Dear Tio Sam:.

I've made it safely down into southern Mexico to a city called Cuernavaca. Wealthy Mexico City residents escape here when they want a break from the smog and crowds of the big city. The local indigenous people come here too, to beg on the streets or market pottery, blankets, and other tokens of their culture to the tourists who happen by.

I'm in Morelos, a state named after a priest. This priest, Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon, led an army of peasants against Spanish rule and the injustices of his day. He was rewarded with execution, like his fellow priest and revolutionary Padre Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. There's history like that all around me here. Tlahuican and Nahuatl pyramids here predate the Aztecs. There's a cathedral and palace Hernan Cortes built after he conquered himself into becoming the richest man in the New World. Emiliano Zapata began his struggle for land reform in Morelos.

I've been having a lot of strange dreams since I arrived, Tio. Angry priests appear and dissolve into an eagle devouring a snake, the ancient symbol emblazoned on Mexico's flag. I think old Cortes himself even made his way into a few of them.

I'm not the only one who's dreaming, of course. There are a lot of people dreaming in Mexico or about Mexico. The working people I meet in Cuernavaca had their dreams fed by the promises of this thing called NAFTA. They thought the treaty would mean that Mexico would finally develop into the economic twin of its big brother to the north. They dreamed of more money, of a better standard of living. That's an old dream here, and it's been perpetually frustrated.

This dream of NAFTA has been realized by some in Mexico since the treaty went into effect four years ago. A few have become wealthy, but the vast majority of people in Mexico have only become poorer while the cultural and economic pressures of global trade make sometimes bizarre inroads on a way of life that has changed little since the time of the conquistadores. In Tepotzlan, a little village near Cuernavaca, European and American travelers arrive to soak up the local culture and visit the ancient temples of the Nahuatl people. They are watched with an uneasy mixture of curiosity and resentment by some of the young Nahautl in Tepotzlan, garbed in the baggy jeans, team jerseys, and knitted caps that represent their approximation of the urban battle fatigues of America's inner cities. But this sartorial cultural pollution is only the most subtle global threat to the Nahuatl community.

A few years ago the people in Tepotzlan faced down a golf course proposed by a team of Mexican and American investors that would likely have drained the community's meager water supplies and put an end to this centuries-old communal agrarian life. In the United States they might have won their reprieve at a zoning committee hearing; here they took up arms against this golf course, scaring away the investors with threats of violence and chaos when Mexico's tattered democratic institutions offered them no respite. A few people "disappeared" during the struggle. It happens sometimes in Mexico.

The angry slogans remain painted on the walls of this town, similar to other angry slogans I have seen on other walls in my travels in Mexico. "??Basta Ya!" they cry: "Enough already." Let those who have eyes see them; I wonder where the writing on these walls will lead.

In Populorum progressio, Pope Paul VI describes a process he calls "authentic development." In this process development is measured not just by material enrichment or rising per-capita incomes but by how much technological, medical, and educational improvements actually pass on to the common people. In this authentic development, economies are put to the service of people, not the other way around, in a process of relationship building and mutual cultural respect. I wonder how much of this authentic development is taking place around me in post-NAFTA Mexico.

There are signs of NAFTA's life all around Cuernavaca: Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald's, even Sam's Club. The people who can afford to are learning a little about what it means to live the American dream as they shop in the new supermarkets and department stores, passing along aisles of American goods that are often priced well beyond their reach. But thousands of Mexico's middle-class business people have trickled down into poverty since these North Americans opened their doors, and the incomes and living standards of the poor have only diminished further. Millions have been forced off the land into $3-a-day factory work, and thousands of others may be preparing to begin the journey north into the United States where an increasingly militarized and dangerous border zone awaits them.

A day's journey south of me, in Chiapas, the Zapatista army lurks in the Lacandon jungle dreaming of a miraculous deliverance. They are not the only ragtag, resistance army at work in Mexico these days. There are better equipped and more aggressive opponents of the free-trade dream staging hit-and-run attacks in other Mexican states now. It is an old story here, a cycle of poverty driven by the demands of an overwhelming national debt, culminating in a violent upheaval and a more violent repression. Watching the peso fall and the markets slump and the greedy eyes turning to PEMEX, Mexico's nationalized oil company, I wonder if I am watching that cycle turning again. They say there is natural gas and petroleum in the hills of Chiapas, and I wonder what will happen when the global juggernaut turns its attentions there.

I hope you are listening, Tio Sam. I'm not sure if anyone in the north is really listening, understands, or cares about what is happening to their neighbors across the border. I hope you get my mensajito, my little message, from Cuernavaca, Tio Sam.

Saludos,