Film Description

This video examines the impact of corporate globalization on Mexico, focusing on the maquiladoras, U.S.-owned factories employing cheap Mexican labor. Archival footage and interviews provide historical background to the present crisis, involving the displacement of peasant farmers who migrate to northern border cities such as Juarez and Tiajuana, where they endure dangerous working conditions in the maquilas for starvation wages. The film also reveals other aspects of the present crisis, including the environmental disasters generated by these factories, their unsafe environment, which has resulted in an unsolved series of brutal rapes and murders of young women employees, and violent rural confrontations between the Mexican Army and Mayan peasant farmers as part of the government's efforts to suppress the Zapatista rebellion. The video features interviews with workers, factory managers, government officials, army officers, indigenous peasants and economists.