Mexican tobacco growers: Economically shunned by industry, still used as lobbyists

Paid off by industry organizers, tobacco farmers traveled from across Mexico to the capital city in 2010 to protest a proposed hike in cigarette taxes. Carlos Pereda/Notimex

By Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab

About this project: Smoke Screen II

By Ricardo Sandoval Palos

10 hours, 51 minutes ago

In February 2010, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists launched a probe into the multinational tobacco industry’s lobbying and political practices in developing nations and emerging markets. In eight countries, reporters have followed connections between the industry and government officials who are tasked with protecting non-smokers and designing rules to curb the massive public cost of treating tobacco-related illness.

In Mexico, tobacco fields disappearing

By Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab and Emma Schwartz

In Mexico, the tobacco fields are disappearing and workers like Otoniel Rivera are struggling to find a way to support their families. Despite this decline, the tobacco industry is still playing the farm card in its attempts to thwart regulation from the Mexican Congress.

Harvested tobacco is strung along collars by workers and then hanged to dry before further processing. Bernardo de Niz

The tobacco industry finances social responsibility projects for tobacco families in Mexico, such as this day care for children of tobacco workers. Bernardo de Niz

No longer profitable, tobacco fields in Mexico now account for only 2 percent of farmed land in the country. Bernardo de Niz

Smoking percentage of each population. Stephen Rountree/Rountree Graphics

In October, in chaotic Mexico City, a small army of protestors, sporting placards and shouting into bullhorns, worsened the usual traffic snarl around San Lazaro, the nation’s congressional office complex. Television news accounts showed screaming-mad tobacco farmers, some of whom had boarded buses and traveled 500 miles to warn federal legislators that new taxes on cigarettes would put them out of business.

Inside, lawmakers were in a tug-of-war over a landmark excise tax law that eventually added about 50 cents to a pack of cigarettes and — anti-tobacco activists hoped — would make tobacco less attractive to consumers.

It was not the first time these farmers had traveled far to protest in Mexico. Like tobacco growers around the world, Mexican campesinos — farmers and farmworkers — for years have been deployed to send a message to the public and politicians: Jobs are at stake in the effort by public health advocates to eliminate tobacco ads and limit smoking.

As the global fight over smokers moves from the United States and other countries where tobacco consumption is on the decline, Big Tobacco has drawn a line around developing nations that account for an increasingly important share of their revenues. And, from Jakarta in Indonesia to Mexico City, farmers have been reliable street-level lobbyists in the industry’s fight against smoking limits. Farmers say they’re defending their jobs, even though experts insist that the buying habits of multinational companies have more impact on the fortunes of growers than anti-tobacco rules designed by the World Health Organization and public health officials who seek to shrink the human and fiscal costs of tobacco-related disease.

Between 2005 and 2030, 135.1 million people will have died worldwide in developing nations because of smoking-related illness, according to the World Lung Foundation. Tobacco consumption is the globe’s leading preventable cause of death.

In Mexico “the anti-tobacco campaigns didn’t hit farmers as hard as the companies’ global strategies have,” said Javier Castellón, a senator representing western Mexico’s Nayarit state, a swath of humid terrain once known as the Gold Coast because of the value of its tobacco crops.

To read the entire story click here

Mexico’s Corrosive Corruption

byShannon K. O'Neil

Mexico City traffic police inspect driving documents (Daniel Aguilar / Courtesy Reuters).

Nearing Mexico City’s airport on my way to Oaxaca with my husband and brother-in-law a few years back, we had an all too familiar experience. Amid the crawling traffic were eight or ten police officers, systematically pulling over every third or fourth car. Unlucky in the lottery, we duly stopped, half in the road, half up a curb. Our offense was not using our blinker to signal a lane change, even though we hadn’t, of course, changed lanes. After the requisite license showing, some hemming and hawing about having to go to the station to sort things out, and a few long silences, we asked what our ticket would cost, and if we could pay it here. Now more animated, the officer pulled out his black notebook and quoted a price based on a multiple of the minimum wage. After finally working the amount down to roughly $40, we put the pesos into his small notebook and were on our way. Just a hundred yards on, at the next light waiting to make our turn, another policeman approached our car, knocking on the driver’s window. My husband, exasperated at this point, rolled it down a couple of inches and yelled “Ya pagamos!” (We already paid). To which the officer, ever polite, replied “Gracias – buen viaje!” and headed off to talk to the next driver in line.

A recent study by Transparency International shows that it wasn’t just our Texas plates that led to this ritual. In the capital, as well as the states of Mexico, Tamaulipas and Querétaro those stopped by the traffic police pay bribes over 80 percent of the time. While these represent the worst, the national average is just under 70 percent (in only four states is it less than half of the time). To read the entire story click here

(Courtesy The Economist / Transparency International)

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