Getty Images: Demonstrators carry an oversized replica of a corn cob to protest the lowering of tariffs due to NAFTA.

One of the things that prompted millions of low-wage workers to abandon Mexico over the last two decades was the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. With NAFTA, cheap imports, particularly agricultural products, flooded the Mexican market, leaving farmers and other low-skilled workers without jobs. NAFTA is just one manifestation of free trade policies pushed in Washington that often have adverse effects in Latin American countries. Former U.S.



President Bill Clinton acknowledged as much after Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake , saying that opening up the Haitian market to cheap U.S. rice "may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked ... I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did, nobody else."