Today President Bush summoned his junior partners in the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) to an emergency meeting in Washington DC. Because it appears that CAFTA has had a big fall and all the President’s partners and all the President’s lobbyists are needed to patch it together again….
In fact, CAFTA is hemorrhaging towards a legislative flatline and US Congressmen haven’t even had a chance yet to slice and dice it to payoff their political benefactors (campaign donors). But this triage team of Central American Heads of State and corporate lobbyists hope to stop the bleeding by impressing upon more conscientious members of Congress (especially those of the Hispanic caucus) how critically important this treaty is to the sustainable development of Central America.
Although their pleas might be drowned-out by the rising crescendo of street protests against CAFTA back home that is now resonating throughout the halls of the US Congress. (But more about that later….)
Would-be leaders without boarders: Heading the CAFTA triage team is Oscar Berger (center) president of Guatemala – here launching the first salvo in their counteroffensive spin yesterday in Miami en route to Washington DC. He is flanked by Ricardo Maduro (left), president of Honduras, and Enrique Bolanos, president of Nicaragua.
Just last December representatives from the participating countries (Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and the United States) celebrated the end of protracted negotiations to make CAFTA an easier sell for President Bush than NAFTA was for President Clinton. Unfortunately for its advocates, CAFTA has incited such outrage among labor, human rights and environmental activists (in the US and Central America) that opponents of the agreement have taken to calling it “NAFTA on steroids”.
CAFTA proposes to eliminate tariffs on American manufactured and farm products, promote US investment in those countries and increase protections for US intellectual property. Its passage in the US Congress is indispensable to President Bush’s hemispheric trade agenda. And, he believes that CAFTA and NAFTA will give him added leverage to compel major South America countries like Brazil to a comply with his terms for a Free Trade Area of the Americas – FTAA.
So much for the public relations spin on the agreement. Here’s the real deal:
Notwithstanding language on eliminating trade barriers, all parties to the treaty have actually protected their most revenue intensive goods from the free market competition required by CAFTA: For example, the US exempted its sugar and textile industries while Central American countries negotiated grandfather clauses of up to 20 years for their corn, diary and other farm products.
Indeed, such resolute protection of corporate interests renders fatuous the World Bank’s endorsement of CAFTA as an agreement that would give the six participants “better access to U.S. markets and technology, which would increase the regions’ stability and export opportunities”.
In addition, American pharmaceutical companies lobbied US trade representatives to insert intellectual property protocols that require Central American governments to abandon generic drugs for diseases like HIV/AIDS in favor of their more prohibitively expensive designer drugs. And, the Bush Administration succumbed to their overtures despite the impassioned pleas by health-care workers and AIDS activists that such protocols will deny life-saving treatment to millions of poor Central Americans.
Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez assured an Emergency Committee for American Trade yesterday that CAFTA is “the trade priority right now” for America and questioned why anyone would oppose it…
In fact, the pharmaceutical protocols in CAFTA expose America’s hypocritical and unconscionably mercurial approach to the AIDS pandemic. After all, in 2003 President Bush announced his global AIDS initiative which called for less expensive generic drug therapies for poor victims of this disease in Africa and the Caribbean. But a year later when President Clinton negotiated an agreement to make the generic drug therapies outlined in Bush’s own initiative available globally, President Bush balked because it (Clinton’s agreement) threatened the bottom-line (profits) of US pharmaceutical companies.
Nevertheless, the rallying cry among CAFTA opposition forces centers on the same labor concerns that the AFL-CIO raised when, ironically, President Clinton was ramming NAFTA through the US Congress. Those concerns include fears that US multinational companies will deploy Mexican style Maquiladoras to exploit cheap Central American laborers and further undercut the availability of industrial and manufacturing jobs in America. And, it is instructive that the American negotiators were especially solicitous of ensuring that CAFTA did not include boiler plate worker rights that are protected in America. Instead, under the pretext of national sovereignty, they argued that each country should be left to apply its own labor laws to workers within its borders.
But to get a measure of the cynicism involved here, one should recall that among the founding principles of global free trade is that developing nations would be able to negotiate guarantees of higher wages and better workplace conditions for laborers in their countries. But customary practices under NAFTA have evidently made a mockery of this principle and now CAFTA negotiators do not even feel obliged to consider it – even if only in writing.
Indeed, it has become axiomatic that, in negotiating trade agreements, American governments invariably further corporate interests at the expense of the welfare of the poor (at home and abroad). What confounds conscientious political observers, however, is the apparent acquiescence of Central American leaders in the codified exploitation of their own people.
Nevertheless, opponents of CAFTA seem determined to demonstrate that they are wise to the proverbial curse of “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”. After all, they have been pricking at the heart of CAFTA with such relentlessness that even arcane provisions pertaining to business competition have bled into public consciousness. And, some of the treaty’s most ardent supporters have exhibited symptoms of light-headedness from these persistent jabs.
For example, towards the end of negotiations, conflicted Central American governments chafed at US demands to open their lucrative state run monopolies to competition. Their spines were stiffened after protests by organized labor ignited fears that privatization would lead to cut-throat business practices that would result in massive unemployment and civil unrest in their countries. In fact, at one point such fears prompted Costa Rican representatives to withdraw from CAFTA negotiations when US officials insisted that Costa Rica open its telecommunications and insuran
ce sectors to competition. Cooler heads prevailed, however, when the Costa Ricans countered that the Americans should open their sugar and textile markets before requiring them to expose their protected businesses to free market competition.
(Ironically, only yesterday lobbyists from the American sugar and textile industries joined labor activists in declaring that CAFTA does not adequately protect their US market share from erosion by Central American competitors.)
Moreover, Hispanic supporters of NAFTA now point to its unfulfilled promises to justify their opposition to CAFTA. Because notwithstanding higher wage guarantees, real wages in Mexico actually plummeted after NAFTA came into effect. In addition, multinational agribusiness behemoths forced more than 1 million small-scale farmers off their farms and down the primrose path along with other illegal immigrants seeking economic asylum in the Unites States.
Ultimately, though, how lobbyists representing Hispanic business groups and those representing Hispanic labor, environmental and immigration groups spin their respective interests before members of Congress will greatly determine the fate of CAFTA. But if past performance is any indication, despite the pricks on their consciences, a majority of members will do the bidding of their corporate donors and pass this very pro-business trade agreement.
And, so blows the winds of free trade….
Click here for information on the Stop CAFTA coalition.
Click here for information on Pro CAFTA coalition.
[Note: Conspicuously absent from America’s hemispheric trade negations are the black nations of the Caribbean. But this is not merely a racist oversight. After all, why would Bush bother to negotiate with a region of congenitally fractious and self-defeating leaders who have been trying to negotiate economic cooperation amongst themselves for over a quarter century to no avail. Indeed, Caribbean countries remain marginalized from global trade compacts for the same reasons that African countries remain marginalized: if they can’t even negotiate trade agreements amongst themselves, there’s really no reason to hope that they will make reliable trading partners with the developed countries of the world…]
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