The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is a real danger to all the people of the hemisphere, but it is not particularly new. Thus I would like to address certain historical and cultural issues that are necessary to understand the danger posed by the FTAA now. In my remarks I will focus on Mexico and the United States, first of all because that is what I know the best, and, second, because the Mexican case can be seen as emblematic of a more general Latin American experience. For the purpose of today's discussion, I will define history simplistically as the chronicling of an ongoing process of human undertakings that needs to be understood to make sense of current dilemmas. I will likewise define cultural analysis as necessarily intercultural since all cultural analysis is implicitly or explicitly comparative. I will define culture as involving differences, as in the differences between Senegalese and French cultures, and as being hierarchical, since powerful groups continually seek to impose their cultural models on the less powerful. In the world of 2003 the cultural model of the powerful is that of the U.S. elites, white, male, upper class, English-speaking, and convinced of the universality of their interpretation of the "American way of life." Finally, I will focus on two terms, annexation and the development of underdevelopment.

Annexation

At least since the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, U.S. elites have devised various plans for annexing Latin America. In the case of Mexico, the annexation was carried out by military means in the 1847 invasion known as "Polk's war," an imperial adventure opposed by Abraham Lincoln on the floor of the U.S. Congress. In the Treaty of Guadalupe of 1848, the U.S. acquired over 50% of Mexican national territory, including California where, in 1849, the Gold Rush began. The United States also acquired Puerto Rico as a colony at the end of the so-called Spanish-American War in 1898 when it also guaranteed its right to intervene in the internal affairs of Cuba through the Platt Amendment of 1903. U.S. military interventions were frequent throughout the twentieth century and continue today, as in the case of Colombia. Throughout our common history, U.S. elites have considered it their right and responsibility to impose their political and economic will, as well as their cultural model,throughout the hemisphere. I shall cite but two examples:

President William Howard Taft in 1912:

The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally. (Cited in Jenny Pearce, Under the Eagle, Boston: South End, 1982, p. 17.)

Sixty years later, Lawrence E. Harrison in Underdevelopment is a State of Mind (Boston: The Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 1982):

From May 1962 to March 1982, I worked in the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), specializing in Latin America. . . . Like many young people who worked for AID in the early years of the Alliance for Progress (. . .), I was convinced that Latin America was in trouble principally because of U.S. neglect, and that a combination of money, Yankee ingenuity, and good intentions would transform the region to one of rapidly developing vigorous democracies in a decade or two. After all, we in the U.S. shared the hope and the wealth of the New World with Latin America, we gained our independence at roughly the same time, and their constitutions and rhetoric sounded pretty much like ours. They hadn't done as well as we, but that could be remedied. The spectacular success of the Marshall Plan was much on our minds.
. . . .
[Since then] I have been increasingly persuaded that, more than any other of the numerous factors that influence the development of countries, it is culture that principally explains, in most cases, why some countries develop more rapidly and equitably than others. (xv-svi).

Although by 1982 it would have been politically incorrect to use Taft's racist expression, then and still now U.S. elites consider their culture to be superior to the cultures of Latin Americans and, therefore, they consider it their right to impose their will on the "inferior" neighbors to the south.

The Development of Underdevelopment

According to the language of common parlance, the world is divided between economically developed countries (for example, the European Union, Japan, the United States) and economically developing countries (more or less those referred to as "Third World," including Mexico and the rest of Latin America). This model is incorrect insofar as it suggests that "developing" countries will someday become developed. In the 1960s this model was expressed through the metaphor of an airstrip along which developing countries would proceed until they "took off" into development. This metaphor, relatively accurate in the case of the United States in the nineteenth century, is misleading when applied to Latin America and, concretely, Mexico, one of the most "developed" (i.e. industrialized, in this case) of the Latin American countries. I have been working in Latin America for thirty years, and I have yet to find a developing country. To the contrary, I have found repeated cases of the development of underdevelopment. Simply stated, development and underdevelopment are neither linear nor separate phenomena. Rather, they are two poles in the world capitalist system, and economic development occurs at one pole at the cost of economic underdevelopment at the other.

Let me remind you that I am overgeneralizing and simplifying, and that each case needs to be studied in terms of its specific conditions, and the model is just that, a model, an accurate model that a brief look at the last 500+ years of the history of the Americas since the arrival of the Europeans will validate. Let's compare Mexico and the United States.

