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| MONDAY, APRIL 21, 2014

INTERNATIONAL NEW YORK TIMES

Opinion

An evolutionary family drama

ARTHUR OCHS SULZBERGER JR., Publisher

JILL ABRAMSON, Executive Editor

STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International

DEAN BAQUET, Managing Editor

PHILIPPE MONTJOLIN, Senior V.P., International Operations

TOM BODKIN, Deputy Managing Editor

ACHILLES TSALTAS, V.P., International Conferences

LAWRENCE INGRASSIA, Deputy Managing Editor

CHANTAL BONETTI, V.P., International Human Resources

RICHARD W. STEVENSON, Editor, Europe

JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA, V.P., International Advertising

PHILIP McCLELLAN, Deputy Editor, Asia

ANDREW ROSENTHAL, Editorial Page Editor
TRISH HALL, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
TERRY TANG, Deputy Editorial Page Editor

CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Marketing & Strategy

PATRICE MONTI, V.P., International Circulation
RANDY WEDDLE, Managing Director, Asia-Pacific
SUZANNE YVERNS, International Chief Financial Officer

MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer, The New York Times Company
STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, Prsident et Directeur de la Publication

GETTING GLOBAL TRADE RIGHT

New trade
agreements
can be negotiated to
be smarter
and
stronger.

Many Americans have watched their neighbors lose goodpaying jobs as their employers sent their livelihoods to
China. Over the last 20 years, the United States has lost
nearly five million manufacturing jobs. In that same time,
however, the prices that Americans pay for basic goods like
T-shirts and televisions have fallen. Americans want the
benefits of trade and they are potentially big and quite
real, including opening up new markets to American cars
and software but theyre increasingly anxious about the
downside, which includes closed factories and lower wages.
The country needs to pursue new trade agreements, but
this time we need to get the agreements right.
This page has long argued that removing barriers to
trade benefits the economy and consumers, and some of
those gains can be used to help the minority of people who
lose their jobs because of increased imports. But those
gains have not been as widespread as we hoped, and they
have not been adequate to assist those who were harmed.
As the Obama administration negotiates two big trade
agreements one with 11 countries along the Pacific Ocean
and the other with the European Union it is appropriate
to take stock of what we have learned in the 20 years since
the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement
and use that knowledge to design better agreements.
To gain the support of a divided Congress and public, the
administration must ensure that new agreements are
much stronger than Nafta and other pacts.
The Pacific agreement, known as the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, could also encourage China, which is not part
of the talks, to reconsider its currency and labor policies to
avoid being at a disadvantage. (The participants are
Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, Canada, Mexico,
Singapore, New Zealand, Chile, Peru and Brunei.) And a
pact with the European Union could harmonize overlapping
regulations to reduce the cost of doing business and
increase competition. Both pacts could aid American foreign
policy by strengthening alliances in Asia and Europe.
Big corporations are playing an active role in shaping
the American position because they are on industry
advisory committees to the United States trade
representative, Michael Froman. By contrast, public
interest groups have seats on only a handful of committees
that negotiators do not consult closely.
That lopsided influence is dangerous, because
companies are using trade agreements to get special
benefits that they would find much more difficult to get
through the standard legislative process. For example,
draft chapters from the Pacific agreement that have been
leaked in recent months reveal that most countries
involved in the talks, except the United States, do not want
the agreement to include enforceable environmental
standards. Business interests in the United States, which
would benefit from weaker rules by placing their
operations in countries with lower protections, have
aligned themselves with the position of foreign
governments. Another chapter, on intellectual property, is
said to contain language favorable to the pharmaceutical
industry that could make it harder for poor people in
countries like Peru to get generic medicines.
Many critics are legitimately concerned about more
outsourcing of jobs, and there is no doubt that trade, along
with automation and financial deregulation, has
contributed to income inequality.
But its important to remember that our trade with
trade-agreement countries, like Mexico, is much more
balanced than our trade with China. Those countries buy
more American goods and services than they would
without an agreement, sending money and jobs back in
this direction.
Its easy to point the finger at Nafta and other trade
agreements for job losses, but there is a far bigger culprit:
currency manipulation. The trade agreements the Obama
administration is negotiating provide a chance for the
United States to press countries to stop manipulating their
currencies.
The president also needs to make clear to Americas
trading partners that they need to adhere to enforceable
labor and environmental regulations. This would level the
playing field for American workers and improve the lives
of tens of millions of workers in developing countries.
In recent months the debate about trade, and the Pacific
agreement in particular, has become increasingly
polarized. Mr. Obama and Mr. Froman argue that their
critics have misunderstood or misrepresented their
intentions. But that is precisely why the president should
provide answers to the questions people have raised about
these agreements.

