Broadening the View of Crimes Against

Broadening the View of Crimes Against

Humanity in the Modern World

Generally, when most think of a crime against humanity, the most common synonym is genocide. Kosovo, Cambodia, Sudan, and Poland are all instances when genocide occurred and the public rightly labeled these instances as crimes against humanity. Within our modern world there are means other then the preconceived notion of genocide to systematically remove a specific group from their rights as humans. Using the relations between Mexico and the United States as an example, the need for a broadened interpretation of human rights violations will be established.

On January 1st 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. The purpose of NAFTA is to reduce and eventually erase trade barriers, allowing the importing and exporting of goods and services to occur with ease. NAFTA began life as an agreement between the United States and Canada, and then in 1992, Mexico joined the venture. The union of these countries made sense, mainly because of their proximity to each other, and the benefits that each would soon come to realize. Some of the key contents in the NAFTA agreement include a removal of tariffs on goods, protection of intellectual property, and easier access to invest in foreign industries. These new trade agreements would increase the flow of cheap goods from Mexico to the U.S., thus lowering cost of living, and create higher paying jobs for the indigenous Mexican workers (Chomsky).

The generally conceded fact is that NAFTA didn’t work. Ten years of NAFTA has resulted in over 1.5 million Mexican farm livelihoods destroyed. For the Mexican government to take advantage of NAFTA, certain concessions were required by the United States government. The most disturbing of these is the removal of the right of the poor and indigenous to collectively own land. A 1917 constitutional amendment guaranteeing this right would have to be abolished to make way for the influx of American agro-business into Mexico.

The flooding of the Mexican economy with low-priced American agro-business resulted in a reduction of the prices paid to indigenous workers by 70 %( Chomsky). Lacking the ability to earn a living, millions of Mexican farmers were forced into the cities to find work. Unfortunately the jobs in the cities were almost as scarce. Formally government owned industries were sold off to the highest bidding multinational conglomerate. These multi nationals in turn begin to downsize the actual number of Mexican workers, favoring the more modern use of animatronics. Millions more Mexicans were out of work than before the inception of NAFTA, and this oversaturated work force allowed employers to offer jobs at extremely low pay with no benefits. After the inception of NAFTA, the average wage dropped from $5 a day, well below a living wage, to $4.

But what does this all have to do with human rights? The declaration of human rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, states that “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person (U.N.)”. The North American Free Trade Agreement has done much for the wealthy Mexican upper-class, but little for the general population of Mexico. In his book, Profit Over People, Noam Chomsky reveals that “In the past decade of economic reform, the number of people living in extreme poverty in rural areas increased by almost a third. Half the total population lacks resources