Sexual Terrorism, Anti-Terrorism and the Global Economy. **
I was listening to the radio the other day and the nasal voice of President Bush came on in a report about his recent travels to Latin America, Peru and El Salvador and about his tooting the horn for free trade without borders. Meanwhile the photos of the places he visited showed heavy guarding and a careful effort to prevent any protestors from showing up at the front door.
Free trade is being touted as part of this administration’s agenda as an answer to the problems of world terrorism. A stronger global economy. Free trade, without borders, of course open borders for the investor, certainly not for the migrant laborer.
The selling of NAFTA to the Western Hemisphere through the Free Trade Area of the America seems inevitable. It will mean an expansion of the many duty free privileges for the investor as well as of provisions in the agreements with a right to prevent a government from enforcing any law or program that might interfere with the right of uninhibited (translate unregulated free trade. (Example – pollution controls; suit under NAFTA against the Canadian government; investors get to claim projected losses from the government).
Neoliberal economics frames NAFTA and will frame the FTAA and isat the root of the discourse by members of the economic focum in support of opening new markets for free trade throughout the world. It’s good old fashioned imperialism.
The Zapatistas put it well—the indigenous are global subjects and your program of global happiness doesn’t do much to preserve the differences of culture, identity and history and it seeks to destroy tmore of the lands upon which that history has been written. Certainly the elimination of the ejido system has to be one of the greatest crimes created by the Mexican government against its indigenous populations.
Yet the beat of the drum in favor of globalization goes one and it seems to be beating stronger since September 11th. Preceded by a downturn of the economy, the temporary plunge of the markets in the fall following September 11th marked more a slowing down that had more to do with a readjusment in the technology markets; everyday you hear more of the hopeful news that the recession is on a road to recovery. Meaning then that the global economy is definitely here to stay.
It does seem clear that an important agenda for the critical theorist and progressive is to begin to develop a coherent critical theory of globalization. If the global economy is here to stay how to we begin to speak of empowering her? So far the only countering discourse is seen in the protests against globalization which are met with repression of the voices of dissent. Therefore the marginalization continues of such global subjects as women, indigenous peoples and all working poor.
A majority of the new working poor in the globalized economy are female. Easily half of them are children. I happen to focus on women at the Mexican border. In interviews I learn how incredibly young they are when these women started working. 14 15. They are old and abuelitas when they are in their 30s. They are useless to the factory owners by the their mid thirties because they are filled with illnesses traceable to their exposure to toxicity in the workplace and because they are often wizened and harder to control than the impressionable youth.
I too was stunned at the rage that consumes a terrorist when I saw the WTC towers fall. I too wondered what kind of rage and hatred would impel someone to lose his life to make a point to a government he seeks to see destroyed? I tried to understand. I found my work on the situation of women workers in the maquiladoras suddenly silenced. But the lessons of history remind us that there have been other times of crisis and that crisis often invites rash judgment, reaction and poor decisions in the making of policy and law.
I do not see a happy answer to terrorism in the global economy. I will not be lulled into a sense of “we’re taking care of you” with news reports of the latest measures being taken for homeland security by the linkages being forged now between the CIA, the FBI, the Homeland Security Office, and the Secretary of State. I worry about the propaganda of national security that banks on the dominant anti-immigrant attitude which can be especially exploited with the image of a lurking terrorist in our neighborhoods, sending coded messages to linked computers that provide data of flight patterns or train schedules. It is the kind of rhetoric that
It is easier to accept – if we’re citizens we don’t have to worry; after all it’s them not us they want. It is this kind of thinking that created a host of new laws or amendments to existing national security legislation that present serious problems from the standpoint of civil rights and liberties. The Patriot Act allows
Sneak and peak of your e-mail, your telephone accounts, bank accounts and doesn’t require notice to you that you were examined.
The usual safeguards to protect our constitutional rights were simply given up in the name of national security, with no real sense that the new laws will in fact do any better of a job in helping us prevent terrorist activity.
It has not surprised me that maquildora workers who I stay in touch with through activist group connections in Mexico also lost their jobs in this economic recession. While Americans brought some of their gluttonous consumption to a halt in the fall, the workers that were affected in the maquiladora industry saw hunger, poverty and medical emergencies brought to a real crisis. While for the American it was a wake-up call to how many of those items do you really need to make you happy, to the maquiladora worker it was how will I feed my family now?
