TEQUISQUIAPAN, Querétaro--It's been a long day. Community meetings for the credit union, talking with the campesinas about Hurricane Paulina and what the union members might do to support the victims. I'm almost too embarrassed to look the group in the eye as we mention monetary support, watching them standing round in the chill wearing every article of clothing they possess, old women wrapped to the eyes in rebozas and bent double with sixty years hard labour. We are in someone's yard - beautifully swept and tidy ready for the meeting, but stony, poor and empty. There are two chairs, and I, the foreigner, am sitting on one. Forty-two people, all women and children, stand patiently. What do they know about the hurricane? Not much - they live in a remote town in central Mexico where a newspaper, even if you could read fluently, would be a big luxury. People are dead, homeless, thirsty, contracting cholera - this much they know. The victims have even less than them, so they talk about fundraising. As they do, I do their banking on a rickety card table. Life savings 145 pesos, this month's interest 40 centavos. There's a hundred centavos to the peso, and about eight pesos to the U.S. dollar, which brings the interest to around 5c. After I hand back their books, they check the figures carefully, tucking the savings books back inside their shawls. The other workers hold up charts illustrating how the percentage of people living in poverty in Mexico is back up around 75%, as bad as it was in the mid-sixties, after a brief moment of hope in 1981 when thanks to the oil boom and Solidarity [government disbursement program-ed.] activities which provided cheaper food and services for the poor, the figure dropped to 47%. That is something worth commenting on here, a situation where less than half of all people in the country living in poverty is seen as miraculous. Is Mexico a poor country, then? asks the Union worker. No, respond the campesinas, Mexico is rich. Rich in natural resources, and in a human population desperate to work. So why are so many people poor? says the worker. Quien sabe, they answer - who knows? That's just the way the world is. It's the reason they are still here, trying to carry out some kind of subsistence agriculture while their husbands and fathers have left for the frontera , the U.S. or some distant foreign-owned factory. They are caught in the flux of a government policy which, dancing to the tune ordered by NAFTA, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, has pledged to reduce the rural population from 27% of the economically active population to 10% by the year 2000. Here is the economic logic: make it untenable for agrarian workers, who used to grow enough food for national self-sufficiency, to stay on the land. Absorb them into the growing industrial and service sectors, and then, with agro-industrial export earnings, purchase the country's food that the people used to grow themselves. Oh - one big difference of course - now they'll be a dependent workforce willing to agree to almost any conditions the companies, both national and transnational, might impose. They will work for less and less per hour, and if they form unions to protest they will be blacklisted and harrassed, perhaps even killed. They will work in toxic waste, in cement-floored sheds, in the blazing sun, in atrocious conditions. They will relinquish their land to vast corporations, and queue to work it again, only now for a minimum salary of 25 pesos a day. It will be cheaper for the companies to pay these peasants to work than it would be to buy machinery. This is where the men are, now. Why? Well, that's the way the world is, now. It's structural adjustment, the macroeconomic system. Sure, there's a hard decade or two at the beginning, but then the economic benefits of free trade and global deregulation will come pouring in. Just wait and see, the remote experts promise fervently, flourishing their blueprints. It's all here in the plan. It's globalisation, and wealth for all. Trust us. We're economists. * * * In the afternoon, we weigh members' children under five as part of our nutrition program. We match an age-to-weight chart, and decide who needs protein supplements, and who's just thin These are the five food groups, we say to mothers, holding up charts on which we've drawn fish and meat, butter, eggs, loaves of bread. They nod, watch the scales measuring their childrens' health with tightly-drawn faces, then go home to tortillas and beans. They nod and hug their children as we give out the food supplements, explaining their preparation, how it's better to mix them with milk than water. Yes, we understand, say the mothers, gathering their other children about them, shifting with weariness. I weigh thirty-five kids, knowing as I lift them into the scales that they are better economic indicators than any figures on paper, remembering the last breathtaking report I read by the World Bank that tried to find excuses for why the country's economic state wasn't behaving the way the projected figures promised it would at the outset of NAFTA. There seemed to be a few problems paying off the $13.6 billion trade deficit. And funnily enough, evidence showed that the free-market restructuring, analysed in 1994, seemed to actually increase poverty rather than alleviate it. The problem, said