lied to you?
Miller: They definitely lied to me and every employee who works there.
Bannerman: So how does that make you feel now looking back on it?
Miller: Mad. I trusted them. I trusted them with my life. Now I have no job. I’m out of work.
Knoph: Not at all. We said at that time that the business was in trouble. At the time the sales were down, and at the time our competitors were on a steady exodus from the United State to Mexico. And what we said is, we will preserve these jobs for the duration of the contract, which was a three year contract, in exchange for this concessionary package.
Bannerman: For all the anger Jim Miller feels, he’s still one of the luckier workers. At 48, he’s young enough to retrain. But many of his friends aren’t quite so fortunate.
John Rowe joined Thomson-RCA in 1961. His only time away came in the mid-1960s, when he fought for his country in Vietnam. Now at 58, he faces a bleak future.
Bannerman: You told me that you’d built a new house about four years ago. How does all this leave you then?
Rowe: Pretty hard. I may have to sell my new home. I’m not saying I will have to, but if I can get lucky and find a new job right away, then I'll continue to have my new house. But if not, I have to sell my new home and get something cheaper.
Bannerman: So your home is at stake? Potentially.
Rowe: Absolutely, absolutely.
v/o: On a sunny day like this with friends around, it’s easy to forget the tough choices facing this group. They can take a job making $5 an hour, or like Rota, go back to school.
Rota: I must be out of my mind doing this at this stage. I’ve got grandkids. I shouldn’t be doing this.
Rowe: Does our government want us to live that way? That’s what I’m wondering. It’s be pretty sad.
Bannerman: Is that what goes through your head?
Rowe: Yes, it is. We have the rich, the middle class and the poor in the United states. They’ll get it down to the rich and the poor. There’ll be no middle class people if they keep continuing the way it is.
v/o: Surprisingly, Jim and his friends feel no resentment towards the Mexican people who’ve taken their jobs. Their anger is directed far closer to home.
Miller: There’s no doubt in my mind that NAFTA cost me my job, and cost the people that I worked with for the last 28 years their jobs.
v/o: Since NAFTA was signed, the movement of people and goods across the Mexican-American border has simply exploded.
Jim Miller has agreed to come with us to Juarez and he’s keen to see if his job – the job that he lost – is delivering someone else a slice of the American dream.
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v/o: But Juarez, as he soon discovers, is not a place for dreams. It’s become an industrial park, a place where foreign businesses can find people who will work for next to nothing.
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v/o: Thomson-RCA has three Macquila factories in Juarez. We have persuaded them to let us inside the largest.
Inside, for Jim at least, it’s a familiar scene. Circuit boards, plastic cases, all being created as high definition TVs to be exported back to America.
v/o: For Jim though, certain things do jar. Workers move heavy boxes without safety equipment. And this woman is expected to work all day in a job which could easily cripple her with RSI.
Miller: They will have to find new workers because they’re going to wear these out.
Bannerman: Are you saying that you think the company just feels these people at that very low rate of pay are expendable?
Miller: They’re definitely expendable. They have people wanting jobs in Mexico all the time. They can go out on the street and get anybody and bring them in and put them there until they’re no good to them any more. And then throw them out the door and get another one.
Galarza: If we try to get together to protest against them we are sacked… like in my case I was sacked from a macquiladora in 1985. We have been sexually harassed by the bosses, the supervisors and the foremen. The way they treat us in the macquiladora industry we are practically modern slaves.
v/o: Judith Galarza is a human rights activist. For the decade she has been an outspoken critic of the Macquiladoras. She has been black-banned from the factories and her life has been threatened. But she says she will not be silenced.
Galarza: The salaries are an offense to humanity
Because if you consider how much they produce, they are bringing in a lot of wealth. So this salary is predetermined by the Mexican government but it is a salary that doesn’t allow us to survive.
v/o: But the story of how these people work is just one part of the picture. The places where many of them are forced to live tell so much more.
This is the suburb of Anapra. Located just a few hundred yards from the Mexican-American border, it is the home for thousands of Macquila workers.
In this town the factories’ one concession is to supply free buses to take the workers to and from the factories.
Joan Irene lives here with her husband and three children in this tiny house. There is no sewerage, no running water, and her one luxury is electricity, stolen from the power lines above her home. Tonight here, as every night, dinner is beans.
Joan [through translator]: It’s very small, so I just have the bed and a little table. That’s where my daughter sleeps.
Bannerman: Does she ever wonder why the government makes people live like this on such low wages?
Joan [through translator]: Yeah, of course. Many people ask themselves the same thing. The salaries are just very low here in Juarez, and I know a lot of people who have just decided to give up and go to El Paso or try to make their way into the United States because of that.
v/o: Next door her brother is building his house. Every single part of it has been made of cardboard. He too works at a Macquila. He’s paid a pittance, but the factory rubbish dump has provided him at least with the materials for his home. And you can only wonder how the house hasn’t already burnt to the ground.
Miller: I don’t understand how they can live like this, how the government could let them live like this.
Bannerman: Does your heart go out to these people?
Miller: Definitely. There’s no hope for them the way it looks right now. The government isn’t helping the way they are living and how they are bussed in and bussed out of here, there’s just no realisation on how they can survive.
Accordion music/sirens
v/o: But there’s another side to Juarez that Jim Miller hopefully will never see. For those who won’t work for 53 cents an hour there is always prostitution and drug running and even murder.
Camira: On the streets of Juarez, you take your life in your hands.
v/o: Crime photographer, Jose Camira, roams the streets with his police scanner, moving from one crime scene to another. For him there’s little doubt that the young woman coming to Juarez to find work are now being preyed upon.
In the last two years, he estimates more than a hundred have been raped, killed and their bodies dumped in the desert.
Camira: Yes, it’s a disgrace – women are more vulnerable to acts of violence and unfortunately many of the people who came her from the south of Mexico – especially the women – end up dead.
Here we have a bunch of ladies, because it’s usually women who work in the Maquiladoras, who are coming out of their jobs at midnight or 4 o’clock in the morning and are found dead - violated , strangulated, trawling the desert. And there is nobody with the mental capacity to tell that company ‘Listen! - if you’re demanding of an employee to be placed in a positon of risk we expect you to do something, to train that person, to provide basic transportation to places where that person may be safe.’ .
Bannerman: But they don’t care?
Jaime: They don’t care. Precisely, ‘Let’s open-up another industrial park ...and here comes the company X,Y,Z and everything is wonderful.’
Bannerman: These murders have a sent a deep chill through the suburbs of the city. In a saner world the government might well decide to slow the rate of development caused by free trade. But that seems unlikely, for the major corporations there is just too much money to be made here.
Jaime: The Mexican authorities and the American authorities contribute all that is necessary for beautiful industrial parks. They contribute wide streets, the contribute to the fast moving of cargo.
And then the working class contribute the dead, the disappeared, the mothers and wives crying day and night, widows and orphans. And everything is fine because we are pursuing the almighty dollar.
Bannerman: When the government signed the NAFTA agreement they did convinced they would also slow the number of border crossers. But that is not the way it has turned out.
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v/o: Even as they wait, another man is risking his life in an escape attempt. Downstream, three more men have waded across the brown ribbon of water that marks the border between Mexico and the United States. They too want to escape. The first man goes over the wall. Below, another crouches, waiting.
When the time is right, the first man makes his bid for freedom. If Bill Clinton thinks NAFTA’s such a good deal, the question is what are these people running from?