The final declaration by the heads of state from the 34 countries present said there was agreement in principle for the formation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), but did not specify a date for its implementation. The U.S. delegation, headed by President George Bush, sought a 2005 deadline.

The FTAA is an initiative by Washington intended to open up the underdeveloped countries on the continent to further penetration, and thus domination, by U.S. finance capital. The U.S. rulers seek to use such a pact to beat down trade and investment barriers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, while maintaining in place U.S. tariffs and strengthening Washington’s edge over its rivals in the European Union.

A U.S. proposal to exclude “the most corrupt” governments from these regional meetings was not included in the final declaration. A number of representatives of Latin American governments argued that it was too vague and some said that Washington would use the clause to isolate its rivals, such as Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez.

The most pointed remarks by the U.S. president were reserved for the one government from the Americas not in attendance—Cuba—which has been excluded from participation in these meetings. Bush reiterated his administration’s call for a “rapid and peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba.”

Workers and farmers on the island ousted the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista on Jan. 1, 1959, through a popular revolution. Successive U.S. administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, have strengthened policies aimed at overturning Cuba’s socialist revolution—including numerous attempts to assassinate Cuban leaders and an economic war that continues to this day.

Bush held what were reported as contentious meetings with Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Argentina’s president Nestor Kirchner. Along with the Chávez government in Venezuela, those of Argentina and Brazil have been dubbed an emerging Latin American “axis of evil” by U.S. congressman Henry J. Hyde, a Republican from Illinois.

Bush did not meet with Hugo Chávez, whom U.S. officials recently accused of working with Cuba to destabilize “democratic governments” in the region. At a January 6 press conference, Roger Noriega, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, accused Cuba of “actions to destabilize Latin America [that] are increasingly provocative to the inter-American community.”  
 
Cuba and Venezuela
Two days later, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell defended Noriega’s comments, adding that “Cuba has been trying to do everything it could to destabilize parts of the region.”

Unnamed U.S. officials told the Associated Press that “Cuba and Venezuela are working together to oppose pro-American, democratic governments in the region with money, political indoctrination, and training, such as in Ecuador and Uruguay. They also implied that “Venezuelan resources may have helped in the October ouster of Bolivia’s elected, pro-American president, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada.”

The Venezuelan government has come under Washington’s fire for taking measures that cut into the profits of finance capital, including a land reform law and a bill extending new rights to exploited independent fishermen. Washington is also hostile to Venezuela’s normal diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba.

At the summit, Chávez said that his government would sign the final declaration “with reservations.” He called the FTAA “an infernal machinery that, minute by minute, produces an impressive number of poor.” He skipped the official summit dinner calling it a “waste of time” and said he spent the lunch time on the phone with Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi to discuss a summit between Latin American and African nations.

In a speech at the summit, Chávez thanked Cuba for its help, noting that 1 million people in Venezuela have learned to read and write partly because of Cuba’s help with his government’s literacy program. He also noted that Cuban doctors now offer treatment free of charge to more than 10 million of Venezuela’s 23 million people. Just two days before the Monterrey summit, Chávez rejected U.S. criticism of the ties between Caracas and Havana, and told Washington to “stop sticking its nose” in the internal affairs of his country.

Following the Monterrey meeting, Chávez flew to Havana to meet with Cuban president Fidel Castro. Thousands of Cuban doctors and literacy workers are helping the Venezuelan government carry out a nationwide literacy campaign and provide medical care to workers and peasants in the most remote areas of the country.  
 
Argentine foreign debt
Days before the summit, Argentina’s president Nestor Kirchner “tossed diplomacy out the window,” according to an online article by the Knight Ridder news agency. At a public ceremony outside Buenos Aires Kirchner condemned interference in Argentina’s affairs by the U.S. administration. “We have stopped being a carpet. We can accept or arrange meetings but nobody orders us… because we are a country with dignity,” Kirchner said.

Kirchner’s remarks came in response to comments by Noriega, of the U.S. State Department, condemning the refusal of Argentina’s foreign minister, Rafael Bielsa, to meet with “dissidents” during a recent trip to Cuba. A cabinet member of Argentina’s government has also said that his government will not vote against Cuba in the annual meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, despite pressure from Washington, according to the Washington Times. Kirchner also scuttled legislation that would have paved the way for U.S. troops to participate in training exercises with Argentine forces, reported the Times.

According to Knight Ridder, Kirchner told journalists that Argentina would “win by a knockout” if a hastily arranged meeting between him and Bush during the summit took place. Kirchner was bringing a proposal that his government pay $.25 to the dollar to resolve Argentina’s more than $88 billion foreign debt. Buenos Aires defaulted on its foreign debt payments two years ago and suffered an economic collapse.

Some government officials at Monterrey strongly criticized Washington for failing on its promises that “free trade” capitalism and democracy would stabilize and bring prosperity to Latin America.

Brazil’s president described as a decade of “desperation” the last 10 years of U.S.-sponsored packages of “market reforms,” known as the “Washington Consensus.” As a result, he said, Latin America lives with “the awful reality of widespread and disgracefully increasing poverty.”

A media session scheduled to take place following Bush’s meeting with da Silva lasted 20 seconds amounting to a handshake and pat on the back. Bush’s aides then hustled reporters out of the room saying “Thank you. Let’s go. Back out the same door.”

During the summit, Bush told Ottawa that Canadian companies would now be eligible to bid for a second round of U.S.-financed contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq. The Canadian government was earlier excluded from the first round of such contracts, along with many other governments that are not part of the U.S.-created “coalition of the willing,” because it did not send troops to back the Anglo-American war on Iraq last year.  
 
Immigration from Mexico
Mexican president Vicente Fox used the summit to publicly announce his support for a proposed bill by Bush to give temporary work permits to an estimated 8 million mostly Mexican undocumented immigrant workers in the United States, provided they are currently employed. The legislation would force those workers to return to their countries of origin once their work visa expires and would provide Washington with a list of the undocumented, enabling it to tighten control on immigration. In the press conference with Fox, the U.S. president stressed that the intent of the plan is that most of these “temporary workers” would return home after their permits expired.

Fox spoke cautiously about the plan, according to the Washington Post, and did not explicitly endorse it until he took questions. The day before he told NBC News the plan was “part of the enchilada.” He added that he would “work for more of it—more enchilada.”

Agreement on concrete provisions for the FTAA has been locked up over U.S. agricultural subsidies to large capitalist farmers and rules on investment and “intellectual property rights.” A meeting of the World Trade Organization in Cancún, Mexico, last September ended at a similar impasse when Washington, Ottawa, France, and other imperialist powers refused to even discuss reductions in agricultural subsidies that they use as an economic club against semicolonial nations.

The imperialist powers subsidize agricultural products at an estimated $300 billion annually, resulting in about $24 billion in lost income among the semicolonial nations. A report issued in August by Oxfam, an international aid organization, stated that the $10 billion subsidy to U.S. corn growers has resulted in “cheap American corn flooding the Mexican market and pushing the poorest Mexican farmers out of business.

“Mexico, the birthplace of corn,” said the report, “opened its borders to U.S. corn exports after signing the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. Within a year, corn imported from the United States doubled. Today one-third of all corn used in Mexico is imported from the United States.” In order to compete with the U.S. subsidized imports, the Oxfam report said, the price of Mexican corn has fallen more than 70 percent, with a catastrophic reduction in the incomes of 15 million Mexicans who depend on corn production for their livelihood.  
 
 
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