the experts, was no doubt due to "the substitution of foreign goods for domestically-produced goods." Hmmm. Wasn't this the very principle of the NAFTA agreement itself? And now it's the reason the whole thing's not working? Well, sure….but you're not an economist, you wouldn't understand the complexity of this kind of thing. We weren't wrong - it's a market distortion. * * * At the end of the day, I go to the class I "teach" a couple of nights a week to a local businessman who runs a wine and liqueur factory. He speaks fairly good English, but he wants help to understand the idiomatic language of business and entrepreneurship. We read an article from the Harvard Business Review. He pauses at a tricky concept. "What is "downsizing"?" he says. "It means getting sacked ." I say. "Laid off. Fired." "I see. And what about this: "profits going south?" "That means going down. Losing profits." He hesitates. "So "business moving south" means losing business?" "No. Business moving south means profits go up. Usually because of downsizing." "I see." It's a surreal exchange, one that belongs in a Tarantino film, which North Americans would watch and laugh knowingly at and comment on how satirical it was. The lesson becomes a discussion on economic development. "If there was a raw product available here," I say, "and you could buy it more cheaply from Brazil, what would you do?" "Import it from Brazil, of course." "And what if that meant that in a few years the local industry closed down here, so there wasn't a nationally-made market you could support, because it had gone out of business, so that you were forced to buy only from Brazil?" He shrugs. "Well, that's competition. That's the way the world is." I take a breath, ready to argue ethics, unemployment, the benefits of subsidies and the havoc wreaked by the dismantling of tariff barriers, the disasters visited on the environment, and endlessly on, then remember we're having an English lesson, and he is a businessman. "Well," I say. "Let's move on." * * * Driving home from the lesson with two other workers from the factory, we discuss the devaluation of the peso, which has happened that day. One of these workers is eight and a half months pregnant, and has been at work for twelve hours, standing up in a lab developing liqueur flavours that approximate the real expensive liqueurs imported from Europe. The other worker teaches English. Mexico has lost sixty centavos to the dollar in the devaluation, which seems like a trifle to a rich inhabitant of a First World country. But people here are making do on the very, very bare minimum of what it takes to survive; they can spare nothing. They are strained with anxiety at the news that the world monetary systems could hiccup again tomorrow. How volatile those markets are, I think as we drive. How incredibly precarious, unstable and arbitrary. How much faith we put in them. I tell my friend the English teacher the bad news that funding for the Australian volunteer program I am working on in Latin America has been cut in this year's budget. Commissioned to write a report on Australian aid expenditure was an ex-executive of Woolworths, who in recommending these cuts claimed that sending volunteer workers to Latin America just didn't offer the "durable returns" on the aid dollar invested that other projects "more in keeping with Australian trade agreements" did. Better to support mining and industry in Papua New Guinea and South East Asia, better to use aid money to offer business and corporate foreign interests an "enabling environment" in which to establish economic development, in the current climate of favourable globalisation. "It's economic cost-effectiveness masquerading as humanitarian aid," I say, depressed. "Yes, it's hard, and we all know it's wrong," says my friend. "But…that's the way the world is, now." Her face makes an apologetic grimace. "It's true," echoes the pregnant lab technician, almost passed out with exhaustion in the back seat. I'm exhausted, myself. I'm so tired of this, this chanting of the mantra of globalisation, as if we hope that if we say it long and hard and often enough, it will come true. Albert Speers worked on the same principle with truth. I'm tired of this litany of the faithful, swayed by the promises of people whose expertise is never questioned, who continue insisting that it's all being taken care of on our behalf, who shrug and fold up the figures and charts and lies and say well, it's hard, but there you are, that's the world. Who when things collapse will hire themselves out as consultants and pull out their next rabbit. The world is not out of our control, not yet. What we have lost is the ability to distinguish between what the people who want that control are insisting, and why they are insisting it. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, as Thomas Pynchon said, they don't have to worry too much about the answers. Ah, that's the world. It's all here in the plan. Really. Somebody else is pulling those strings, so what's the point protesting? May as well just get in for your percentage - it's human nature. That's just the way it is. Or is it just the way we allow it to be, obeying the new world order: sit down and shut up. Yet here in the heart of Mexico the myth of economic sustainability has one wheel off and a broken axle. [END]