by Abbie Bakan
Plans are in place to combine 34 countries of North, Central and South America in a mega-trade zone, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), that combines Canada, the US and Mexico in a regional trade bloc, is being heralded as the model for the FTAA.
Cuba is noticeably absent from the negotiations.
As in NAFTA, the United States government is the principal motivator behind the new trade deal. And, again as in NAFTA, Canada is also pushing hard for the deal, which is to be fully in effect by 2005.
The FTAA will become the most encompassing free trade agreement in the world, affecting the lives of 800 million people.
Canada's government appointed representatives are currently chairing the international arrangements to see through the FTAA. This month and for the next two years, Canada will be hosting a series of summit meetings to secure the FTAA's future.
When NAFTA was passed on January 1, 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation organized a rebellion in the Mexican state of Chiapas to protest the extension of the so-called "free market".
NAFTA entrenched more than a decade of pro-market policies that had reversed one of the few remaining gains of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-17 -- land reform in the interests of small farmers and peasants.
Today, estimates of the number of peasants and farmers forced to abandon their lands through the 1990s approach one million.
Corporate land purchases, denial of access to credit, monopolies of trade on exports and imports, increased international competition and the removal of agricultural subsidies have combined to force peasants into destitute poverty.
Some joined the resistance movement, and faced massive repression from the Mexican state.
Others have migrated to the cities of Mexico and the United States. A 1996 survey of Mexico's cities reported that 53 percent did not have enough food, 45 percent said they did not receive health care, and 29 percent stated that children age 16 or less had to work in order to support their families.
But the multinational corporations have no hesitancy in extending this market driven system to other Latin American countries. NAFTA formalized the policies of successive Mexican governments desperate to secure access to the US market.
For the US and Canada, NAFTA has meant that nearly all tariffs for trade in goods have been eliminated, massively favouring the multinationals in both countries.
And Canadian and US capital have been allowed access without restriction to Mexico's cheap labour market. The real industrial wages of Mexican workers, adjusted for inflation, are now lower than at any time since 1939.
NAFTA whetted the appetite for profit of US and Canadian corporations. The result is the FTAA.
The FTAA was initiated in 1994, headed by US President Clinton and supported by an orchestrated lobby of US corporate interests. The region of Latin America has long been considered the "backyard" for US imperialism. Recent instability in the world economy has provoked renewed fear that resistance to America's dominance could grow.
The 1998 wave of economic crises in Asia threatened to spread to Brazil, the world's ninth largest economy. Brazil accounts for fully 45 percent of total Latin American GDP. In July of 1998, Britain's Financial Times summarized why a prospective meltdown in Latin America would have much more serious effects for US capitalism than the crisis in Asia.
"Latin America accounts for 18 percent of US exports, against 17 percent for Asia (excluding Japan), and $20 billion of foreign direct investment against $15 billion. Around 12 percent of US companies' foreign profits come from the region, almost twice as much as from Asia's Tigers. And while European banks took the lead in lending to Russia and much of the Far East, US banks dominate south of the border. Their total cross-border exposure in Latin America, including loans, securities and derivatives, amounted to $79 billion as of March, compared with $59 billion to Asia and less than $7 billion to Russia."
The FTAA is designed to eliminate state subsidies for agriculture, and open up the economies to intensified competition from US and Canadian multinationals. In addition to taking down trade barriers for industrial products, the FTAA follows the pattern established by the World Trade Organization where services including energy, water, education and health care are included on the free trade auction block.
The negotiations towards the FTAA are organized through nine "working groups" with official names that indicate the scope of what's on the table. The committees are: market access; agriculture; investment services; government procurement; intellectual property rights; subsidies; anti-dumping and countervailing duties; competition policy; and dispute settlement.
Then there are three oddly grouped "special committees". These deal with "smaller economies", "experts on electronic commerce", and most notably the committee of "government representatives on civil society participation."
"Civil society" is a term popularized by the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci to refer to organizations outside the official state machinery. Now the pundits of world capitalism have created a bureaucratic body of the same name with the undeclared goal of co-opting potential opposition on the scale of the Zapatistas.
Resistance is bad for business, of course.
Tragically, the shell game seems to be having some of the corporate hoped for effect. Many prominent labour leaders in the US, Latin America and Canada have shifted from a position of opposition, taken when NAFTA was under negotiation, to one pleading for inclusion.
The Canadian Labour Congress stated their position on the FTAA in former President Bob White's submission to the Committee on Civil Society.
The statement calls for changes in the process of consultation with labour, arguing that the "privileged" status of business interests should be extended to the leaders of trade unions. The CLC gives its support to "efforts to broaden trade liberalization in the Americas", but suggests that such liberalization should be based on a platform of "fair trade" and "active participation."
The forces at work in pushing for market liberalization are not about to hold back their profit margins in the interests of greater consultation or "fairness."
These are the same forces that have defended the likes of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, planned repeated invasions and economic strangulation against Cuba, and the training of professional torturers in the US sponsored School of the Americas.
The FTAA should be opposed, not treated as an organization that can be improved or amended into something else. It is a bosses' cartel, and only those who advance that agenda will be welcomed in its dens.
To stop the FTAA will require organization and determination, inside Canada and internationally. But that is not just a pipe dream. In every one of the 34 countries involved, there is opposition to the deal. The Zapatista rebellion showed the way when NAFTA was introduced.
We will need a mass international movement of solidarity against imperialism in order to stop the FTAA, but it's not too late to join in and build it.