Enlace
Enlace is a strategic alliance of low-wage worker centers, unions, and community organizations in Mexico and in the U.S. We partner with our member organizations in international campaigns to motivate abusive multi-sector transnational corporations to treat workers and communities with dignity and respect.
Enlace uses an integrated approach to organizing, creating unique campaign strategies while developing systems strengthening organizations internally. Our strategies often cross industrial and sector lines for reasons relating to both workforce development and campaign strategy.
In addition, the Enlace Institute presents trainings in strategic organization development that were developed over the many years of learning through our campaigns. Our collaborative brainstorming processes are useful for virtually all work groups in base-building organizations.
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Wall Street and the Criminalization of Immigrants
By Peter Cervantes-Gautschi / October 06, 2010 Revised February 24, 2011
*published by the Americas Program*
Over the past four years roughly a million immigrants have been incarcerated in dangerous detention facilities in our taxpayer-financed private prison system. A growing number of news reports and investigations confirm that for many of the people funneled into this system, it is a living nightmare. Children were abused, women were raped, and men died from lack of basic medical attention.
How Wall Street Profits from the Criminalization of Immigrants and Lobbies for More To Be Locked Up
By Peter Cervantes-Gautschi / October 9, 2010
*published by AlterNet
Two Wall Street-backed powerhouses are making fat profits off of the private immigration detention system, and they’re flexing their muscles in Congress. Read article on AlterNet website
Wall Street and Immigration: Financial Services Giants Have Profited from the Beginning
Peter Cervantes-Gautschi | December 4, 2007
*published by the Americas Program, Center for International Policy (CIP)*
Life began to get hard for most Americans beginning in the late 1990s due to increased family debt. During the same period, life got a lot harder for most Mexicans for the same reason. The same financial institutions created and profited from much of the family debt in both countries.
According to census reports, 70% of the government unauthorized immigrants in the United States are from Mexico. Most legally unauthorized Mexican immigrants in the United States are economic refugees from the 1995 devastation of Mexico’s economy.
While it is popular among U.S. presidential candidates these days to blame Mexican corruption for our huge undocumented immigrant population, corruption in the United States played a far larger role in compelling millions of Mexicans to cross our southern border with or without legal authorization. U.S. corruption came in the form of politicians implementing and enforcing foreign policies that yielded unprecedented profits for their well-heeled campaign contributors in the financial services industry. They probably didn’t break U.S. law to accomplish this, but they did force Mexico to break its own laws to implement their program.
Led by Wall Street heavies Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citi, Fidelity, Chase, and others, these finance industry leaders got Congress to permit financial institutions to increase family debt in the United States by enacting legislation friendly to mega-banks (financial holding companies) while thwarting consumer-friendly legislation. The same U.S.-based financial services leaders played a leading role in increasing family debt to unmanageable levels in Mexico in the mid to late 1990s through their influence of the U.S. Congress.
Larry Summers, Champion of Wall Street Greed Attained by Impoverishing the Mexican People
By Peter Cervantes-Gautschi | November 11, 2008
*published by the Americas Program, Center for International Policy (CIP)*
Appointing Larry Summers our Treasury secretary would be a grave mistake, and a slap in the face to Mexico and those who struggle for economic justice on both sides of the border.
Summers, while serving as under secretary of the Treasury in 1995, engineered the destruction of Mexico’s economy by increasing interest rates to unmanageable levels—business and farm loans went from 11% to 56%, credit card rates from 7% to 61%, home loans from 5% to 75%, car loans from 7% to 91%. The result was massive human suffering and the forced migration of millions of economic refugees to the United States.
Although Wall Street banks profited handsomely, the impact of 1995 loan interest rate increases in Mexico was more than millions of people and businesses could handle. Thousands of farms and businesses, both large and small, went bankrupt. In 1995 alone over 12,000 of Mexico’s businesses filed for bankruptcy, and as economic activity came to a standstill and demand was cut, orders were canceled and plants operated at less than minimum levels. Idle capacity in many branches of the manufacturing sector increased to 70%. It became impossible for millions of workers to support their families by earning paychecks in their own country. Unable to earn enough to support their families, many of them migrated to the United States to find family wage work.
Taking on Global Capital & Winning
Written by Enlace Co-Director Joann Lo
Published in Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social
Fall 2006
Click here to download the article
A Review of Why David Sometimes Wins, by Marshall Ganz
Posted May 2009
By Peter Cervantes-Gautschi
Today, as we face the fact that the optimism we enjoyed when Obama was sworn in last January has been replaced by the harsh reality that our movement lacks the organized critical mass to accomplish fundamental change, we need better insights into how under-resourced organizations can spark movements that succeed, despite the wealthy, better-connected opposition. Marshall Ganz provides such insights.
The introduction, alone worth the price of the book, focuses on the quality of the work of a highly motivated and diverse strategic team as the determining factor in an underdog organization’s success. Ganz calls the strategic team combined with its work the organization’s strategic capacity.