Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future [Hardcover]

But as you descend further and draw nearer you notice the rat maze of shacks covering the hillside along the valley and realize it looks like no other American city you have ever seen before. Then you grasp the reality.

The hillside is Mexico. The rat maze of shacks is a cardboard colonia. The city, of course, is Juárez. Charles Bowden calls it "the laboratory of our future," where free-marketers are loose to test the human and environmental limitations of money.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) just marked five years of no-holds-barred commerce between the US, Canada, and Mexico. According Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch "do-no-harm" test, the pact has failed in every respect.

"NAFTA at 5: A Citizen's Report Card" (12/98) shows failing marks in nine categories ranging from US job creation to economic impact on Mexico. In just five years, "Free Trade" has become synonymous with pollution, poverty, crime, and corruption. Now free trade simply means unfettered foreign investment anywhere that guarantees substandard wages and absolutely no environmental regulations; a place where capital moves freely and labor is held hostage.

All these places, writes Charles Bowden, "...are growing quietly like mold on the skin of the planet."

Nowhere is the impact of free trade more evident than in border cities like Juárez, and nobody understands better NAFTA's impact on Juárez than Charles Bowden. In Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, with its 100 disturbing photographs of death and despair, Bowden transforms our first-world dream of the future into a third-world nightmare of reality.

"Politicians and economists speculate about a global economy fueled by free trade. Their speculations are not necessary. In Juárez the future is over thirty years old, and there are no questions about its nature that cannot be answered in this city."

In Juarez, with essays by Noam Chomsky and Eduardo Galeano, Bowden reports on the disparate relationship between El Paso and Juárez at ground zero, and its compounding effect on the larger alliance between Mexico and the US. It is a sad story that first surfaced in an acclaimed article written for Harper's magazine a couple of years ago. Here Bowden wends his words around the poignant and often brutal images of thirteen Juárez "street shooters," a group of unknown guerrilla photojournalists who work for little more than film and the satisfaction of exposing the city's deep malaise.

Charles Bowden's powerful narrative and wry first-person style, combined with these photographs of human and environmental devastation, create a tormenting text. The free-traders in Juárez (US-owned multinational corporations) make no qualms about exploiting human labor for a profit, and their NAFTA boosters are quick to point to America's surging economy to justify its sordid history. To paraphrase Bowden, They reluctantly admit to the object, but steadfastly deny any subject or verb.

Today there are more than 300 foreign-owned factories (maquiladoras) employing over 200,000 Mexican workers, mostly women, who work 6 days/48 hours for about $9 per day. (Ironically, under NAFTA, the new jobs created in Juárez are almost equal to the high-paying manufacturing jobs lost in America.)

Americans routinely justify these substandard wages with a belief that the cost of living is less in Mexico. In reality, prices in Juarez are 85-90% of those in El Paso, only 50 yards away, where your average Texan earns ten times more.

But jobs and wages at ground zero are just the tip of the iceberg in the maquiladora economy. NAFTA's other promised benefits of prosperity and environmental cleanup have failed miserably. The treaty instead has exacerbated social decay and public-health problems on both sides of the border.

In Juárez the petri dish bubbles over with a toxic brew of evil elements that has poisoned an entire city. People seethe with fear of violent gangs, narcotraffickers, smugglers, corrupt cops, and now even US soldiers along the border to help keep NAFTA's mess contained.

"In Juárez," Bowden writes, "you cannot sustain hope."

The veracity of Bowden's thesis is born out by Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch report. Juárez stands as a scathing indictment of American free-trade policy.