Acquiescing to Washington's dictates through the FTAA would mean "less protection of the national industry and interests, more unemployment, and more social problems" for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Cuban president Fidel Castro said in a May 1 speech. He noted that the bourgeois regimes in the region "intend to take this monstrous step without consulting their peoples. This is all the democracy that can be expected from the imperial power and its lackeys." The Cuban leader called on labor movements throughout the region to campaign for a plebiscite or national referendum in their countries to reject the FTAA. "No government must be allowed to sell out a nation behind its people's back," Castro stated.

The FTAA was conceived in 1994 at the first Summit of the Americas in Miami where former U.S. president William Clinton called for creating what would be a U.S.-dominated free trade zone stretching from Alaska to Argentina. The meeting--demonstratively excluding Cuba--included 34 heads of state who agreed to draft the FTAA and complete negotiations for the agreement by 2005. At that time many top government officials from semicolonial countries voiced complaints to the media about unfair U.S. restrictions on their imports. Several said their economies would be wiped out by larger competitors if they did not have protective measures for some of their nations' products.

At the third Summit of the Americas, held in April in Quebec City, Canada, the heads of state reaffirmed their commitment to the FTAA, which would supposedly eliminate tariffs and domestic subsidies in all countries of the region with the exception of Cuba. With all the hoopla about "unfettered" trade, however, conflicts are far from being eliminated. The draft trade deal is itself a 434-page document. When it was posted July 4 on the FTAA's web site, the Associated Press reported, "Many brackets in the agreement language underscore how much ground negotiators have to cover."

The Brazilian government was one of the regimes at the Quebec summit that reportedly balked at the FTAA, insisting that Washington reduce its farm subsidies and antidumping rules, which keep out Brazilian products such as steel, sugar, and orange juice. "We will insist that free-trade benefits should be equally shared by all participants, that trade opening should be reciprocal and that it should lead to the attenuation rather than the aggravation of the disparities that exist in our region," said Brazilian president Fernando Cardoso. "Otherwise it would be irrelevant or, worse, undesirable."  
 
Protectionist measures
Washington has imposed tariffs of 45 percent on 15 of Brazil's main exports, including sugar, orange juice, and shoes. The Brazilian government is also embroiled in a five-year trade dispute with the Canadian imperialists, who claim that subsidies to the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer has robbed the Montreal-based Bombardier Inc. of sales of regional jet planes. Earlier this year Ottawa moved to slap Can$2.3 billion in trade sanctions against Brazil and banned imports of Brazilian beef, charging that it could carry mad cow disease.

While the FTAA is supported by a majority of U.S. capitalists, there is some conflict over the trade agreement between those who compete in Latin America and who want more protectionist measures than currently stipulated by the FTAA. For example, the sugar industry in the United States enjoys one of the most protectionist havens--a 244 percent tariff on sugar imports. And according to the New York Times, the Flo-Sun Corporation and other giant sugar producers want more restrictive trade polices. "Sugar programs that protect growers from foreign competition" are maintained at a cost of $2 billion a year, the paper reported.

A 10-year-old conflict between U.S. and Canadian timber companies has also flared up, with U.S. timber bosses demanding restrictions on softwood lumber imports from Canada. Washington has also placed a ban on potatoes from Canada's Prince Edward Island, supposedly because of concerns about a potato virus.

Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives voted in June to prohibit Mexican trucks from using U.S. highways beyond 20 miles of the border. The Senate voted the following month to substantially increase inspection requirements of Mexican trucks before they enter the United States. The bipartisan votes for the measures were justified on claims that Mexican trucks are unsafe and would present road hazards. The truck access was part of the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which mandated Washington to allow Mexican trucks to ship goods to and from any place in the United States by Jan. 1, 2002.

NAFTA is a precursor of the FTAA. The NAFTA trade pact, penned by the U.S. government along with Canada and Mexico, is a trade bloc primarily aimed at Washington's rivals in Europe and Japan.

Trade agreements like NAFTA are aimed at extending the domination by the handful of wealthy ruling families in the United States and Canada over superexploited workers and oppressed nations such as Mexico. Many voices in the debate over the trade pact point out that despite the Bush and Clinton administrations' statements about the FTAA guaranteeing a "level playing field for all" the nature of the economic and social relations between the imperialist powers and semicolonial countries, as well as the raft of both formal and informal measures used by Washington to restrict imports, make a mockery of pretenses at equality.

