NAFTA Implementation

The North American Free Trade Agreement entered force on January 1, 1994. For Mexico’s rural economy, its central effect was the removal of tariffs and supports protecting smallholder agriculture, above all corn. US corn exports to Mexico increased twentyfold; Mexican farm income from corn fell by roughly two-thirds; the number of corn producers declined by a third; Mexico’s corn import dependence rose from about 7% before 1994 to roughly 38% by the 2020s.

NAFTA is the hinge on which Mexican agrarian history swings from post-revolutionary smallholder protection to neoliberal displacement. The rural outmigration it produced fed the expansion of both the US-bound migrant labor force and the opium poppy economy of the Golden Triangle and Guerrero highlands — cultivated area of which grew from 5,000 hectares in 1995 to 32,000 in 2016. The Zapatistas timed their uprising to NAFTA’s first day, and recent narco-history reads the post-1994 countryside as one of the core conditions of the post-2006 violence.