In Mexico, the struggle grows for basics: hunger for beans, tortillas provokes protests, food raids

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 4, 1996 by John (American tribal leader) Ross

MEXICO CITY - The six-year-old who said her name was Gabriela extended a grimy little hand to a U.S. reporter outside a subway station just a block from Mexico's Congress. A few feet away, a man Gabriela claimed was her uncle pumped away on a battered accordion. "I'm hungry" the urchin repeated, cadging a coin from the next passerby.

A full two-and a half years after U.S. and Mexican government officials promised the North American Free Trade Agreement would improve the quality of life for Mexicans, hunger is the number one complaint of underprivileged people throughout Mexico.

Through the spring and summer, Mexico has witnessed an increasing number of protests and incidents of civil unrest over basic survival needs, such as access to a sustenance level of tortillas and beans.

For example, in July in the San Quintin Valley of Baja, Calif., 15 miles from the U.S. border, 700 Mixtec Indian farmworkers chanted in unison, "Hunger, Hunger," as they blocked a potholed highway to protest the refusal of a local tomato packer to pay them two weeks' wages. "There is no money for beans or even tortillas," one worker complained to a reporter.

Tortillas and beans are the staple of diets 40,000 Mixtec pickers - among them an estimated 4,000 children - who migrate 600 miles from their native Oaxaca each year to plant and harvest tomatoes for U.S. transnational companies.

That sheer drive to survive prompted scores of the Mixtec protestors to raid San Quintin supermarkets following the protest over wages. Police responded by arresting 26 Indians, and the Mexican army subsequently sent patrols into the tomato fields.

Hunger also prompted 400 residents of the shantytown of San Nicolas de las Garzas to stop a freight train on May 31. The group, mostly women and children, unhooked three cars of imported corn and carried off loads of grain in buckets, sacks and apron pockets. San Nicolas is perched on the outskirts of Monterrey, the wealthiest metropolis in northern Mexico. The looters stoned police who tried to stop them.

Farmers in Chihuahua raided a government warehouse and confiscated 271 tons of beans in mid-May; farmers in the state of Durango raided a freight car full of wheat in June. A shipment of bottled July.

These scenes tell the stories behind the statistical reports about the deterioration of the Mexican economy - a downswing analysts claim is the country's worst since 1932. According to a recent study by the economics department of Banamex, Mexico's leading private bank, half of Mexico's estimated 92 million people consume less than the minimum daily requirement of 1,300 calories. In the past 20 months as the recession deepened, the cost of the basic food basket has surged 64 percent while salaries have risen only 18 percent. Consumption of basic grains declined 29 percent in that same period. Inflation has been aggravated in the north by the worst drought in 50 years.

Officials from the National Institute on Nutrition reported during a July conference in Mexico City that 350 people die each day from hunger and related diseases in Mexico.

The hunger crisis has hit indigenous communities especially hard. In the Tarahumara mountains of the state of Chihuahua nestled next to western Texas, 15 Raramuri Indian children died of malnutrition between January and June at the Jesuit-run Santa Teracita hospital, reports Fr. Luis Verplanken. Chihuahua public health authorities, meanwhile, list 77 Raramuri child deaths though July, 86 percent of them "nutritionally related."

To the south, in the state of Chiapas, a 1995 military offensive against the Zapatista Army of National Liberation prevented Mayan farmers from planting corn in the spring of 1995. Now, campesinos have no corn reserves to see them through the current growing cycle. The cupboard is bare for approximately 100,000 "men and women of corn" as the Mayans are historically known. Only solidarity caravans from the big cities are keeping the villages fed. In the parish of Ocosingo on the edge of Chiapas' Lacandon jungle, Fr. Jose G. Garcia estimates a shortfall of over 800 metric tons of corn thus far this year. Consequently, 205 of the 300 outlying communities his church serves have applied for dwindling emergency supplies.

Fr. Gonzalo Ituarte, co-vicar of the Chiapan diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas, says the Mexican military is using hunger to its own advantage. Soldiers distribute grain free to inhabitants of towns that do not openly support the Zapatista rebels, Ituarte said. "Corn has become a weapon of low-intensity warfare here," he said.

In the neighboring state of Guerrero, hunger is fueling the recent uprising of a guerrilla group that calls itself the Popular Revolutionary Army or EPR. "This is the worst time of year for us. There is nothing to eat and the soldiers keep us from our fields," complained Julian Rodriguez, a farmer from the militarized mountain town of Tepetixtla. Since the EPR first surfaced on June 28, its heavily-armed fighters have made appearances in many of the 14 Guerrero municipalities that are listed by the National Geography and Statistics Institute as living in "extreme poverty".