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<h1><b>How “The NAFTA Flu” Exploded<br><br>
</b></h1><h2><b>Smithfield Farms Fled US Environmental Laws to Open a
Gigantic Pig Farm in Mexico, and All We Got Was this Lousy Swine
Flu</b></h2><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.narconews.com/Issue57/article3512.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.narconews.com/Issue57/article3512.html<br><br>
</a></font><h3><b>By Al Giordano<br>
Special to The Narco News Bulletin</b></h3><font size=3>April 29,
2009<br><br>
US and Mexico authorities claim that neither knew about the “swine flu”
outbreak until April 24. But after hundreds of residents of a town in
Veracruz, Mexico, came down with its symptoms, the story had already hit
the Mexican national press by April 5. The daily La Jornada
<a href="http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2009/04/06/index.php?section=estados&article=030n1est">
reported</a>:<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>Clouds of flies emanate from the rusty lagoons where the Carroll
Ranches business tosses the fecal wastes of its pig farms, and the
open-air contamination is already generating an epidemic of respiratory
infections in the town of La Gloria, in the Perote Valley, according to
Town Administrator Bertha Crisóstomo López.<br><br>
</i>
</dl>The town has 3,000 inhabitants, hundreds of whom reported severe flu
symptoms in March.<br><br>
CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, reporting from Mexico,
<a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/28/swine.flu/index.html">
has identified</a> a La Gloria child who contracted the first case of
identified “swine flu” in February as “patient zero,” five-year-old Edgar
Hernández, now a survivor of the disease.<br><br>
By April 15 – nine days before Mexican federal authorities of the regime
of President Felipe Calderon acknowledged any problem at all – the local
daily newspaper,
<a href="http://www.marcha.com.mx/resumen.php?id=2128">Marcha</a>,
reported that a company called Carroll Ranches was “the cause of the
epidemic.”<br><br>
<a href="http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2009/04/29/index.php?section=politica&article=004o1pol">
La Jornada columnist Julio Hernández López</a> connects the corporate
dots to explain how the Virginia-based Smithfield Farms came to Mexico:
In 1985, Smithfield Farms received what was, at the time, the most
expensive fine in history – $12.6 million – for violating the US Clean
Water Act at its pig facilities near the Pagan River in Smithfield,
Virginia, a tributary that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The company,
<a href="http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/135261f4d1edd40885257359003d4807/c7a68726816ff7b3852567ef0053e790%21OpenDocument">
according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)</a> dumped hog
waste into the river.<br><br>
It was a case in which US environmental law succeeded in forcing a
polluter, Smithfield Farms, to construct a sewage treatment plant at that
facility after decades of using the river as a mega-toilet. But “free
trade” opened a path for Smithfield Farms to simply move its harmful
practices next door into Mexico so that it could evade the tougher US
regulators.<br><br>
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect on
January 1, 1994. That very same year Smithfield Farms opened the “Carroll
Ranches” in the Mexican state of Veracruz through a new subsidiary
corporation, “Agroindustrias de México.”<br><br>
Unlike what law enforcers forced upon Smithfield Farms in the US, the new
Mexican facility – processing 800,000 pigs into bacon and other products
per year – does not have a sewage treatment plant.<br><br>
According to
<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters">
Rolling Stone</a> magazine, Smithfield slaughters an estimated 27 million
hogs a year to produce more than six billion pounds of packaged pork
products. (The Veracruz facility thus constitutes about three percent of
its total production.)<br><br>
Reporter Jeff Teitz reported in 2006 on the conditions in Smithfield’s US
facilities (remember: what you are about to read describes conditions
that are more</i> sanitary and regulated than those in Mexico):<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like
barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated
and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn
around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size
of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no
sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow
excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things
besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets
accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of
insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigsanything small enough to
fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain
closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good
expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out
into a large holding pond.<br><br>
<dd>The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety
degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with
gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous
exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems
function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down
for any length of time, pigs start dying.<br><br>
</i>
</dl>Consider what happens when such forms of massive pork production
move to unregulated territory where Mexican authorities allow wealthy
interests to do business without adequate oversight, abusing workers and
the environment both. And there it is: The violence wrought by NAFTA in
clear and understandable human terms.<br><br>
The so-called “swine flu” exploded because an environmental disaster
simply moved (and with it, took jobs from US workers) to Mexico where
environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced
against powerful multinational corporations.<br><br>
False mental constructs of borders – the kind that cause US and Mexican
citizens alike to imagine a flu strain like this one invading their
nations from other lands – are taking a long overdue hit by the current
“swine flu” media frenzy. In this case, US-Mexico trade policy created a
time bomb in Veracruz that has already murdered more than 150 Mexican
citizens, and at least one child in the US, by creating a gigantic Petri
dish in the form pig farms to generate bacon and ham for international
sale.<br><br>
None of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but,
rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the optimal
conditions for the flu to gestate and become, at minimum, epidemic in La
Gloria and, now, Mexico City, and threatens to become international
pandemic.<br><br>
Welcome to the aftermath of “free trade.” Authorities now want you to
grab a hospital facemask and avoid human contact until the outbreak
hopefully blows over. And if you start to feel dizzy, or a flush with
fever, or other symptoms begin to molest you or your children, remember
this: The real name of this infirmity is “The NAFTA Flu,” the first of
what may well emerge as many new illnesses to emerge internationally as
the direct result of “free trade” agreements that allow companies like
Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and environmental
laws.<br><br>
<br><br>
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