For too long, debates over international trade have been dominated by corporate elites and economic ideologues, rather than rooted in the experiences of ordinary Americans. 

The Trade Stories Project allows people who have been affected by policies and institutions like NAFTA and the WTO to share their views on a matter crucial to the global economy. 

This includes displaced workers, farmers, small business owners and immigrants who have been typically excluded from the trade debate.

Luz Rivera

Nicolas Bravo, Tlaxcala, Mexico

Luz lives in the rural, farming community of Nicolas Bravo in central Mexico.  She, and others in her community, discussed the impact of NAFTA on crop prices and the ability of small farmers to take out loans. 

Prior to NAFTA, farmland in Nicolas Bravo was communally owned under the ejido system.  Families worked individual plots, and could effectively pass them down from generation to generation, but could not sell the land.  Under this system, farmers could obtain small loans needed to plant their fields simply on the promise of future crops.  That has changed since the government’s PROCEDE process has encouraged communities to privatize ejido lands.

Hear part of Luz and others' stories...

“One of the primary impacts of NAFTA has been the reform of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution.  This implied the dismantling of the ejido system.  What are the implications, for example, in the PROCEDE program, which divides up the land formally? …

“We refuse to enter the PROCEDE process and view it as the next step in taking our land away from us.  We’ve seen in this community, as well as in other communities, that when people are part of the PROCEDE process and they ask for a loan, and then cannot pay back the loan, not because they are lazy, but because they absolutely don’t have the money to pay back the loan, they lose their land. 

“Small farmers continue to produce on the land for their own consumption to survive, but it is no longer possible to gain income from the land.  We no longer have the conditions to do so.  It costs us too much to invest in the land, and we don’t get back enough.

“There have been people who have sold their parcels of land in order to pay organized crime figures who act as coyotes to get them across the border to the United States. 

“So we see the constant dislocation of people from their lands.  For instance, there is a project coming up where the state governor is pulling together ejido lands in order to offer them for the production of an oil refinery plant.  There was a case where Carlos Slim built a highway, and kicked people off of their lands to do so.  So we see the constant dislocation of people from their lands, and it doesn’t matter which political party is involved.  All the parties do it.

“We have a woman here who put up her house as collateral so that she could get fertilizer to plant her land, and now the bank wants to take her house away from her.”