A century ago, the caretaker of the overcrowded cemetery in Guanajuato, Mexico, dug up a few unclaimed bodies to make room for new ones.
What he found astonished him: Minerals in the soil had mummified the corpses, preserving them in a grotesque leathery skin. The caretaker stored the bodies in a shed, but soon the curious were slipping him money to see them.Over the years, the shed evolved into the Museum of the Mummies, and to the tourists who came to view the preserved bodies in glass cases, one mummy stood out: that of a young woman who had been buried alive. Her arms and face were forever frozen in the horrific position of someone desperately trying to claw her way out to the air above.
"We have been that mummy," explains a prominent citizen of this mountain city in the heartland of Mexico. "And the earth that was thrown in on top of us was the United States and its horrible NAFTA agreement. Can we make it out alive?"
The individual, who spoke with our associate Dale Van Atta on the condition of anonymity, was trying to illustrate how the North American Free Trade Agreement has been viewed by many Mexican citizens.
Americans are familiar with the various arguments voiced by U.S. opponents of the agreement: The loss of jobs to low-paid workers, environmental degradation and so on. Many assumed that if critics thought it was a bad deal for the United States, it must have been good for Mexico. Not so, say many observers here.
In 1994, the first year of the agreement, Mexico's agriculture trade deficit with the United States climbed to $1.7 billion - meaning Mexicans were buying $1.7 billion more in produce from the United States than they were selling north of the border.
"So the first stage of NAFTA was a big defeat for Mexico," lamented Guanajuato Gov. Vicente Fox in an interview. "The jobs that we were supposed to be creating were created in the States, not in Mexico. All of our productive structure went broke, went into bankruptcy and we lost over a million jobs."
Fox, a fourth-generation rancher in the region, blamed the loss on former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the Harvard-educated politico who championed the pact and now faces financial corruption charges. Fox believes Salinas was too close to the United States and was giving American farmers advantages over his own Mexican farmers.
"We have the productivity, we have the yield, but we didn't have the president (Salinas) associated with the Mexican economy," he continued. "He was associated with the United States, because he studied there. So, we had to face that. Even myself - I had to import vegetables and apples from the States to market them here. I couldn't compete with American prices because of an over-valuation of 35 percent that (Salinas) applied to the produce."
Fox was plying a popular line - a strong strain of suspicion, hostility and fear of the United States that runs through the Mexican psyche. The fact that the U.S. government took almost half of Mexico's sovereign territory in the mid-1800s is surprisingly fresh in the minds of many Mexicans. There is a natural suspicion that American officials would only agree to NAFTA if it benefited America more than Mexico. The results of the first year of the agreement only intensified those feelings.
Last year, however, was a different story. Mexico went from a $1.7 billion trade deficit to a $260 million surplus in farm exports. But rather than cheers, this news was overshadowed by complaints about new safety requirements and restrictions on Mexican trucks coming across the border - provisions that were spelled out in the agreement.
The trucking issue, in particular, was of big concern to environmentalists and safety advocates in the Southwest, who worried about giant, triple-trailer Mexican trucks belching fumes and wreaking havoc on American highways.
Still, even enlightened Mexican officials view some of the rules and restrictions in a conspiratorial light.
"Now that we're winning the battle in the second stage," Fox notes, "now that we're exporting, that we have come closer to a true balance of trade in the second stage - now the U.S. finds new objections to our tomatoes and avocados, for example. It's not fair - it's not fair for the U.S. to always win, win. We have to be partners; we have to win both. Otherwise, NAFTA will never work."