When the Spanish conquistadores arrived in what is now Mexico in 1519 they encountered a highly developed indigenous civilization. The Aztec empire was vast, and Tenochtitlan, the site of Mexico City, was one of the world's largest and greatest cities. Cortez's troops commented that it was the most splendid city they had ever seen, and many of them had been to Rome and Constantinople. They also found silver, a great deal of silver, and thus the cycle of the development of underdevelopment began. The Spaniards destroyed the indigenous economy (primarily agricultural and self-sufficient) and the theocratic political structure. In their place they established an economy based on the export of a natural resource, primarily silver, and turned the indigenous peasants into virtual slaves in the encomienda system; the workers worked hard and died young. At the same time, finished goods for the elites were imported from Spain, and potential local producers were prohibited from competing with their Spanish counterparts. The Spaniards put a viceroy in the place of the Aztec emperor, and what used to be tribute to the emperor was turned into a centralized system for getting the silver to Spain. They also tried to impose their religion on the natives. In the center of Mexico City this imposition of a social and cultural model is clearly illustrated. The colonial baroque cathedral was constructed on top of the Aztec main temple, and tourists visit them both at the same time. The National Palace was constructed on the site of Montezuma's palace. Since the arrival of the Spaniards this pattern of the development of economic undevelopment has continued through independence in the nineteenth century, the Revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century, and through NAFTA. Thus the FTAA, with its focus on "export oriented growth," and the imposition of the "American way of life" is but the latest episode of a five-century old story in Mexico.

On the other hand, when the Pilgrims arrived in what is now the state of Massachusetts in 1620 they found no silver. Instead they found Plymouth Rock, not exactly an exportable resource. The families that arrived planned to stay unlike the conquistadores who sought to get rich and return to Spain, and they were left relatively free to develop an economy based on small farms and manufacturing. In contrast, the lords of New Spain ruled over large and inefficient estates. New Spain was born rich and important, and Mexicans are still paying the price of this cursed birth. New England however, was born with little to export, and, after the American Civil War in the 1860s, that model prevailed and the U.S. industrial takeoff could begin. In Mexico, on the other hand, the elites were still fighting over control of the land, and no industrial takeoff was in sight.

Resistance

The other part of the story involved in this five-century narrative is the native resistance, from Cuautemoc through Emiliano Zapata to the Zapatistas, the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional. Many people in the United States will recognize the name of the Aztec emperor Montezuma, but few know who Cuautemoc was. Yet, in Mexico Montezuma is reviled for almost literally giving Cortez the keys to the city. It is another Aztec emperor, Cuautemoc, whose statue stands at the main crossroads in Mexico City and whose figure, with his feet being burned by the conqueror, is honored in a mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros in the national Fine Arts museum, and many Mexican boys carry his name, including the progressive political leader, Cuautemoc Cardenas. You see, Mexicans learned about the dangers of foreign interventions early on. Emiliano Zapata is the one leader of the 1910 revolution still revered throughout the country. Sightings of Zapata are outnumbered only by those of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and probably most Mexican families have boys named Emiliano, including the son of the former president and signatory of NAFTA, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, now more reviled in the country than even Montezuma. You are all familiar with the Zapatistas. Their name indicates their political lineage, and they are making their presence at the current FTAA protests in Cancun felt. Let me just remind you that they rose up in arms against the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect, and resistance to NAFTA went right along with their rebellion against a corrupt and authoritarian state apparatus; the Zapatistas recognized that their issues arose from the destructive use of economic and political power by foreign and local elites. Their rebellion was probably the major cause of the political reform of 1996 that provided the opportunity to have relatively clean elections much cleaner, at least, than in Florida, and for the opposition to score significant electoral victories in 1997 and then in 2000. Ironically the conservative Vicente Fox owes his victory in the 2000 presidential elections to the zapatistas.

As the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and NAFTA have clearly demonstrated, the elites throughout the Americas and the world have been using the neoliberal model to impose their will, to impoverish and weaken the human majority throughout the world, and to destroy the planet, at least since the beginning of economic structural adjustment in 1982. That majority has begun to rebel, and there are many examples of successful resistance in Mexico. For the good of humankind and the planet we must continue.