"While espousing the virtues of free trade, the United States, Japan, members of the European Union, and other rich countries continue to employ various means--including high tariffs, export subsidies and hygiene restrictions--to shelter their own industries, effectively preventing developing countries from gaining greater share in the markets," wrote Washington Post reporter William Drozdiak .

In order to bolster regional trade and international competitiveness, many countries in South America and the Caribbean have sought to form economic alliances. The FTAA would be a powerful lever in Washington's hands to undercut or force the scraping of trade pacts like the Mercosur customs union, the Caribbean Community and Common Market or Caricom, and the Andean Pact. Mercosur, also known as the Southern Common Market, was established in 1991 in Asuncion, Paraguay, to develop a common market and remove trade barriers between Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay.

While these economic agreements were drafted to remove trade barriers between member countries, Mercosur has also attempted to create a measure of preference over foreign capital among its member countries. A number of other countries have signed agreements with Mercosur as associate members, including Chile in 1996 and Bolivia in 1997. Negotiations have taken place between Mercosur and countries from the Andean Pact--Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Bolivia--that would establish a South American common market for trade and investment.  
 
Normal workings of capitalism
Since the rise of finance capital at the opening of the last century, every action by Washington or some other capitalist power--be it a bank loan to the ruling classes in a semicolonial nation, a trade pact, or a scheme to replace a national currency with the U.S. dollar--has warped the economies of the oppressed nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

This process is the lawful functioning of capitalism in the imperialist epoch. The imperialist powers have used their dominance in manufacturing, transport, access to capital, and, when needed, their military power, to maintain the semicolonial countries as sources of cheap raw materials and markets for commodities.

Meanwhile, as international finance capital has squeezed more and more wealth from the toilers of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to boost their sagging profit margins, the total Third World debt today has soared to more than $2 trillion, immensely higher than at the worst level of the debt crisis of the 1980s.

Since 1980 the living conditions for millions of workers and peasants in Latin America and the Caribbean have worsened. The number of people living below the official poverty line has risen from 39 percent to 44 percent over the past two decades. The debt owed by Latin American countries to banks in the imperialist centers went from $300 billion in 1985 to $750 billion today, even as these countries paid hundreds of billions in interest payments over the same years. In fact, 56 percent of the region's income from exports is diverted toward paying this debt, which continues to grow. Between 1992 and 1999 countries in Latin America paid $913 billion in debt-servicing charges, that is interest on loans from imperialist investors.  
 
'Union of a shark and some sardines'
The FTAA "is nothing other than integration between a shark and some sardines," said Osvaldo Martínez, president of the Cuban National Assembly's Economic Affairs Commission. "The reasons for the FTAA are not what the Caribbean or Latin Americans want nor are they the alleged advantages of economic integration for those countries," he noted.

Martínez was a speaker at the International Conference in Solidarity with Cuba and Against Neocolonial Globalization held in Havana May 2. The meeting was hosted by the Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC) and included representatives of more than 200 unions from 58 countries. Participants at the conference approved a plan to call on the trade union movement in Latin America and the Caribbean to mobilize against the imperialist trade pact. They set July 22–24 as the date for a meeting in Caracas, Venezuela, to build opposition to the FTAA.

Faced with competition from its rivals in Europe and Japan, U.S. finance capital seeks to "consolidate its dominion over Latin America and the Caribbean.... in the context of the struggle between the large centers of world power," Martínez explained. The U.S. rulers aim to assert their dominance over a region they view as their backyard and extend control over a broad range of markets and raw materials, and draw on a source of cheap labor for enormous profits.

Cuban president Fidel Castro, who also participated in the conference, led the May Day march and rally at Revolution Square the previous day, which he billed as the "first protest" against the FTAA. Both Castro and Martínez pointed to nontariff barriers that range from alleged environmental protection measures to subsidies that push Latin American goods from the market, and reinforce dependency on U.S. capital. Castro pointed out how "the U.S. agricultural sector receives some $80 billion in subsidies and will continue receiving them in the future, whatever the disguise."
 
 
Related articles:
Argentine general strike condemns austerity drive
FTAA and imperialist plunder  
 
 
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