On New Year's Eve 1993, there was little indication that popular President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was about to take a monumental fall. Mexico was in the midst of unprecedented prosperity. The world's oldest ruling political party, Mexico's PRI, enjoyed substantial support. Allegations of corruption within an authoritarian regime were now frivolous charges obscured by economic success. The nation was poised to become a major player in the global market; vying with Japan to be the second largest trading partner of the U.S.A. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, the largest trading partner of the U.S., Mexico and the United States became effective January 1, 1994. Just after midnight 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) went to war in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Approximately 2500 peasants (mostly indigenous men of Mayan descent) had mobilized against the Mexican government. The violence sparked world wide interest in the human rights of Mexican Indians. Ten days later, as the EZLN retreated into the jungle, an international audience remained captivated by the struggle. The Mexican Army did not advance. The EZLN refused to lay down its arms. Within the year, the Mexican economy collapsed. Soon thereafter, President Salinas went into voluntary exile amidst charges of high crimes against the state. Was it just a coincidence that the rebellion coincided with the implementation of NAFTA? Did the treaty really present such an enormous threat to Mexico's underclass? Did NAFTA contribute to the nation's political problems? The following thesis answers these questions. It is the product of years of travel and study throughout Chiapas and Mexico, both before and after the rebellion. The intricacies of the relationship between NAFTA, the Mexican government and the EZLN are revealed. The government's position and rebel demands are reconcilable. This is an important conclusion. But Mexico is a poor country embroiled in a rebellion to the south as well as a precarious economic treaty with the world's wealthiest nation to the north. In addition, the EZLN has come to represent the world's beleaguered poor in an era of free trade. As Mexico's past and present are explored, conclusions about the country's future have implications that go beyond NAFTA. / Graduation date: 2000

To be fair and equitable are aims inherent in most legal systems, whether domestic or international, but are usually tacitly stated. With respect to foreign direct investment (FDI) they constitute a standard of treatment which lacks a clear definition. Nevertheless, the recurrence of this standard in conventional instruments makes it one of the focal points of this branch of international law. / The main goal of this thesis is to explore and understand the standard of fair and equitable treatment. To understand its definition, it is first necessary to undertake a theoretical analysis of the notion. Secondly, having assessed the general meaning to fair and equitable treatment, an attempt is made to assess the difficulties which have arisen from its incorporation in Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Finally, the thesis tries to assess where the concept stands in international law and whether or not it has passed into the corpus of customary international law.

Applying market arbitrage theory on daily data, we measure the empirical financial market convergence of NAFTA’s financial markets since 1994. Radar diagram and wavelet multi-resolution analysis (MRA) scalogram movies of the statistical moments of the term interest rate differentials visualize the multidimensional convergence. From the radar movies, we find: 1) a uniform disappearance of the average forward premia; 2) a non-uniform decline of bilateral financial market risk; 3) variation of bilateral financial market pressure measured by skewness; and 4) emergence of uniform market microstructures as measured by vanishing excess-kurtosis. From the MRA movies, we find that the national term structures of interest rates converge, since the stochastic resonance coefficients of the interest rate differentials lose significance: market energy at all frequencies dissipates into “white noise.” Testing Obrimah, Prakash and Rangan’s (2009) Lemma, we find that, after 2002, higher financial flow pressure is a necessary condition for lower financial market risk. / vii, 67 leaves ; 29 cm

NAFTA's Article 2005 prescribes that the NAFTA governments, being Canada, Mexico and the US, may choose either a multilateral or a regional forum within which to solve their trade disputes. Thus, they may choose between either the new WTO dispute settlement mechanism or the NAFTA Chapter 20 dispute settlement mechanism. Nevertheless, in order to have an effective choice of forum, there is one essential condition: the subject matter of the dispute must be similar or identical, and there must be some degree of subject matter overlap in both the NAFTA and WTO provisions. The relationship between NAFTA, the WTO and GATT is complex. The core problem is whether there is a legal distinction between the GATT 1947 and the GATT 1994, incorporated into the WTO Agreement, in order to establish either NAFTA or WTO primacy. The latter-in-time treaty general rule will decide the issue. Nevertheless, a decisive conclusion cannot be drawn, as this should be studied on a case-by-case basis.

This paper raises questions about the accessibility of the Articles 14 & 15 submissions mechanism, a public complaint process that attempts to use the eyes of ordinary persons in Canada, Mexico and the US to monitor an important environmental treaty obligation: NAFTA signatories' commitment to effectively enforce their environmental laws. In order to consider whether the Articles 14 & 15 review tool is accessible, we assemble a set of indicators that nourish four hypotheses, which may reveal if the review tool is sufficiently well installed to attain its long term objectives in a significant measure. The hypotheses are: 1) that the CEC receives an insufficient amount of submissions; 2) that it takes considerable or random times to process them; 3) that it consistently takes longer, or has more troubles, to process Mexican and disadvantaged-group cases; 4) that few complainants harvest any benefits from complaining, being more likely that they do if they are rich environmental NGOs than if they are ordinary individuals. The information we present is based on primary research and statistical information on the processing of NAAEC Articles 14 and 15 submissions. Our chief objective is not to conclusively prove or disprove these hypotheses, but to provide a framework to respond these questions. By consistently focusing their efforts on evaluating the attainment of the ultimate objectives of this review tool, all authors who have critiqued the Articles 14 & 15 submissions process have failed to consider whether the complaint mechanism is effectively positioned to capture environmental law enforcement information from all of its target population. Instead, this paper explores the implementation of Articles 14 & 15 by generating information on the attainment of its midcourse objectives. This paper may be of interest to persons working on issues concerning the implementation and further elaboration of NAAEC Articles 14 and 15 and to those pondering whether and how the proposed FTAA and the Canada-Chile Free Trade Accord should be structured to deal with the environmental consequences of further economic integration.

The increase of antidumping measures could represent a source of mounting frictions in the trading systems among Canada, United States and Mexico. Mexico is an active user of antidumping measures suggesting that both private sector groups and government policy makers have found antidumping measures to be a convenient response to the pressures of import competition. / In the last two decades, Mexico has opened its economy to international commerce. Nevertheless, its economy and legal system are not comparable to those of the United States or Canada, although it has adopted analogous antidumping laws. The Mexican antidumping practice is based today on common law practices influencing civil law formalities. In the NAFTA context, more specifically, in its Chapter 19, legal problems facing the binational panel review system have arisen from Mexico's different legal tradition, notably in the areas of transparency and procedural issues, standard of review, parallel amparo and the power of panel vis-a-vis national courts. The procedural requirements of the Antidumping Agreement prove a challenge for Mexico and will likely lead to trade disputes concerning procedure because it lacks the tradition of administrative and legal process.

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