COLUMN LEFT / JAVIER RODRIGUEZ : Latinos Are Selling Out on Free Trade : Mexican-Americans, especially, will be the losers for buying Mexico’s appeal to sentiment.

According to polls done by La Opinion and Univision, the Mexican population in the United States--both native-born and immigrant--overwhelmingly supports the North American free-trade agreement. This is not surprising. With few exceptions, the Latino media, businesspeople, political leaders and organizations have sympathetically lined up behind the effort. Opposition is minimal and primarily relegated to trade unionists.

The Mexican government has done a masterful job of marketing the free-trade agreement in our community, appealing to patriotism and solidarity to help our mother country make a leap into the First World. (More than 70% of Latinos in the United States are of Mexican heritage.) And, of course, there is the promise of mutual benefits, such as business opportunities for Mexican-Americans that will mean jobs for our Mexican cousins.

Hardly anyone is looking at this critically. Free trade is being pushed by the three most pro-big-business administrations we have seen in the United States, Canada and Mexico in a long time. That alone should tell us enough. The masses will only serve to fatten the coffers of the elites.

Any Mexican-American who expects our lot to improve under this agreement only has to look at who has done well under the three administrations that are negotiating it; then look at recent reports on social and economic conditions in Mexico and among Mexicans and other Latinos in this country. It is a grim picture.

In the United States, Latinos have the highest unemployment rate and the highest rate of communicable diseases. We have even become No. 1 in the prison population. In Los Angeles, the second Mexican capital, the school dropout rate for Latinos is around 50%, and the school district is close to bankruptcy.

As with the rest of the U.S. population, our plight has a direct link to corporate flight, which puts profits ahead of people. Life here has been brutal, to say the least. This is the legacy of the Reagan-Bush era.

On the other side, in Mexico, conditions are even worse. After 1982, when Carlos Salinas de Gortari took over management the economy under then-President Miguel de la Madrid, the purchasing power of Mexicans decreased by 50%. With Salinas as president, the decline has continued. Mexicans now consume 70% less protein (in meat, poultry and fish) and 70% more vegetables, beans and tortillas. What a way to become a vegetarian!

Full-scale implementation of Salinas’ neo-liberal economic policies has been accompanied by rampant violations of human rights in Mexico. The 1991 human-rights studies by the prestigious Americas Watch and Amnesty International show an increase in torture, persecution and political assassinations. One of the most prominent is the still-unsolved murder of Sinaloa’s human-rights leader, Norma Corona Zapien.

It is nonsense to think that free trade will change the trajectory of justice, economic or otherwise.

Canadians have had a free-trade agreement with the United States for two years and their experience has not been pleasant. Canada has lost almost 300,000 high-wage industrial jobs to corporate flight to lower-wage areas in the States, and this has had a downward pressure on all Canadian wages.

Mexican-American leaders and organizations in the United States pretend that none of these down-sides exist. Even with all of the information available on social, economic and political conditions in Mexico, they have fallen for the Mexican government’s aggressive and very astute line. They have been courted and co-opted. Besides their lack of vision on the real effects that free trade will have on our community, they show a lack of compassion for our Mexican motherland.

In its Nov. 12, 1990, issue, Business Week synthesized the benefits and costs of free trade to the United States: “Better access to cheaper labor and parts; a growing export market; 100% ownership in Mexican subsidiaries (and a) more reliable source of petroleum. . . . “ The costs? “Jobs lost in certain industries, painful restructuring of others; downward pressure on U.S. wages; organized labor is hurt. . . . “

Business Week speaks to corporate North America, but for those of us with principles of social responsibility it should leave no room for doubt. The principal Mexican commodity that Salinas is offering to salvage Mexico’s economy is “cheap labor.” The principal motivation for the North: profit.

There is still time for our leaders and organizations to be more honest with our community about who gains and who loses with the free trade agreement.