Economic crisis reaches the pockets of Mexican migrants (Feature)

By Alejandro Ruiz Mar 11, 2009, 2:04 GMT

Teopisca, Mexico - Before the financial and economic crisis broke out, Abelardo Lopez, a peasant from the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, worked as a gardener at a golf course in Phoenix, Arizona.

He earned 10 dollars an hour for mowing and watering the lawn, and for assisting people who took part in golf tournaments. In the middle of the ongoing global recession, however, he was handed over to the authorities for deportation alongside 70 other Mexicans.

'Everything was fine until the bosses told us that there would no longer be any work, because of the economic crisis, and that we had to return to Mexico,' the peasant told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in his native village of Teopisca.

'The employment situation for immigrants is very difficult in the United States, and their own bosses are deporting them,' he said.

Teopisca is a small village in the area known as Los Altos de Chiapas, 100 kilometres east of the state capital, Tuxtla Gutierrez.

The US crisis has forced thousands of workers to return to their hamlets in Chiapas and other parts of Mexico, and it has also caused an unprecedented drop in remittances, the money that migrants send to their families back home.

According to the Bank of Mexico central bank, remittances fell by 3.6 per cent in 2008, to 25.1 billion dollars. Never before - since 1995, when the count was first made - had remittances stopped growing.

Remittances plunged, particularly towards the end of the year: by 10.8 per cent in November and by 9.8 per cent in December. Mexican authorities and international organizations alike predicted that this trend would continue in the coming months.

'Now that I am here, I am going to see what I can do to provide for my wife and my three children, but I see that here too there is no work and the situation is critical,' said Lopez, who is about 30.

Lopez said that in Arizona the authorities carry out raids on immigrants in workplaces and on the streets.

At a telephone booth in Teopisca, as he awaits his turn to get in touch with friends he left in the United States, Lopez says he plans to use his savings to feed his family while he finds a job. Soon he is set to take part in the corn and bean harvest in Nuevo Leon, a small hamlet near Teopisca.

For him and many other migrants, the American dream has vanished, and when they return to Mexico there is not enough work to go around. Since November, some 500,000 formal jobs have been lost across the country.

With mixed feelings - happy about being with his family but also sad and frustrated about his job - he says he hopes things will get better, so he can return to the United States.

The thousands of returned migrants who have been able to find jobs closer to home are now working in agriculture, construction and informal trade in Chiapas. When hired, they get tiny salaries for more than 12 hours of work, with no social benefits.

Felipe Arizmendi, the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Cristobal de las Casas, called upon these returned peasants to form agricultural cooperatives and to go to other parts of Mexico in their search for work.

'There are solutions, but you need to look for them, you need to get organized, because one person alone cannot manage, communitarian organization is a very important alternative,' he said.

Jorge Lopez Arevalo, an economist at the Chiapas Autonomous University, told dpa that migrants from Chiapas started to lose their jobs in 2007 due to a slump in the construction sector in the United States. The recession has hit the construction and manufacturing sectors in the US economy particularly badly, and it is in those sectors that Mexican workers have a particular weight.

For Chiapas, 2006 was the best year in terms of remittances. Its migrants sent home 824.5 million dollars, a figure that is higher than the state's total annual agricultural production. The following year remittances amounted to 779 million dollars, while in 2008 they fell to 702 million dollars.

Lopez Arevalo said the drop in remittances makes indigenous hamlets and the families of migrants particularly vulnerable.

'Some progress that may have been made in the fight against poverty is lost,' he said. To bring the point home, Lopez Arevalo explained that, for years, remittances 'have done more than all the social policies of the Mexican government.'