Richard Conniff
OLD LYME, CONN. We would see amaz-

ing things if we could learn to be travelers in our own neighborhoods, Henry

David Thoreau once suggested. Lately,
I have come to think that this is more
true than I had imagined.
Most mornings in warm weather,
when I am home in coastal Connecticut,
I head out before dawn to row on a 260acre dogleg of a lake, backed up behind
a rickety old dam. And I see plenty of
wonderful things as I do my laps: An
osprey cruising with a freshly caught
fish carried underneath, like a seaplane
pontoon. A newly emerged damselfly
riding on my deck for a lap and a half till
its wings harden enough for flight. And
once, at a distance of 50 feet, a bald
eagle scavenging the carcass of a cormorant. But I did not realize until recently that a grand evolutionary experiment was taking place beneath my hull.
Along with other members of my rowing club, the Blood Street Sculls, I spent
much of last summer moaning about a
project to rebuild the dam where Rogers
Lake here spills down to become Mill
Brook, on route to Long Island Sound
and the sea. Construction required dropping the lake level by more than two feet,

and that increased the risk for rowers of

scraping the bottom or spilling ignominiously on an unexpectedly low patch.
Now, though, the dam is finished, and
starting this month, alewives, also
known as river herring, are climbing
the new fish ladder around the dam so
they can return to Rogers Lake from
their feeding grounds at sea. The work
is part of a coastwide effort to remove
or bypass dams in the hope of restoring
the alewives to their former glory.
Alewives are anadromous fish: Born
in freshwater, they spend their lives in
the ocean, returning annually to their
birthplaces to spawn. Until colonial-era
dams cut off their migration, hundreds of
thousands of alewives would have come
pouring into Rogers Lake every spring
and into other lakes like it along much
of the Eastern Seaboard. Farmers used
to apply them to their fields as fertilizer,
and all along the coast, river herring festivals celebrated their arrival.
Whats particularly intriguing about
Rogers Lake, though, is that the first
dam built on Mill Brook in 1672 inadvertently drew a pre-Darwinian dividing
line across the species. On one side of
the dam, the anadromous alewives continued their old seagoing life. But on the
other side, in Rogers Lake, other members of the species became landlocked.
Local conservationists have added
fish ladders to the dams lower down on

Mill Brook, and about 10,000 anadromous alewives a year have been recovering at least a part of their old migration.
The new fish ladder means they can finally complete their journey and
come face to face with their landlocked
cousins, after a separation of 342 years.
Evolution has wrought strange
changes in the intervening 100 or so generations, most notably in size. The landlocked fish are now just a third the
length of their footlong seagoing cousI went out
ins. Somewhere berowing each
neath the hull of my
morning,
rowing shell, its as if
unaware that
mastiffs are returning
a grand evoto discover that their
distant kinfolk and
lutionary
potential mates have
experiment
become Chihuahuas.
was taking
At his laboratory at
place beneath
Yale University, the
my hull.
ecologist David Post
clambered over
obstacles in what
would be a walk-in freezer, if it werent
so full, and eventually pulled out plastic
bags containing frozen landlocked and
anadromous alewives. They look like
something youd get out of a pickled
herring jar, because thats basically
what they are, he said. Theyre not
nearly as sexy as Atlantic salmon, or as
funky as eels. Theyre silvery and non-

