Many of Mexico's poorest have been forced to abandon their homes and are now working on U.S. farms.

  BY RICHARD BRAND

  IMMOKALEE - A group of migrant workers sits and watches an anti-free-trade propaganda video, a cartoon showing a blond American farmer on a gleaming trailer piled with bags of corn and his Mexican counterpart with a donkey, both plowing the fields.

  ''How can we compete?'' the video's narrator asks in Spanish.

  As the narrator goes on to blame the 10-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement for the plight of Mexico's rural poor, dozens at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers office nod their heads in agreement.

  Among them is Jorge Vásquez Martinez, 47, who abandoned his family's maiz and coffee farm in Oaxaca two years ago because of plummeting prices caused largely by an influx of subsidized American corn.

  For him, the cartoon hits home, or at least the home he left behind.

  As finance ministers from 34 nations gather in Miami for the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit next week, protesters and critics will be pointing to the experiences of Mexican corn farmers like Vásquez as a warning of the potential pitfalls of free trade. Indeed, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is planning to bus hundreds of migrant workers to Miami to participate in anti-FTAA marches.

  ''Ten years ago I could go to the plaza and sell my corn at my price. Now you have to sell to the bodegas there, and they set a price that's not enough to live on,'' said Vásquez, who owns six hectares of farmland in Mexico but instead picks calabaza and tomatoes in Florida for minimum wage. ``I never thought I would end up in the United States, but things changed so quickly.''

  ENORMOUS WEALTH

  While NAFTA has helped create enormous wealth in many Mexican sectors through increased trade, the removal of trade barriers has also left many of Mexico's poorest, those in rural areas who found sustenance in centuries-old corn farming, unable to compete with cheaper, U.S.-subsidized corn.

  Since NAFTA took effect, the amount of U.S. seed corn exported to Mexico more than doubled, with the biggest jump coming between 2000 and 2001, when old tariffs and quota policies were for the most part phased out. Since NAFTA took effect, the price of corn in Mexico has dropped 80 percent, according to Mexican government figures.

  ''What's going on in Mexico is bleak. Rural residents of Mexico are living more difficult lives than they were a decade ago,'' said John Audley, director of the Trade, Equity and Development Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C.

  LOSS OF JOBS

  Since 1994, Mexico's agricultural sector has lost 1.3 million jobs, Audley said. Many of those jobless have sought work elsewhere -- in Mexico's crowded cities or in the United States.

  ''What NAFTA predicted was that it would stem the tide of undocumented workers, and it did not,'' Audley said.

  In Nicaragua, as in other Latin American countries, campesino groups are hoping that trade negotiators working on FTAA and the proposed U.S.-Central American Free Trade Agreement try to avoid a repeat of what happened to Mexico's corn farmers. But they are bracing for the worst.

  ''We are very worried about what's coming,'' said William Rodriguez of the Center for International Studies, a Managua-based group that works with the rural poor, in a phone interview. ``We've seen what happened in Mexico.''

  Proponents of free trade acknowledge that Mexico's agricultural workers have suffered the brunt of some difficult changes, but they say that in the long run, increased trade is a force for good, pointing to how Mexico's trade deficit of $2.4 billion with the United States in 1994 is now a surplus of $36.5 billion, according to Mexico's Economic Ministry. That boost will translate into more jobs, higher tax revenues and better services. Proponents also say that the decline of Mexico's small farms is a process that long preceded NAFTA.

  ''It's very easy to say it's because of a trade agreement and to say if we hadn't done this, then rural Mexico would be the same as it has been for 200 years,'' said Ed Gresser, trade policy director at the Washington-based Progressive Policy Institute.

  ``You have to be careful about what is due to a trade agreement and what has happened naturally with development.''

  BENEFITS OF TRADE

  But those intellectual arguments on the benefits of trade mean little to Vásquez, the farmer enduring the harsh realities on the ground.

  Faced with a $2,000 debt to the people who smuggled him into California, his $35 share of the weekly rent and the lack of work on rainy days, Vásquez says he cannot send much money home to his wife and six children, the ultimate purpose of his journey.

  ''I explain to her that I have so many expenses here so I can't send her much,'' Vásquez said. ``I don't make enough to save, only to survive.''

  Vásquez shares a sweltering trailer with six other men, one of their wives and a bunch of scurrying creatures. When he turns on the light in his bedroom, roaches and black ants don't bother to hide in dark corners; the floor is a constant swarm.

  On a recent morning, Vásquez and his roommates were up at 4 a.m. mixing tortillas and frying eggs for their lunch before heading out to work, the cramped kitchen and hallway bustling as everyone took turns using the bathroom, the sink and the stove.

  Some of Vásquez's roommates have stories similar to his, of falling corn prices in Mexico forcing a decision to seek work here.

  Orbelin Velasquez, 23, of Chiapas, said he crossed the border in Arizona's desert in mid-September.

  ''Who knows the truth why I couldn't get money for my corn, if it was NAFTA or drought or whatever,'' Velasquez said. ``It makes me sad because that is what I did since I was very small.''

  TOMATO FARM

  After a 10-minute walk from the trailer, Vásquez boards an old blue school bus that carries him and others to an industrial tomato farm, where they spend most of the day.

  He says that he is miserable in his current situation and wishes for a return to times of old.

  ''It was hard back at home too, but if I got tired I could take a rest. And, in the end, back home I was working my own land,'' said Vásquez, whose wife has encouraged him to return to Oaxaca.

  ''I was having just as hard a time here as I was having in Mexico,'' he said. ``She said it serves no purpose for me to stay here and suffer.''

  Staff writer Alejandro Landes contributed to this report.