The Death of Ramon Gonzalez and the 21st Century Dilemma

Globalization on the Tomato Trail, follows Oaxacan women migrants through Mexico,
the United States, and Canada. xx In Culiacan, a greater share of the labor force now
comes from Guerrero, Chiapas, and Central America, where rural crisis sends out a
stream of people who are more desperate and less-experienced in finding work and lesswell
supported by formal and informal migrant networks.
Continuing problems of pesticide abuse
As we will discuss in more detail below, some people had expected that NAFTA
would result in major changes in pesticide regulation and practice. Those opposed to
NAFTA argued that it would result in the lowering of regulatory standards in the United
States. Proponents of NAFTA maintained that the opposite would occur: NAFTA would
tend to bring Mexican regulatory standards closer to those of the United States. As I will
discuss later, the effect of NAFTA on pesticide regulation has been modest on both sides
of the border, though, as we will see, Canadians have cause for complaint that NAFTA
has dragged Canadian standards down to the laxity of U.S. standards.
The problems of pesticide use in Mexico documented in the first edition have
been shown to be a continuing and pervasive problem, before and after NAFTA. All
indications are that farmworkers in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America have
continued to face the kind of dangers from pesticides and other forms of abuse that they
did during the field studies undertaken for the first edition of Ramon Gonzalez. Douglas
Murray, a sociologist and occupational health specialist, published Cultivating Crisis:
The Human Cost of Pesticides in Latin America, that demonstrated the severity of
damage done to farmworkers by heavy, uncontrolled pesticide use. Working primarily in
Nicaragua, his study benefited from the ability to work under a Sandinista government