Sí a la Vida, No al ALCA

On October 31, 2002 thousands of people from across the Americas converged in Quito, Ecuador. They were not there to celebrate the Dia de Musica Criolla, rather the men and women, young people and elderly, and campesinos representing each country in Latin America, joined in the common goal of demonstrating their opinion to oppose the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Delegates from the 34 countries of the Western Hemisphere, excluding Cuba) gathered in Quito to secretly negotiate the free trade agreement, which is modeled on NAFTA and an expansion of the plan to increase privatization and deregulation.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick described the U.S. interest in Latin America through CAFTA and the FTAA as part of a bigger picture, “to advance U.S. objectives for the multilateral negotiations currently underway in the World Trade Organization” (8/22/02 letter to Congress). “We have no way to live, and the FTAA will only make it worse. When we complain, the U.S. government calls us terrorists. We are not threatening anything, but we are hungry and tired and things have to change,” said Leonidas Iza, the President of the CONAIE (the Ecuadorian indigenous federation).

The blatant U.S. imperialism exercised in the FTAA not only will affect the people in Latin America by creating colonies out of their countries, vulnerable to exploitation by the United States and corporate interests. Many North Americans also are concerned about the impending disaster if the FTAA is approved, which the U.S. hopes to achieve by January 2005.

Modeled after the World Trade Organization's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), the FTAA will include commitments to "liberalize" trade in services such as education, health care, environmental services (which can include access to water!), energy, and postal services. Examples: Privatization of public schools and prisons, like in the U.S. which would open the door to greater corporate control, corruption and the cutting of critical corners (such as medical care for inmates or upkeep of safe school facilities) to increase profits; and Privatization of postal services by transferring U.S. Postal Service functions to a few delivery companies like FedEx, which could then send postal rates through the roof.

Also, The FTAA provides a potential "back door" for the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) through the negotiations on investments and liberalization of the financial services sector. Modeled on NAFTA's Chapter 11, the USTR says that FTAA will include "investor-to-state" suits. These allow corporations to sue governments in secret "corporate courts" for any act that may indirectly affect their profits, such as the enforcement of public health laws. In other words, the FTAA would provide a hemispheric "regulatory takings" clause that explicitly values corporate profits over human costs and environmental degradation.