The January 2007 “Tortilla Riots” in Mexico. Really?
I’ve been biting my tongue (or restraining my fingers) for months now. But yesterday an article in the New York Times once again took the protests in Mexico City against the price of tortillas as symptomatic of the unrest that is likely to occur worldwide as the result of biofuels, rising maize prices, etc. You see this constantly in books, blogs, newspapers, news programs, and the like.
I don’t blame the author, John T. Edge, who is a fine scholar and tireless investigator of Southern Food, as well as a great guy to be around. He was just picking up on hundreds before him when he referred to the “the so-called tortilla riots of 2007, during which thousands took to the Mexico City streets to protest the rapidly rising cost of maize.” (It’s actually in a review of Paul Roberts’ new book, The End of Food, about which once I’ve read it I shall undoubtedly have lots to say).
But it’s not at all clear to me that these particular tortilla riots are symptomatic of anything except business as usual in Mexico. True, tortilla prices did rise in Mexico in January 2007. And since these maize flatbreads provide about half the calories of the poor in Mexico, that created hardship for many in the population. And true, there were protests.
But consider the situation.
1. Part of the NAFTA (North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement) agreement between Canada, the US and Mexico signed during the Clinton administration was that price supports for tortillas would gradually be eliminated. They’d been in place for decades as part of Mexican food policy, a complex subject that we needn’t pursue here. The point is that tortilla prices had been way below market value for a long time and everyone, at least everyone who could read, knew they were going to go up. (And that’s not because cheap American yellow corn would be imported. It was. For animals. But Mexico was, and still is, largely self sufficient in the non-sweet white corn that is used for tortillas. In fact production has increased dramatically in the past few years).
2. A new President, Felipe Calderón had just been sworn in (literally just, given the razor edge political race and the protests at his inauguration. We stopped watching television to get a cup of coffee and when we returned the inauguration was all over). He belongs to the PAN party. Mexico City is in the hands of the PRD party which had lost the election. There was and is near-open warfare between the very-powerful Mayor of Mexico City and the President.
3. Protests in Mexico City, where we live part time, are a fine art of politics not a spontaneous outpouring of the feelings of the people. Planned by political groups, the participants are carefully rounded up, bussed in, and given food and drink or much more to participate. They bring traffic in the city to a halt, or more of a halt than its usual situation. So when people in Mexico City “rioted” you have to understand that even if participants were in agreement, this was a PRD ploy.
4. When I asked people in villages and towns around here two hundred and fifty miles north of Mexico City what they thought of the rise in the price of tortillas, they were at a loss. What rise?
Thus these riots had little to do with rising prices of maize worldwide, less to do with biofuels, and everything to do with the internal politics of Mexico.
Now since then, prices have been creeping up and tortillas are once-again subsidized though it’s hard to tell by how much. But the point remains. None of the foreign reporting seemed to understand that this was part of an internal political battle.
If the reporting about the “food crisis” elsewhere is equally superficial, well, it makes me nervous.
PS. Comment from my husband who follows Mexican news carefully. What riots? I don’t remember any riots.
PPS. Correction from my husband. No riots, just protests. Those are very different.
Speaking of riots and lack of knowledge about internal politics- about 6-7 years ago when I was living in Seoul we received a call from nervous relatives in France about “massive riots in Seoul”.
Well, they were organized protests. Seoul residents were informed ahead of time about which areas to avoid (mostly because of traffic and congestion), why the protesters would be there, basically given the lowdown on what to expect for the day. The police might come do their little push and shove, no biggie. Just another organized protest, no need to be alarmed.
In France, “OMG! OMG! SOUTH KOREANS ARE PROTESTING!!!! NEAR RIOTS!!!!”
Apparently on French tv they had shown close ups of the protests and our relatives in France assumed that the whole city was under siege. They saw images of thousands and thousands of swarming protesters, holding up signs and screaming protests. They didn’t understand that the screaming was part of the show and that the protesters weren’t feverishly angry.
We had spent the whole day rather quietly in our neighborhood about 10-15 minutes from the protests.
Yes but the riots in Paris were real right?
Yes, they were real.
The coverage was pretty in depth on NPR (National Public Radio) as far as I remember. And they were treated seriously at the academic level here.
Back on topic: RIOT used as a headline grabber or riot used with qualifying descriptions, verifiable acts, etc…
In Los Angeles over the past several decades there’s been much debate (and caution) over which terms to use: protest, riot or even “rebellion”. Oops, going off topic again…
Well, not so far off topic, Ji-Young. If the debate about world food is going to be conducted in overblown or inflammatory terms, it’s important to try to introduce sanity.
Ms. Laudan, I was reading National Geographic this fall about the tortilla “riots” in Mexico and found a number of ‘misconceptions’ (a kind word for lie). As an Iowa corn farmer and spokesperson for agriculture, I was shocked by the spin embraced by Nat Geo – three years ago they wrote that corn is food for livestock, not people, and therefore was expendable and now in this issue its a human “staple”! I searched for an alternative view and consider myself lucky to find your response. I’m late to this discussion, but appreciate your review! By the way, I cancelled my subscription to Nat Geo years ago when they advocated burning crop weeds with liquid propane instead of herbicides and then condemned burning fossil fuels due to global warming. The tortilla issue belonged to someone else.
Hello Curt, thanks so much for writing. I haven’t read the National Geographic on the tortilla riots in Mexico but will look it up as soon as I return home later this week from a trip that I am currently on. It was interesting living in Mexico to see how quickly the foreign press picked up these “riots” without further inquiry. I also read your article on industrial agriculture and wholeheartedly agree.
The specific issue is October 2014, but you probably know that already. In case anyone else is wondering… I was curious about what they (NG) said about the tortilla riots and I found this. Interesting perspective; thank you for your insight.
Thanks for that, Chris. I need to look at that particular issue.