NAFTA...And Liberals

[malecki@xxxxxxxxxx (Robert Malecki)]

Forwarding the below to the list..
malecki

By Pete Carey and Esther Schrader
Mercury News Staff Writers

-----------------------------------------

As Mexico suffers through its worst economic breakdown in six decades,
millions of dollars in U.S. charitable aid to its people is being
squandered.

In a five-month investigation tracking cash, goods and services from U.S.
non-profits to Mexico, the Mercury News found an Alice-in-Wonderland world
where some groups resort to smuggling food and medicine across the border
while others ship junk by the truckload to people who don't want it. Useful
aid is stymied by cultural misunderstandings, Mexican red tape and
corruption.

The investigation also found that Mexico is driving away international aid
by proclaiming itself a ``first-world'' country above the need for charity.

No one knows exactly how much charities and non-profit groups spend in
Mexico. About a dozen of the larger charities looked at by the Mercury News
spent a combined $30 million in 1995. Estimates of total spending range to
$100 million.

The Mercury News questioned more than 70 U.S. charities, non-profit
organizations, church groups and foundations, and dozens of Mexican
non-profit groups and consultants. From Silicon Valley to the villages of
Chiapas, many charities do good works, many more try to do good works and
others are seeking ways to do better. But frequently they fail.

-- Some charities choose programs based on what is attractive to American
donors rather than on the needs of Mexicans.

-- U.S. non-profits and charities are seen their Mexican counterparts as
cash cows. Projects are ruined, abandoned or delayed because struggling
Mexican aid workers invent phantom programs or embezzle money.

-- Mexican officials commandeer valuable donated goods that wind up on the
open market or are distributed as aid from the government. Aid shipments
never reach their intended destinations and can't be traced.

-- Along the border, and in Mexico City, short-dated medicine given by U.S.
drug companies, charities and churches expires before it can be used. In
some cases examined by the Mercury News, there appear to have been
violations of Mexican law and U.S. Food and Drug Administration
regulations.

-- Groups collect surplus U.S. goods and equipment and then dump it in
Mexico. While corporations receive a tax break and charities boast of the
dollar value of these free ``gifts in kind,'' many inappropriate shipments
fill warehouses and hospital storage rooms.

``Truckloads of stuff flow across (the border), but the trucks are usually
not filled with the right things,'' said John Burstein of the International
Development Bank in Washington, D.C. ``It's good P.R., it makes Americans
feel good, but most of the stuff they are sending is not going to help
build a long-term viable organization in Mexico. The highest-impact kind of
support is from organizations that fight for the (political and economic)
rights of poor people, of indigenous people in Mexico.''

U.S. charities working in Mexico often put their energy into collecting
donations and religious converts or struggling for survival -- a mission
made even more difficult during the past two years of economic crisis.


ECHOS OF DEPRESSION

Seeming prosperity crashes in crisis

On Jan. 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement was enacted with
high hopes that it would cement Mexico's stature as a major trading power
and economic dynamo. But that same day, Indians in Chiapas rebelled,
reminding the newly well-off Mexico of its poverty.

A year later the over-valued peso and the economy had crashed.

The result: In 1995 the nation's economic output shrank almost 7 percent,
the sharpest economic contraction in 60 years. More than 2 million jobs
have disappeared. Eight million people have been dumped out of the middle
class. Working-class Mexicans have tumbled into poverty. Tens of millions
of the already destitute try to survive on even less, including the
kindness of strangers.

``The economic crisis has been devastating to ordinary Mexicans,'' said
Professor Harley Shaiken, a labor specialist at the University of
California, Berkeley. ``It equals and in some ways surpasses the Great
Depression of the 1930s. It has been devastating in terms of the number of
jobs eliminated and the catastrophic drop in real wages. The overwhelming
majority of Mexicans are not only worried about having their job tomorrow,
but whether they'll be able to survive even if they retain that job. ''

The crisis only intensified the already deep divisions within Mexican societ=
y.