descript, and thats both the joy and the

curse of working with these fish.
The joy, for an ecologist, is that
alewives are a keystone species. As
predators, they drive the ecosystem of
every coastal lake and stream from the
Carolinas to Maine or at least the ones
to which they can still gain access. As
prey, alewives, together with menhaden,
Atlantic herring and other forage fish,
are the basic food stock for the entire Atlantic fishery, as well as for seabirds,
whales, dolphins and other species.
Part of the curse is that even biologists have a hard time telling alewives
from bluebacks, another species of river
herring. At sea, alewives, bluebacks
and Atlantic herring all school together,
and to fishermen trawling huge nets for
the Atlantic herring, they also look the
same. As a result, an estimated 3.8 million river herring a year are caught unintentionally as bycatch, and that may
be an important reason the overall river
herring population has plummeted by
more than half since the 1960s.
Professor Post has been studying
alewives in Connecticut lakes for the
past decade and is now tracking the outcome of the reunion at Rogers Lake. Before the dams cut them off, he said, the
alewives arrived each spring as slash
and burn predators on the planktonic
life in the lake. They picked off everything they could find mostly fly larvae
and feathery little copepods and water
fleas and then headed back out again,
leaving what was left of the plankton to
recover for another harvest the following spring. Its a pretty good lifestyle, if
youre anadromous, he said. You eat
everything in sight and go elsewhere.
But once the alewives became landlocked, they caused an almost complete
disappearance of large plankton. The
change in the prey base forced the
alewives not just to become significantly smaller but also to develop more
closely spaced gill rakers, apparently
so they could strain their minuscule
food from the water rather than picking
it off one particle at a time.
So what will happen when the two
forms of alewife come together? Size
may not matter for mating, since
alewives dont practice internal fertilization. Instead, they broadcast sperm
and eggs into the water simultaneously.
But the anadromous alewives begin
breeding several weeks ahead of their
landlocked cousins. So the two forms
may just pass one another with a
glance, curious but puzzled.
Or there may just be enough overlap
for romance. If so, what happens to the
young? Will they turn seaward at the
end of the summer, as did their
anadromous forebears? Or will the landlocked lifestyle keep its hold on them?
It is an evolutionary family drama,
and it makes me think that Thoreau
was right: With every stroke of my
oars, I am skimming across the surface
of unsuspected mysteries.?
is the author of The
Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the
Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth.

RICHARD CONNIFF
ERIC NYQUIST

The April invasion of Veracruz

Enrique Krauze

Contributing Writer

MEXICO CITY The invasion had various

objectives. To help remove a dictator
who had seized power in a coup dtat,
to channel and direct the radical groups
that opposed him, to safeguard the interests of the oil companies active in
the area, to forestall interference from
other national powers, and to teach the
citizens of an unfortunate country
about the virtues of democracy. Baghdad in 2003? No. The Mexican port of
Veracruz, on April 21, 1914.
For Europeans and Americans, 1914
marks the beginning of World War I.
For Mexicans, it is synonymous with
the American intervention, a smaller
encore of the Mexican-American War of
1846-1848 that cost Mexico half its territory and that in 1879 former President
Ulysses S. Grant dubbed as Americas
most wicked war.
When the expeditionary force (some
6,500 Marines and soldiers under the
command of Vice Admiral Frank F.
Fletcher) disembarked on April 21,
there were still elderly Veracruzans
who could remember, with horror, the
naval bombardments of February 1847
ordered by General Winfield Scott.
Bombs had rained down on hospitals,
churches, public and private buildings,
and had been followed by scenes of
rape, pillage, robbery and killings by
the invaders. Six hundred Mexican civilians died. The future commanding
general of the Confederacy, Captain
Robert E. Lee, wrote to his wife: My
heart bled for the inhabitants.
The 1914 intervention was less bloody,
its violent period lasting only a couple of
days. President Woodrow Wilsons
stated intention was to block a shipment
of arms from Germany to the Mexican

