NAFTA and the elephant in the room

[Joanne98]

Tehran Times | Sunday, July 20, 2008

NAFTA and the elephant in the room

By Laura Carlsen

It’s rare for the junior partners of NAFTA — Mexico and Canada — to have a chance to sit down and discuss regional integration without the dominating influence of the United States. Even when they do, of course, the U.S. is the elephant in the room.

The University of the Americas in Puebla, Mexico hosted a conference recently on the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) from the Canadian and Mexican perspective. Although most of the presentations were from academics, businessmen or government officials, our panel on civil society participation set me to reflecting on the long personal and political history of the nearly 15-year-old NAFTA and its offspring, the SPP.

When negotiations on the free trade agreement with Mexico began in 1991, we had little idea of how a North American Free Trade Agreement would affect the country. But Canada had already been through it all. The U.S.-Mexico agreement sought to extend many of the terms of the 1989 U.S.-Canada agreement and patch them into a regional agreement.

In the early nineties, it was clear that NAFTA represented a huge step forward in locking in the kinds of structural adjustment programs from the IMF and World Bank that had devastated sectors of the economy, and that it formed part of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s project to extend the neoliberal economic model of trade liberalization and export-orientation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from social programs and economic regulation. But we didn’t know the specifics of what to expect and the whole process was being carried out in backrooms hermetically sealed to citizen participation.

I felt like kind of a double agent at the time. I was working as a journalist and editor at Business Mexico, the magazine of the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico, and had also been working with a Mexican non-governmental organization in communications and women’s projects. The dual perspective was fascinating, to say the least. The mood in the Chamber of Commerce was one of euphoria, while the citizen movements felt a sense of impending doom. I had trouble reconciling the opposite scenarios being presented until I realized that it wasn’t so much that one was right and one was wrong, but that the gap between the winners and losers in Mexico’s economy was about to get much, much wider.

At the magazine I began to specialize in stories about sectors that would suffer under the agreement, mainly small-scale agriculture and micro-industry oriented toward the domestic market. There was no real argument from promoters about the lack of “competitiveness” of these sectors — the argument was that these workers would be re-employed in new export-oriented, internationally financed industries. In the face of predictions of massive job loss, they blithely assumed that the market and high growth rates would work it all out. For U.S. businesses in Mexico, the greater mobility of capital and investor incentives in NAFTA presented a bright new day with nary a cloud in sight.

Meanwhile, small farmers organizations couldn’t believe they were being asked to compete with subsidized products from the world’s largest exporter. Independent unions thought the trade-off between more maquiladora jobs, and downward pressure on wages and job security due to international competition between workers was sure to be a bum deal in the long term.

Mexican trade activists decided on a two-part strategy: 1) demand information on the negotiations and 2) call the Canadians. Canadian citizen groups had developed excellent critiques of the FTA from labor and agriculture perspectives and analyzed the way the agreement could affect the social safety net. Although the two countries had very different political and economic contexts, these studies and the experience helped Mexicans to begin to project outcomes. Later, U.S. groups joined the networks as well. There was very little chance of influencing the negotiations, but the groups did manage to get more public information released.

This was the birth of trinational networks that, with ups and downs, have continued to work together to oppose aspects of NAFTA and the SPP to this day. It hasn’t been an easy process and mistakes have been made. Canadian and U.S. labor unions at first viewed Mexican workers not as allies but as unfair competition as their factories moved South. It wasn’t until they began to see the conditions of the Mexican workers and analyze corporate strategies of pitting workers against workers that real solidarity and understanding set in.

Continued>>>
http://bilaterals.org/article.php3?id_article=12745

[Captain Hilts]

1. "Tehran Times?" The elephant in the trade room is CHINA. nt

[Peace Patriot]

2. Good article--an overall perspective on the anti-NAFTA movement

"Over the past year the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and other organizations have sponsored a couple of major meetings to take a look at what we’ve learned from NAFTA and the fight against corporate-led globalization. It gives me no great satisfaction to report that some of the most pessimistic predictions we made — the displacement of small farmers, lower than expected growth rates, the growing divide between the rich and the poor — have come true. And although many of us did not believe NAFTA would solve the immigration problem as its promoters predicted, few imagined the huge increase that occurred.