The maquiladora industry at the border pulses along with the American economy = expansion in the nineties meant a growth rate of exports that reached 24% in 2000, but only 6.9% by the middle of last year at the beginning of the downturn. Employment growth was at 12% in 2000, but only 3.1% by the middle of 2001. Of course all these figures translate into lost jobs for the workers who are the globalized subjects I am interested in.
El Financiero, just reported that 239,000 jobs had been lost simply in the maquiladora sector. When you’re talking about 1 million workers that’s nearly a 25% unemployment rate in that sector alone.
What does this actually mean to the workers? Workers in those factories already don’t have it so good – Miserly wage – about $35 dollars per week; Exposure to toxic chemicals; Lousy worker’s compensation treatment; Terrible accidents on the job; Workers develop sometimes life threatening conditions that are chronicNo adequate protective gear.
It’s hard to relate to this stuff; that’s why I collect stories;
I like to give people some sense of who we are talking about so it doesn’t stay too abstract. I’ll tell you about Irma Salvador a maquila worker and her husband Osvaldo who are maquiladora workers. Irma was among l85 workers who lost their jobs at a subsidiary of ALCOA in Ciudad Acuña, on the other side of Del Rio, Texas. The timing of the layoff was perfect for ALCOA. September 11th gave them an excuse to accomplish what they had wanted to do earlier- get rid of the workers who are seen as troublemakers because they dare to protest wages and working conditions. But it didn’t stop there with ALCOA. After they laid off some workers, a few got to go back and now the recession brought about by September 11th became the reason for cutting back on wages. The very thing that had made them troublemakers in the first place was their complaining about the fact that they earn non-living wages. Irma and Osvaldo have two children who are disabled; in fact how I met them was that through other activist groups an effort was made to get new wheelchairs for Lizette and Osvaldo. Because they have spina bifida and their surgeries to straighten their backs destroyed the ability to walk they will be in wheelchairs all their life. They had outgrown the wheelchairs which had also been donated by a humanitarian p roject that didn’t take the time to fit them to the bodies of a spina bifida child. I met them recently at a meeting with some people who are trying to get them wheelchairs fitted because their parents could absolutely never afford a new wheelchair for them. They are loved and clearly cared for. Their bodies are about the size of healthy children of age 5 or 6 at the most. Osvaldo was so debilitated by his last bout of pneumonia that he can no longer even sit up. The cost of a new wheelchair? $6-10,000 each for a decent one. Where would their parents ever get something like when they earn together about $50.00 U.S. per week in a border economy that functions at about 90% of the U.S. dollar.
So when you think about the global economy think about people like Irma, Lizette and Osvaldo and Osvaldo Sr. Because they illustrate what lies behind the answer to terrorism – reproducing a lifestyle that is profitable to the investors and their shareholder but inhumane for the global subject whose voice is not being heard. It is economic terrorism.
The roots of terrorism it is often believed, lie in the rage and despair that come from the wide gap between those who have and those who don’t. As the U.S.A. economic and governmental elites convince themselves that this culture is exporting freedom and democracy, or loans and financial aid only to those who tow the WTO line, they also have to engage in a denial over how much of what it has accomplished, whether in terms of economic growth or political democratic theory, rests on the foundation of cultural genocide, whether on Native-American soil here or on other parts of the Western Hemisphere.
I believe that has been point driven home by the Zapatista rebellion- you speak of globalization which translates into continued destruction of our culture and language, stealing once again our lands and imperialistic projects that are the multinational corporations. Subsidiary factories in Mexico, or the Yucatan region, or in South America or East Asia – they function the same – to attempt to homogenize culture, to pick and choose cultures and it will introduce to the global market but in the long run working towards the bilingualism of English and computer beeps per second.
These collective worries of mine, more globalization without a critical theory of globalism, globalized subjects remaining in their marginalized positions, homogenization of culture, loss of loss and the whole idea of anti-terrorism has had me thinking about another kind of terrorism – and that is sexual terrorism. And I do not speak here of the cultural oppression of women in Afghanistan and whose culture is more terrorist and another. I want to talk about the sexual terrorism that is a distinct byproduct in the Ciudad Juareaz (bordering El Paso) of the global economy of the maquiladoras.
