The end of the Bracero program forced the United States and Mexico to develop new initiatives that would allow labor cooperation between the two countries. This alternative emerged in 1965 with the BIP (Border Industrialization Program) known in Mexico as the Maquila Program, which aimed at lowering restrictions and taxes on machinery and raw materials along the border in order to produce goods for export at low prices and to attract foreign investment. The BIP was leveraged by a Mexican infrastructure program called ProNaF (National Border Program) which was responsible for building roads and factories and providing border cities with parks, water and electricity to improve the situation on the border. The Maquila program made use of some of the factories built with ProNaF funds for its operation.
The most complete definition of the concept and scope of a Maquiladora is offered by Katherine Pantaleo, a sociologist from the University of Pennsylvania:
The official name for sweatshops in Mexico is “maquiladoras,” which can be defined as “foreign-owned assembly plants in Mexico [where] companies import machinery and materials duty free and export finished products around the world” (CorpWatch 1999). Eighty percent of the billion dollar maquiladora industry is owned by the United States and lies along the U.S.-Mexico border (Portillo 2001). Beginning in the mid-1970’s, the maquiladoras were designed not only to bring more wealth and employment to northern Mexican cities, but also to provide inexpensive labor to multi-national companies out of the country. In the words of Sheryl Lindsley (1999), “the maquiladora industry is representative of the international liaisons prevalent in today’s global economy.”
The idea of taking advantage of the “permeability” of a border, its threshold character, to filter machinery and export finished products paying reduced taxes and tariffs, that is, to build an economic exception, is not new at all. Its most common expression, from the point of view of consumption, are the duty-free shops that lie beyond emigration, that legal gray area that takes place at any international airport.
According to Canadian activist and author Naomi Klein, the concept of free trade zones is as old as trade itself, but she warns that these acquired “further economic significance during colonial times, when entire cities—including Hong Kong, Singapore and Gibraltar—were designated as ‘free-ports’ from which the loot of colonialism could be safely shipped back to England, Europe or America with low import tariffs.”2 From the beginning, empires like the British understood that colonialism is a form of territorial and political expansion as well as of economic conquest, a model that determines that military power is inseparable from mercantile power. What is new in the maquiladora model is that it is not only commercial processing but the very production of consumer goods that is happening in these places and, therefore, that production has suddenly moved into the realm of the exception. Thus, we should remember Agamben’s definition of camp as “the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule.” (7.26).
Leave a Reply