clipped from: www.commondreams.org   

Standing at the end of Avenida Madero (Madero Avenue) on the last day of January 2008, a stone throw from the Zócalo or City Center of Mexico City, I am swept along in a sea of thousands of farmers and laborers, carrying signs and banners. Streaming from the historic statue of the Angel of Independence, symbolically setting fire to a decrepit tractor, one hundred and fifty thousand small farmers, teachers, workers, and neighborhood activists are marching to repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and end the illegal “dumping” by Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto of billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidized U.S. agricultural crops–beans, rice, sugar, powdered milk, soybeans, and genetically engineered corn–onto the Mexican market.


NAFTA, pushed through in Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. in 1994 over the opposition of the majority of North Americans, is literally driving Mexico’s thirty million small farmers and villagers off the land and into the slums of Mexico City,