First let’s talk about terrorism as a concept – terrorism is defined as the act of terrorizing; as a system of government that governs by intimidation; as a systematic effort to use terror to overthrow a government.
Our recent political focus is on the threat of this government in the hands of political terrorists. It is ironic when this nation and its foreign policies are thought as effecting other forms of terrorism throughout the world. How ironic indeed I saw it for the Bush administration to tripping down to El Salvador, a country that lost so many innocent lives to the terrorist activities of a government that our military trained and supported.
NAFTA also has nurtured a kind of sexual terrorism at the border. Because so much of the global economy thrives on the exploited labor of women , the body of the working poor woman is an important and neglected global subject who is silenced by our complacency and our commitment not to see what is happening to women day in and day out at the border..
The other day I read an article by a journalist assessing the work of brave photojournalists, some of whom document the findings of murdered women whose number scontinue to rise in Ciudad Juarez. On the front of that article was the photograph of a woman’s body that had been found in the desert. Her stiffened body preserved an open mouth screaming silently the name of her killer.
To me that photo epitomized the image of the global subject most wanted and most ignored in the fight against any kind of terrorism. The woman recruited for work in the maquilas are usually between 15-35. The women found murdered are 15-25. Hatred unleashed is terrorism. Misogyny, the hatred of women, unleashed is sexual terrorism and this is the counter –reality that accompanies all that talk about a happier and safer world forged by a global economy against global terrorists.
They like the women young. The terrorist who is murdering the women also likes them young.
They are kidnapped and raped sometimes shot and burned on their way to and from work.
This I find truly ironic and tragic. That an extension of the vulnerability of the young female body, which in the factories translates into – sweatshops working conditions, exposure to toxic chemicals, sexual harassment, non-living wages, the inability even to take a bathroom break when their bodies need it, lack of job security,
Lack of adequate safety gear, humiliating forms of pregnancy discrimination and spontaneous abortions effected by the long workdays and the toxic fumes, that an extension of all of that is another level of vulnerability. That a tired and hungry worker may begin her walk home or may get on a bus and may never get home at all.
The young bodies are expendable, and so are their lives.
Factory owners don’t care that they may have to get to the factory so early that it is not even light when they show up or that a production quota is so important that they must leave at ll or midnight and go home on public transportation or walk through unlit streets. Because the home they go to is a shack in a colonia that has no lighting and no public services.
What’s the problem here? The fact that so many young women whose bodies have been exploited for work in the factories, then become victims as they go to and from work of a vanishing phenomenon tells you something about the attitudes of the owners of those factories. An expoitable worker, expoitable bodies, whether for work, rape or crime.
In one year alone in the late nineties, 150 girls disappeared in the Juarez area. They stopped for a while around 1997 but the latest report I got of a brutal murder of a young woman happened just last November.
So why do we want to care about what is happening to the women in global economy as it is seen at the Mexican border? The stories of the oppression and the violence present you a future and attitudes about people that are just like us. My Abuelita and Mami worked in those kinds of factories. That give me some reason to want to pay attention to the subject at least from the perspective of my own personal history and values.
I think it is ironic that right at a point when we hear consistently how Latina/os are becoming this significant presence in the U.S. at our backs and our back doors people that look just like us are not respected, are paid low wages, are seen as expendable are just sweatshop laborers.
As that writer put it — the floor under the gore of Juarez and the murders of young women is an economy of factories owned by foreigners, mainly Americans. Ah but there is one more irony—the supervisors in those factories are often American citizens, and sometimes those 2-3 thousand managers are Anglo and white but sometimeis they are Latina/os in the U.S., and they commute back and forth from the U.S. border city and earn very nice salaries so they can have a microwave, and a nice big screen TV and put into the VCR that has no doubt been assembled by workers of his own race and ethnicity that put those items together for $5.00 a day and no benefits.
So these are the issues that concern me these days about women in the global economy. I hope they are useful to you in the conversations that you will be having today and tomorrow.
** Speech delivered at the national Chicana/o Studies Conference, Chicago, IL, March 28, 2002; Elvia Arriola, is professor of law and director for Women on the Border.