NAFTA's agribusiness competition caused Mexican flight to US
1994 was the year of the enactment of NAFTA, the so-called North American Free Trade Agreement, which, like others, has only a limited relation to free trade and is not an "agreement," at least if citizen s are part of their countries.
It was anticipated by rational analysts that opening Mexico to a highly subsidized US agribusiness production would sooner or later undermine Mexican farming, and that Mexican business would not be able to withstand completion from huge
US corporations that must be allowed to operate freely in Mexico under the treaty. One likely consequence would be flight to the United States, joined by those fleeing the countries of Central America, which had been ravaged again by
Reaganite terror in the 1980s. Therefore, the border had to be militarized. The imperative of protecting the country from the consequences of NAFTA and other such economic measures is far higher than protection from the threat of terror.