``There are two Mexicos,'' said the Rev. Alberto Athia, director of Caritas
Mexico, whose agency is shutting its doors from lack of funding. ``There is
a very powerful Mexico with everything it could possibly want, and there is
a vast number of Mexicans who don't have access to the most basic parts of
life -- at least 20 million Mexicans.''

With many Mexicans working two or three jobs just to make ends meet, they
have neither time nor money for anything but survival. Mexican charities
have found it difficult to recruit volunteers or raise enough money to get
donated commodities across the U.S. border.

``The economy has gone down the tubes, and these different charities that
usually take care of the people, they are broke,'' said Blas Maynez of Los
Medicos Voladores (The Flying Doctors), a San Jose humanitarian group.

In Durango state, aid workers could not raise $6,000 to transport two
53-foot tractor-trailer loads of medical and dental equipment donated by
Los Medicos Voladores to a clinic in Gomez Palacio that subsists on
donations.

``This is probably the last load that's going down,'' Roberta Roads said in
early February as her group loaded the second trailer in the rain at a
North San Jose storage locker. In May, Los Medicos Voladores gave up on
Gomez Palacio and delivered the shipments to clinics on the border.


GOVERNMENT DENIAL

Refusal to admit need, stunts services

Despite this continuing flow of assistance, the Mexican government claims
that Mexico has outgrown the need for charitable aid. That denial has meant
that, unlike other needy countries, Mexico has never established a
government agency to help collect, regulate and sort the aid it receives.
It is easier to track aid to much less developed countries than it is to
Mexico.

Last year the government established a much-touted office to manage the
work of non-profit agencies. But the post, in the vast Interior Ministry,
isn't much: one bureaucrat with little understanding of charities or
non-profits in a remote, almost empty office.

``Foreign aid is useful for all countries,'' said the official, Guillermo
Ortiz, director of support for civil organizations. ``We know we have to do
better at making it easier for aid to enter Mexico.''

``In Mexico we are just, basically, trying to get to know the phenomenon
(of charity work),'' said Ortiz. ``In terms of laws, there really isn't
much to speak of.''

Despite more than four months of requests for data from the Mexican
government, authorities could not say how many domestic and foreign
charities work in Mexico, what they do or how much money they spend.

Worse, government statistics about the number of Mexico's poor and their
needs are scanty, outdated and conflicting.

No one can say with any precision what Mexicans' needs are or how they were
being met -- not the government or the World Bank, not researchers or the
charities themselves, and not oversight groups.

``It's almost impossible in Mexico to get figures on how much comes in,''
said Richard Walden, president of Operation USA, a Los Angeles-based aid
group. ``I can go to Vietnam and get a figure; it goes to the government's
relief ministry. In Mexico they don't have one. They pretend they don't
need relief.''


=46ALSE INDICATORS

Impression of growth turns charities away

Ironically, Mexico's image as a first-world economy and major U.S. trade
partner has been so well-established that some large charities have stopped
working there, shifting to other parts of the globe.

CARE no longer works in Mexico because the country's ``human development
indicators'' improved markedly two years ago -- just before the economic
collapse. Oxfam America works with many Latin American and Caribbean
countries, but not Mexico. Caritas Mexico has laid off 19 of its staff of
20 because of cuts from overseas donors.

``We don't want to walk away from any of our projects, but we don't know
what we're going to do,'' said the Rev. Athia of Caritas Mexico, surrounded
by packing boxes and quiet. ``We would like (the economic crisis) to not
affect our projects. We would like the projects to grow, in fact, because
the need is greater than ever.''

Next year the United Nations will close its World Food Program in Mexico
and in all other ``middle-income countries,'' said Torbin Due, the U.N.
director in Mexico. The program has been subsidized by U.S. Department of
Agriculture surplus.

U.S. food surpluses have dwindled, and in 1994 the Agriculture Department
program, which also supplied charities with food, ended for Mexico. An
Agriculture official said Mexico had ``graduated out of the food-needs
category'' with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement. It
continues to buy food through a commercial credit program.

This forced World SHARE (Self-help and Resource Exchange) of San Diego to
stop distributing USDA-subsidized food packages to 150,000 people a month
in 17 Mexican states. The organization replaced its food-aid program with a
much smaller food program in six cities that is struggling to gain
acceptance.