"We’ve also seen that despite advances, the challenges to our networks today are greater than ever. The extension of NAFTA into security issues under the SPP — in the logic of the Bush National Security Strategy — poses unprecedented dangers to Canadian and Mexican sovereignty. There is no better example of that than the recent Merida Initiative that fundamentally changes the nature of the U.S.-Mexico relationship. The focus on geopolitical goals over human security and the imposition of U.S. foreign policy objectives on Mexico will have lasting and likely destabilizing effects as Mexico takes on the militarized vision of confronting public security challenges."

http://bilaterals.org/article.php3?id_article=12745

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Translation: The "Merida Initiative" means billions of non-existent U.S. tax dollars (borrowed from the Chinese and the Saudis) funneled into war profiteer/police state powers in Mexico, to bash heads in places like Oaxaca, where a six months long teachers union protest, against the fascist thuggery of the local governor, was brutally ended by the Darth Vader-style federal police. The money is for enhancing and further militarizing police power, in anticipation of more such civil unrest. Bush wants Mexico's oil--a constitutionally protected, PUBLIC resource--privatized. That is the agenda of the current president, Calderon, who defeated leftist Lopez-Obrado, by a hairsbreadth margin (0.05%) in a probable stolen election in '06. The oil issue is extremely controversial in Mexico. If Mexicans lose their constitutional control of this resource it just about means that their sovereignty as a country is at an end.

There are currently public hearings all over Mexico on this issue--hearings demanded by leftists in the legislature, and by Lopez Obrador's activists. They are trying to slow it down, and educate the public and raise consciousness about it. Calderon, of course, wanted to ram it through, out of the public eye. He lost that one.

I agree with the writer that NAFTA has caused the immigration problem. First, global corporate predators move jobs/manufacturing to Mexico, to cut wages, say, from $10/hr, to $2/hr. Then, when Mexican workers organize a union and demand $3/hr, the corporate predator pulls up stakes in Mexico, and moves to Cambodia, where they can get away with paying 25 cents/hr. And, of course, all benefits and labor protections are lost along the way. Unsafe conditions, and often brutality, are common in corporate slaveshops, as well as child labor. Secondly, NAFTA has resulted in the eviction of millions of campesinos (small peasant farmers) from their farm land. Campesinos are the best food producers, and also seed-savers, and protectors of millennia of farming knowledge and traditions; they don't use pesticides; they hate GMOs. Their methods have been feeding their families, their communities and their country since the Mayans. Corporate agriculture--practices in Mexico, as well as practices here that aim to dump cheap corporate foods on their markets--deliberately and systematically destroys native farmers, who end up migrating to cities (where there are no jobs) and then come here. They don't want to be here. They want to be with their families and communities in Mexico. They have no choice.

This is a good article on the movement to oppose NAFTA, which began--with great odds against--way back at the beginning. It reveals how Mexican and Canadian activists caught onto NAFTA's potential devastation before workers and farmers in the U.S. did. Now the movement is universal, as each country's movement fights for their country's sovereignty on these issues, and also gains understanding of our common plight--for instance, how workforce is pitted against workforce.

Globalization and internationalism are only bad things if they are run by global corporate predators. It is otherwise great to trade with other countries, get to know other peoples, and loosen up borders and all artificial barriers. Funny how the price of oil doubles, just as labor unions, human rights groups, environmentalists, and all the representatives of the majority in the NAFTA countries, are finally getting together to get rid of NAFTA, as designed by corporate predators, or to re-write it in favor of the workers, the poor and the planet. And they're trying to put a "Berlin Wall" up along the Mexican border. Gee, I wonder what's happening south of the border that they don't want us to know?

Could it be leftist governments elected in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and, recently, Paraguay (!), and next--very likely--in El Salvador and Peru, and quite possibly Mexico in '10--for a near complete leftist sweep of the entire southern portion of the western hemisphere? Yup, they want us to view all this through global corporate predator eyes, not through the eyes of the people who live there and are making it happen. In South America, they are well on their way to creating a South American "Common Market" based on principles of social justice and Latin American self-determination. One way to keep us apart is gas gouging. Another is a fence. Another is immigrant-bashing. Another is lies, slander and disinformation about South America's best leaders. And, of course, goddamn lies about "free trade."