NAFTA

DEC 17 1992 · 12:00

Presidents George H. W. Bush and Carlos Salinas with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney at the NAFTA initialing ceremony, San Antonio, October 1992. Place: trilateral: signing at San Antonio, Mexico City, and Ottawa simultaneously; effect across the USA, Canada, and Mexico Figures: George H. W. Bush, US president (signing) · Bill Clinton, US president (ratification) · Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Mexican president · Brian Mulroney, Canadian prime minister · Subcomandante Marcos, EZLN spokesman in Chiapas A Continent as a Free-Trade Zone The North American Free Trade Agreement enters force at midnight on 1 January 1994, eliminating most tariffs across a continent of 370 million people and 6.5 trillion dollars in combined GDP. It is the first major free-trade agreement between an industrialized economy (the United States) and a developing one (Mexico). Negotiated under Bush, signed in his last weeks, ratified in 1993 with decisive Republican support over the objections of organized labor and the Perot wing, NAFTA is the template the Washington Consensus exports to the rest of the hemisphere for the next decade. The Mexican concessions are the most significant: liberalization of the financial sector, of agricultural protection, of the constitutional reservation of the ejido communal lands. The 1917 constitution's Article 27, which protected the communal land tenure of indigenous communities, is amended in 1992 to enable NAFTA compliance. The amendment, more than the tariff schedule, is what the Zapatistas will fight. The Zapatista Counter-Reading At dawn on 1 January 1994, hours after NAFTA enters force, masked indigenous fighters of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional seize seven municipal seats in Chiapas including San Cristóbal de las Casas. Their First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, read from the balcony of the captured palace, frames the rebellion explicitly: NAFTA is a death sentence for indigenous Mexico, and the constitutional amendments enabling it have voided the social contract of the 1917 revolution. Subcomandante Marcos, the movement's writer and spokesman, gives the framing its global vocabulary across the next year: a revolt of the local against capital's borderlessness, fought from a forest, mediated by the early internet. NAFTA's record over the next three decades is genuinely mixed. Mexican manufacturing employment in the maquiladora border zone expands sharply, then is hollowed out by China's WTO accession (see [[wto-founded-1995]]) in 2001. US manufacturing employment declines. Cross-border supply chains for autos and electronics become continental. The Westphalian state's sovereignty over its own trade policy has been explicitly pooled in regional treaty form. The Zapatista reading, which Video: President Bill Clinton signs the North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act in the Mellon Auditorium, Washington, 8 December 1993. Former Presidents Carter, Ford and Bush stand alongside him. NAFTA enters into force 1 January 1994.