Features » May 29, 2008
Mexico’s Ghost Towns (cont’d)
In Mexico's Cerrito del Agua, freshly painted concrete houses line empty streets because most of their owners are working in the United States
He dismisses talk of depopulation and an abandoned countryside as “fatalism.” “Zacatecas has a 120-year history of migration,” he says. “Migration is historical.”
Robledo describes the state government’s development priorities as variations on the “three for one” program — where local, state and federal governments match each dollar provided by U.S. migrant organizations for use in local development projects, such as building interstate highways heading north and constructing greenhouses for growing export crops.
“If you had $50 million in the budget,” Robledo says, “would you use that to increase production in the countryside or to build an interstate highway? It is a political and economic decision.”
Robledo puts priority on the highway.
But doesn’t building super-highways toward the Mexico-U.S. border and changing agriculture to a cash-crop export reproduce the very neoliberal policies that dispossess migrants in the first place?
“We do not live in a socialist country,” he responds, “where the government controls every aspect of the economy. We are in a neoliberal country. We cannot escape from neoliberal economics.”
Garcia Zamora, who helped write the Zacatecas state development plan, is unconvinced. The main problem, he says, is the lack of real political alternatives to neoliberalism. According to Zamora, “there is only one political party in Mexico — the PRI,” referring to Mexico’s notoriously corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled the country from 1929 to 2000. “The PRD government in Zacatecas now acts just like a PRI government,” Zamora says, this time referencing the Party of the Democratic Revolution, the opposition party to the PRI. “The same lack of planning and nepotism. It spends its time mainly implementing federal programs. They drafted a good development plan, but they … have never carried out a serious regional economic development policy that seeks to diminish the massive exodus of 40,000 Zacatecas residents who abandon Mexico every year.”
Abandoned by migration
A few years ago, Mario Garc’a left Zacatecas to work in construction in Southern California, but after about five months he decided to return to El Cargadero, a tiny town about 50 miles west of the city of Zacatecas, the state capital.
“I thought, ‘In Mexico, if you work a couple of shifts, you can live OK’, ” he says. “Without so many luxuries and freeways, but you can live a more peaceful life.”
Garc’a, in his early 40s, is a small farmer and municipal delegate. His wife and three daughters live in El Cargadero. All nine of his brothers and sisters, and more than 50 cousins, live in the United States.
El Cargadero, with a population of about 350, and a population in the United States of more than 1,000, is supposed to be a success story. Most of its roads are freshly paved, and residents have electricity and potable water, thanks to remittances and the “three for one” program.
“There are many points of view, but as you can see here, this is a community abandoned by migration,” Garc’a says. “The government should work to keep people in the country, to find jobs, better living conditions. Here we have pretty streets, but where are the people?”
Driving from the city of Zacatecas to El Cargadero, mile after mile of empty fields, closed restaurants and boarded-up houses span the countryside. José Manuel, a taxi driver, who worked in California for four years, washing dishes and making salads, accompanies me on the drive. He says he remembers when these roads weren’t paved yet, but the fields were full of corn and beans. It is now vast emptiness.
“Nobody works most of this land anymore,” he says. “The owners went to the U.S. and left the land behind.”
This is precisely what brought Mario Garc’a back. “The countryside is broken,” he says. “The rural economy needs to be reactivated. But we export one of the most valuable things: our workers. And now we don’t produce anything.”
The legalization debate is misguided, he says, because it focuses, always, on the U.S. economy: how many immigrants to allow in and how to stamp their passports. That focus needs to shift to include Mexico.
“Mexico does not need an open border with the U.S. that invites Mexicans to go work there. People always talk about legalization, but no, what needs to be legalized is the Mexican’s ability to stay [home] so that Mexico can grow and produce.”
More information about John Gibler
-
subscribe to print magazine
-
email this article to a friend
-
Reader Comments
-
register a new account »Posting Security
Appeared in the June 2008 Issue
Also featured
No Strings Attached?
Sam’s Club Politics
Main Street Squeeze
Full contents
Previous issues
Subscribe and save!
Also by John Gibler
- Death Squads in Oaxaca
The Mexican government ignores the assassination of two community radio activistsPosted on June 10, 2008 - Counterinsurgency in Chiapas
Around 3 p.m. on Jan. 2, nine shots were fired into the… morePosted on January 23, 2008 - Militarizing Mexico’s Drug War
More than 1,000 police officers, soldiers and members of enemy cartels have been killed this year as President Calderon has turned up the heatPosted on June 19, 2007 - Street Battles in Oaxaca
At 8 a.m. on November 2, police came to remove the last… morePosted on December 27, 2006 - Oaxaca in Crisis
Just as the teacher's strike in Oaxaca appeared ready to end, paramilitary violence breaks out.Posted on November 1, 2006
RSS Feed