| Aug 1998 Leaders promised the deal would mean prosperity for all. Four years on there is still no sign. For fifty years, the RCA-Thomson plant had been the hub of the economy for the town of Bloomington. Today the Stars and Stripes still fly over the plant, but the workers have gone and the factory is silent. The factory has slipped over the border to Juarez, Mexico. At 53 cents an hour, these new employees are expendable: "They can go out on the street and get anybody and bring them in and put them there until they're no good to them anymore". Re-living the Industrial Revolution Joan Irene lives with her husband and three children in a tiny house. Without sewerage or running water, her one luxury is electricity stolen from the power lines above her home. But Juarez has an even darker side. For those who won't work for modern slave wages, there is always prostitution, drug running and even murder. We follow crime photographer Jose Camira who roams the streets with a police scanner. In the last two years more than a hundred women have been raped, killed and their bodies dumped in the desert. The American dream has not come to the Mexicans who are still searching. As a result the number of illegal border crossers has not slowed, as NAFTA had predicted. Even as we wait, another man is risking his life crossing a bridge in an escape attempt. Downstream, three more men have waded across the water that marks the border. The first man goes over the wall. Another crouches below ... |
