The following article comes from the Socialist Worker (Britain), January 7, 1994 weekly newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party. For subscriptions: 10 issues for L4, L13 for six months, L26 for a year; L40 for airmail overseas. Socialist Worker, PO Box 82, London E3 3LH. THE RISING OF THE RED BANDANNAS by Mike Gonzalez As the world trade talks ramble on, you could lose yourself in the forest of statistics and initials, GATT, NAFTA, the Uruguay Round- they are all anonymous, bureaucratic. The endless petty squabbles over clauses and sub-clauses rob them of any meaning. Capitalism has always hidden its international reality behind grave pronouncements about the rights of nations. Yet for decades the mineral prices set daily at the London Metal Exchange could mean ruin for millions. A cent or two off the price tin could destroy the economy of Bolivia, Zambia or Malaysia - and no national government could protect itself. Now the instruments of economic control are more complex - and more integrated. GATT and NAFTA represent something very concrete. They are contracts drawn between the ruling classes of the world to act together to set a stagnant world economy in motion again. NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Area, is an agreement between Mexican, North American and Canadian capitals to integrate their activities. It trebles the size of their market, and allows new economies of scale - but only for the big guns with capital to invest in new machinery. Chile and Colombia are waiting to join, and Venezuela and Argentina will soon follow. What does it all mean for those who have nothing to gain from the rationalization of the market? Early in January, the answer was given in Chiapas, southern Mexico. It is a region of large and prosperous cattle ranches on the plain and maize production in the hills. Nearly a million acres of land belong to the Indian communities (there are 20 different peoples, each with their own language). For them NAFTA dealt its first hammer blow a year ago. A new law reforming agriculture removed the protections on their communal land; the ending of government subsidies made it more expensive to produce and market their maize. And under NAFTA, maize produced on huge North American farms would swamp the market with cheaper goods. At the same time the local landowners used the new laws to take the land and expand the cattle randes. With their new U.S. collaborators they could now produce more and cheaper meat for a growing market. The small farmers and communities were caught in a vice. The market removed all their hard won guarantees and the land barons hovered like vultures to seize their land. When the most powerful politician in the state, the ex-governor Patrocinio Gonzalez, became Interior Minister in the national government, he acted on behalf of his fellow landowners. In May 1993, 2000 soldiers attacked the Indian communities - calling it a "training mission" to eliminate drug dealers. For the peasants and workers of this poorest state in Mexico the future was clear. They would be dispossessed, thrown into a system where nearly 2 million jobs had already been lost in anticipation of NAFTA, and a million more would go on the very day of the ceremonial signing. Small farms, businesses, and hundreds of thousands of jobs would disappear behind a veil of takeovers and shifts in production. In every part of the "free trade" area workers would lose - because capital would follow the cheapest labour and supply their markets from new factories and farms. So the Mexicans of Chiapas put red bandannas across their mouths, took up arms and fought back. This army spoke twenty different languages, wore twenty different costumes, possessed as many histories. But capitalism had made them a single column of the dispossessed. Their scarves are a special symbol; they identified the guerrilla armies of El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua just a few years ago. There too, a hundred years ago, a new market for coffee led to new laws which threw millions off their communal land as the coffee farms grew to accommodate the demands of the market. A century later their struggle for land continues. In Brazil the burning forests are eternal flames on the altar of profit. With each reorganization, millions are thrown into terrible poverty. In Washington, Brussels, Mexico City smiling greysuits reach agreement. Elsewhere factories close, villages disappear, more and more people are deprived of their land and cast into the streets to live. And everywhere the bourgeois politicians buy new weapons for the police, and howl about the "ragged armies" of the dispossessed who appear on the city streets in search of work. In India, on the day that NAFTA was signed, four students walked naked through their city - to symbolize the impact of the GATT agreements on them. They too were part of the ragged army of the dispossessed - but they did not wear the red bandanna of the common struggle. Not yet. The response of the Mexican peasants was only the first uprising. These are the rebellions of the victims of the market. We should celebrate their refusal to be victims only, and recognize that however hard the commentators work to convince us that these are the death throes of a primitive world, the red bandannas are a symbol not of despair, but of a resistance that has already crossed the borders.