Carlos Heredia is an influential Mexican civil society activist and academic who played an important role during the debates on NAFTA in the early 1990s. He has held senior positions within Mexico’s treasury department and the government of Mexico City and was a senior advisor for international affairs to Lázaro Cárdenas, the former governor of the State of Michoacán.

Carlos is an advisor to the Foundation for Democracy, a title he has held since 2000, and a founding and associate member of Comexi, the Mexican Council of Foreign Relations, where he co-directs the Binational Task Force on the United States-Mexico border. His expertise and experience with NGOs such as Equipo Pueblo and Iniciativa Ciudadana para la Promoción de la Cultura del Diálogo, among others, make him an important figure and leader in transnational activist movements.

EJA: Carlos, what are some of the most important things you have learned during your many years of transnational activism?

CH: First is that sharing citizenship does not equate to sharing a vision of the world, much less public policy proposals. In the traditional political system of Mexico, it was assumed that any international action of a Mexican had to conform to the Mexican government’s view of things. That is, sharing citizenship automatically translated into sharing the same vision of things.

When I participated in the [creation of] cross-border alliances between Canada, Mexico and the United States during 1992-93, it became very clear that this old-time view corresponded to a vision of a single party, in a closed economy, and became evident that this was something that could no longer be expected.

A second lesson closely linked to the first one is the fact that I was obviously much more in agreement, and I still am 30 years later, with my American and Canadian colleagues with whom we made alliances than with the Mexican negotiating team, whom I knew but [with whom I was] on politically opposed sides.

I found much more affinity in labour, environmental, social, and cultural aspects with the allies with whom I worked. I found rather important differences with the Mexican [NAFTA] negotiating team, which maintained a very orthodox position, and, to a large extent, I would say it was subordinate to Washington’s position.

Perhaps the third lesson is that, although we lost the vote in parliament and in the two congresses (U.S. and Mexican), two decades later, several of the approaches that we had put forward [on labour and the environment] had gained traction. Therefore, our proposals were fundamentally ahead of their time. The Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) recognized that labour and environmental issues were not parallel or complementary agreements but part of the central content of [CUSMA] instead.

In one of the memoirs of [former Mexican president] Carlos Salinas de Gortari, he mentions that we—the Mexican groups that were critical of NAFTA 1.0 and formed transnational alliances—were traitors to the homeland because we preferred to ally ourselves with foreign interests than support our government.

[However], over time, what we concluded was that it was not trade measures that were at heart being negotiated. A country project was being negotiated. A partnership project was being negotiated. A national project was being negotiated. A social pact, indeed.

Over time, of course, we realized that free trade agreements were a way to codify the kind of society that was sought. These treaties and negotiations ensured that whatever government was in the leadership, it would implement a policy that consisted of trade liberalization and the privatization of public enterprises and public goods.

EJA: During the negotiation of NAFTA, what was the role of civil society?

CH: As activists, we were focused on demands for social justice, inclusion, care for the environment and recognition of multicultural societies. We were defending the territories, the water, the public goods, the nature. We thought the treaty was going to undermine our societies’ ability to decide on their own futures…by promoting counterproductive policies in environmental matters, labour matters, and so on.

So, our role, as activists and popular organizations and social movements, was to fight for the society we were aspiring for. A society that does not privilege a small handful of people, namely the exporters. We outlined the kind of social contract that should exist.

As an academic, [I think] we did a very thorough job of critiquing structural adjustment, not only in the United States, Canada and Mexico, but with researchers from practically all over the world. We had a network of economists who helped us look at the same issues but from a different geopolitical perspective. The role of the academics with whom I was linked was basically to critique hegemonic arguments from a perspective of international political economy.

We participated in many international forums, and I systematically attended the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. We went to the meetings of the OECD, the meetings of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and other United Nations agencies.

We pushed for a recognition of Mexico’s comparative advantage regarding labour. However, at the time, the Mexican government refused to even raise the issue of labour mobility on the grounds that it would never be approved by the U.S. congress nor the Canadian parliament—although, as we later saw, this was not the case.

At the end of the 1990s, we began to propose that the problems of the three countries should be addressed from the perspective of widening economic, gender and racial inequalities, where the one per cent has most of the wealth and income, and keeps amassing it in an accelerated way, to the detriment of the rest of the population. This would mean that we faced common challenges.

Back in the early ’90s, the position of some of the Americans and Canadians was of solidarity with Mexico, which was the junior partner, the weakest, and the “underdeveloped.” But for us, the political economy approach implied that we needed to build joint answers to those common challenges.

The United States and Canada were also polarized societies, where the concentration of wealth and income was sharpening and where financial capital was causing that inequality to be perpetuated and become eternal. And this remains [true] today too.

EJA: Carlos, what are you working on now? What are your next goals?

CH: I am preparing a piece in which I discuss how comfortable it is to say that violence, the climate crisis, and even political crises are the root causes of migration when I think that extractivism and its predatory economic model are the main roots of migration.

The promise of NAFTA 1.0 was that wages were going to converge and that there would no longer be northward migration because NAFTA would create many jobs, and everyone would stay in their home country. It turns out that the predatory model that reproduces this violence, this systemic violence, has expelled a huge amount of the population.