dictator Victoriano Huerta. But the citizens of Veracruz did not passively accept the invasion of their city, already
caught up in the Mexican Revolution.
In the United States, there were
voices of opposition as well but also
rapid support. The tabloid press of William Randolph Hearst, as it had done
with Cuba in 1898, not only rallied behind the landing in Veracruz but campaigned for invading the entire country.
The writer Jack London, who combined
a measure of revolutionary sentiment
with a racist ethic of white supremacy,
wrote in Colliers magazine: Verily,
the Veracruzans will long remember
this being conquered
by the Americans,
In 1914, the
and yearn for the
people of the
blissful day when the
city, left to
Americans will contheir own
quer them again.
devices, deThey would not mind
thus being
fied a U.S.
conquered to the end
force sent to
of time.
teach Mexico
In fact, the Veracsome lessons.
ruzans reacted with
rage. The American
military did not have to confront a regular army. (General Huertas federal
troops had been ordered away from the
city.) It was the people of Veracruz
masons, police officers, carpenters,
street sweepers, shopkeepers, students
of the Naval Academy, even prisoners
who resisted. Almost every Veracruzan family treasures the memory of
at least one heroic act: the young Judith Oropeza who threw bricks from
her rooftop at the Americans; the prostitute nicknamed America who set
her ammunition belt on a flat roof and
fired down at the gringos; the artillery lieutenant Jos Azueta who, all by
himself, with an antiquated machine
gun, covered the retreat of his comrades at the Naval Academy who had

been battling the Americans. By the

end of the fighting, 193 Mexicans had
died (including Lieutenant Azueta)
along with 19 American soldiers.
The American intervention plainly
failed to achieve its objectives. It contributed only marginally to General
Huertas fall a few months later, and
had little influence on the outcome of
Mexicos civil war. The expeditionary
force remained in the city for seven
months before leaving it in the hands of
Venustiano Carranzas Constitutionalist army, a less revolutionary faction
than those headed by the popular caudillos Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Without any need for protective
American Marines, the oil wells of the
area, with their copious production, remained untouched until the end of the
civil war. The European powers especially England and Germany
pulled back from Mexico, though their
withdrawal from the scene had nothing
to do with the American intervention:
World War I had broken out. And
Wilson, of course, did not succeed in
teaching democracy to the Mexicans.
What the intervention did achieve
was the renewal of rancor among Mexicans. Thousands of Veracruzans went
quietly into internal exile, avoiding any
cooperation with the invaders. Only a
minority of civic employees were willing
to work with the Americans provisional
government. A parallel Mexican administration attended to the needs of the
people. And Mexican nationalism underwent a surge with profound and
long-lasting consequences.
The experience of Veracruz sheds
light on the nationalism of other Caribbean countries, such as the Dominican
Republic, Nicaragua and especially
Cuba. In each of these countries, deep
resentment was sparked by the physical presence of the invader. In Cuba, the
United States went to the extreme of

establishing what amounted to a protectorate based on the total identification of American foreign policy with
American private interests. As a result,
in 1922, a Cuban journalist predicted
that hatred for the North Americans
will become the religion of Cubans.
We are now near the end of this cycle.
Since the invasion of Panama (in 1989) ,
American Marines have not come
ashore on Latin American beaches. The
identification of American diplomacy
with the interests of its large, private
enterprises is less evident. And the understandably anti-Yankee discourse of
Fidel Castro became an artificial rhetoric for Venezuelas Hugo Chvez and
then a caricature for his successor, Nicols Maduro. In the meantime, commerce and migration have grown so
large and steady as to file down the old
harsh points of contention.
Will an American president be willing to examine this long history of resentment and distrust, the better to
construct a happy ending to these
conflicts with the other America?
Concrete actions are required: to pass
long-awaited reforms of immigration
laws, increase commercial relations
and encourage mutual understanding,
nourish cultural exchanges, lift the
embargo on Cuba, close Guantnamo,
and to be much more attentive and respectful toward Latin American countries and not treat them as the mere
backyard of the nation they call the
Giant of the North.
And also, at this time of year, a simple
gesture: to remember the dead of April
1914 in the Mexican port of Veracruz.
is a historian, the editor
of the literary magazine Letras Libres
and the author of Redeemers: Ideas
and Power in Latin America. This article was translated by Hank Heifetz from
the Spanish.
ENRIQUE KRAUZE

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