Visions of a modernized and industrialized Mexico competing in the global market clash with the sobering reality of a desperate peasantry and falling agricultural production. The crisis and rebellion in Chiapas is the same one confronting most of Mexico and the Third World. Tom Barry views the crisis that confronts Mexico as alarming evidence of the incapacity of neoliberal and free trade policies to foster broad economic development. Barry shows that such policies have resulted in reduced food security, environmental destruction, increased rural-urban polarization, depopulation of peasant communities, and social and political instability.