Endeavors magazine: Bordering on atrocious

On the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, houses are made of anything people can drag away from local factories and dumps: pallets, cardboard boxes, rusted car hoods. People use kerosene, candles, and jerry-rigged electricity to keep warm. Fires are a constant threat. Unregulated dumping in the Rio Grande has contributed to birth defects that are rarely seen elsewhere.

“You can see what people have to do to survive in these conditions; you’re bound to have an unraveling of the social fabric,” Deborah Weissman says. Specializing in immigration and gender violence law, Weissman was drawn to Ciudad Juárez after a burst of violent crime in the 1990s.  

Weissman sees a link between the situations in cities such as Ciudad Juárez and NAFTA. The trade treaty, in combination with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, resulted in a shrunken public sector: the police academy in Ciudad Juárez was shut down, for example. Mexico’s consumer-protection laws were weakened under pressure from foreign investors.

Changes to labor laws undermined Mexico’s once-progressive workers’-rights protections. “Transnational corporate management made efforts to teach Mexican counterparts how to break unions, how to deny workers’ rights,” Weissman says. Land-use laws changed and farmers were suddenly thrown off land their families had worked for generations, while subsidized corn flooded the market. “A lot of farmers started to grow what they knew they could sell, which were drug crops,” Weissman says. As the saying goes, drugs kept going north, guns kept coming south.

In response to rampant drug cartel violence, the United States signed the Mérida Initiative in 2008. Weissman fears that this could be rubbing salt in the wounds. The initiative promises four hundred million dollars of aid to militarize the Mexican efforts against drug violence and terrorism. Most of the money will go to equipment, helicopters, and military training. “But a percentage of the funds is supposed to go to judicial reform and some legal experts think that this is about reforming a legal system so that it works for foreign investment just as much as anything else,” Weissman says.

She wants to follow the Mérida Initiative’s influence on legal reforms and how it affects everyday citizens. An example is legislation Mexicans refer to as the Gestapo laws, which expand police authority and violate civil rights by allowing warrantless house searches and extending holding time for detainees.

These laws, Weissman thinks, are an example of U.S. interests being woven into Mexican legal reform without addressing the roots of social problems. Violence and the drug supply continue untouched; the militarization of the war on drugs has made it easier to quash social activism. “A number of labor activists have disappeared or been murdered,” she says.

“You can’t just say, ‘We want accountability for crimes, we want an end to drug violence,’ without thinking about how these situations come to pass,” Weissman says.

Beth Mole is a doctoral student in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the School of Medicine.

Deborah Weissman is the Reef Ivey II Distinguished Professor of Law and director of clinical programs in the School of Law.