Meanwhile, there's a dire need for food this summer in northern Mexico,
which is suffering its worst drought in 43 years. Crops have been destroyed
and the Mexican government extended $1.147 billion in aid last month. In an
indication of growing hunger -- which is rooted in the low wages most earn
-- about 300 residents of a slum near Monterrey, Mexico, forced a train to
stop in late May and looted an estimated 40 tons of corn belonging to the
tortilla maker Maseca.

Throughout Mexico, U.S. charity groups encounter problems, from corruption
to misguided shipments of goods to government hostility. Many of these
groups work in dozens of countries and experience difficulties elsewhere,
but some problems are particularly troublesome in Mexico.

-- Mexican authorities have cracked down on the mercy missions of groups of
``flying doctors.'' In northern Mexico, U.S. doctors fly in without federal
permission to treat villagers, hoping the federal government won't boot
them out.

``Right now, we're going down to Baja because those (local) officials seem
to want us and aren't making us jump through hoops. I don't pay attention
to politics. I go down to examine eyes,'' said Dr. Richard Koleszar of
Monterey.

-- In Chiapas, a pastor complained that U.S. churches were shipping him
high-heeled shoes and brassieres for Indian women, who wear neither. What
they needed were bolts of fabric they could use to make traditional
clothing or the sandals they prefer for their children.

``I mean, can you imagine an Indian woman tottering around the fields in
high heels?'' said Pastor Abner Lopez, a Presbyterian minister with the
Consejo Indigena de Chiapas (Chiapas Indian Council). ``This stuff is
absolutely useless.''

-- At the Brownsville-Matamoros border, a church group that says it can't
get permits to legally import aid smuggles food, clothing and medicine for
families living in garbage dumps and on arid gulf islands. Another
missionary, Mark Rollins of Christ for Humanity in Tulsa, Okla., says the
situation has forced missionaries to become ``contrabandistas.''

-- In Mexico City, a Mexican charity wonders what to do with part of a $1
million shipment of medicine, including heart-transplant drugs, from a U.S.
charity. The medicine has expired and can't be used. It happened because of
delays in obtaining government permission and problems with the Mexican
charity that originally received it.

-- From Mexico's northern frontier to its southern flank, government
corruption has a firm grip on charitable efforts.


CORRUPT INFLUENCE

=46lood of donations ends up a trickle

The Rev. Jesus Castelazo of the Templo Evangelico (Evangelical Church) in
Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas, whose 7,000-seat temple opened in 1991, said the
Mexican state aid agency ``takes everything to their warehouse. But the aid
enters in one big flow, and it exits in drops. And we see the corruption,
we see people taking part of it for themselves.'' To top it off, Mexican
officials count and promote this appropriated charity as government aid.

Some Mexican and U.S. humanitarian workers -- especially those from small,
evangelical churches -- encounter similar problems with Mexican Customs
inspectors along the U.S. border.

Ray Arroyo, a Mexican pastor with the International Assemblies of God, said
that until he completed a difficult process and qualified as a Mexican
non-profit, he had to give part of his load to Mexican Customs officials.

``They'd ask for part of the cargo for them and they'd let it go, Arroyo sai=
d.

Yet beyond the government corruption, bureaucracy, trade deals and policy
shifts lies an inescapable reality: Inevitably, Mexico competes for U.S.
humanitarian help everywhere there is war, famine, disaster or genocide.

Mexico's Central American neighbors, with a tiny fraction of the population
of Mexico, but with the cachet of having been Cold War battlefields,
receive together more U.S. charitable aid than Mexico, according to Mario
del Carril of the World Bank's Latin America office.

And for many Americans, Mexico -- so close, so familiar -- lacks the
mystique of far-flung parts of the world.

``It's hard to get people to set aside the little amount of volunteer time
they have,'' said Mark Switzer, a member of Partners of the Americas, who
chairs a San Francisco-Mexico City project. ``It's much more exciting to
have an exchange with Russia, or sub-Saharan Africa, than it is with
Chihuahua, Mexico.''

=A91996 Mercury Center




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