ceive NAFTA-related unemployment assistance through the NAFTA-TAA program. Despite the job losses, trade officials said NAFTA remains a net gainer for U.S. workers. Increased exports to Mexico and Canada will support some 3 million U.S. jobs this year, up some 500,000 from two years ago, according to the U.S. Trade Representative's office. (Briones)III. Recent EventsA. The Chiapas Uprising and the Zapatistas On January 1, 1994, a group of Native Americans called the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) captured four towns in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas and demanded reforms from the Salinas government for better treatment for poor Indians there. They chose to begin their rebellion to coincide with the implementation of NAFTA because they consider it a "death sentence." They demand bilingual and intercultural education in their indigenous language as well as in Spanish. They want titles and protection of the lands where they live. Finally, they say that the governments should ratify the International Labor Office's (ILO) resolution 169 on the promotion and protection of the rights of indigenous people. The group is named for Emiliano Zapata, a 19th-century Mexican revolutionary leader and agrarian reformer. The EZLN has organized itself among some of the most dispossessed people of the world. Its' soldiers are drawn from the forests, mountains and small towns of the region, both from the indigenous Mayan population, and from immigrants from Central and Northern Mexico. The EZLN soldiers have been subsistence cultivators and landless wage-laborers. They have grown and marketed their own export crops and have worked on the plantations and ranches of others. A very few are intellectuals drawn to the area over a decade ago by their ideals and hopes. The EZLN understands how NAFTA opens Mexico to U.S. exports and imports, and how the most threatening of these is corn, the basic food crop of the indigenous population and an impor...
