News: by The Other Journalism with the Other Campaign

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http://www.narconews.com/Issue40/article1634.html



Subcomandante Marcos Invites the Braceros to Go with Him to Meet Mexicans that Live and Work In the United States
Gatherings Set for June in Tijuana and Juárez: “The Other Campaign Is also on the Other Side”

The Other Journalism with the Other Campaign, Reporting from Tlaxcala


More than a thousand “ex-Braceros” – who once worked the fields and railroads in the United States, only to see their earnings stolen by the Mexican State – gathered today in Zacatelco, Tlaxcala with Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos. There they received a special invitation to go with him to Tijuana and Juárez in June to meet and listen to the word of those Mexicans who today live and work on “the other side.”

“The other campaign is not only in Mexico,” the rebel spokesman explained. “It is also on the Other Side.”

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They came from many parts of Mexico, but especially from the central farming regions: elder men in cowboy hats; gray-haired women carrying plastic tubs and clay vats of food; rice, beans, eggs, nopal cactus, chicken, beef, red and green salsas to be folded into hand-made tortillas of locally grown (non-transgenic) corn… Broad-shouldered, brown-skinned, beaten down for decades but never defeated, these men and women are of the age group that in gringolandia is referred to as “senior citizens.” Here they still chop the firewood, pick the crops, care for the grandchildren (whose parents, in many cases, left to do the heavy lifting from California to New York that North Americans don’t want to do), and on top of all that, they do something else: Organize and fight to change their country.

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What brings more than a thousand old folks across regions on a Monday to tell their story to a 40-something man wearing a black ski mask? And then to vow to accompany him to march in Mexico City? And later to say they will travel northward once more to join him in his fight?

It is a story that began in 1942 – but is clearly not over yet – when the United States entered World War II, and that nation’s young men stormed overseas to fight, leaving crops unpicked and railroads unfinished. The United States government decided it needed workers to do those jobs and made a deal with the Mexican government to import thousands of Mexican workers. That program – the legendary workers were known as braceros because they arrived in railroad trains with engines that burned coal embers, or brasas, that glowed red hot – continued through 1966.

As they worked the railroad and put food on North America’s table, ten percent of their salaries were withheld by the Mexican government with a promise they would be paid upon returning to Mexico. Some didn’t even know it because the contracts they had been told to sign were in English, and only found out about these monies owed upon returning home. Today, 64 years after the program began, they still haven’t been paid. In many cases, these men have already died and their wives and children continue the fight. The money owed amounts to billions of dollars. Bracero fighters have uncovered documents that prove that the Mexican government had received the funds and deposited them in the National Bank of Mexico (later to be known as Banamex, now part of the US-owned Citibank), then switched the deposits to other banks, in a shell game (perhaps a pioneering example of money-laundering) that denied these workers what they were owed. “That’s where the money is,” Marcos, indignant, told the workers and their families today. “It is yours and your ancestors’.”
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america is a crime scene

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