Blood for Free Trade in Miami  
An Analysis of the FTAA 7^th Ministerial Meeting on Nov. 16-21, 2003

Free trade but captive people:  This seemed to be the bloody message embedded in rubber bullet fired at some 25,000 anti-globalization protesters during the Ministerial Conference of the Free Trade Area for the Americas (FTAA) held in Miami on Nov. 16-21. The Miami affair however was merely a half-success for the U.S. corporate powers.  Opposed by the Brazilian government, the corporate powers failed to railroad a comprehensive agreement that would have ensured the full liberalization of trade and investment in Latin America.

By Ricco Alejandro M. Santos
Bulatlat.com

An anti-FTAA protester (right) was hit by rubber bullets fired by the police (left)

Free trade but captive people:  This seemed to be the bloody message embedded in rubber bullets fired at some 25,000 anti-globalization protesters during the Ministerial Conference of the Free Trade Area for the Americas (FTAA) held in Miami on Nov. 16-21.   A virtual police state descended on downtown Miami as police garrisoned blocks and streets, brutally dispersed crowds with nightsticks, pepper spray, tear gas and rubber, wooden and plastic bullets. The dispersal injured more than a hundred, and police arrested over 250 marchers, many of whom were denied of right to counsel, visitation rights and adequate medical attention.

At stake in Miami for the guardians of the FTAA meeting was the defense of the all-out trade and investment liberalization agenda being pushed by U.S. corporations and the Bush administration over a bloc of 34 countries (all countries in the American hemisphere, except Cuba).

The Miami affair however was merely a half-success for the U.S. corporate powers.  Opposed by the Brazilian government, the corporate powers failed to railroad a comprehensive agreement that would have ensured the full liberalization of trade and investment in Latin America.   Backtracking somewhat in order to prepare for a stronger assault, the FTAA conference agreed for now that the U.S., Canadian and Latin American governments adopt a narrower set of trade liberalization policies, leaving individual Latin American regimes with the option of adding to these policies at their own pace.    

The U.S. trade negotiators relented, fearing another collapse in the footsteps of the failed World Trade talks in Cancun, Mexico last September, and in Seattle in 1999.

However, as the Ministerial Declaration indicated, the U.S. trade negotiators were yet willing to attempt to rush the completion of negotiations in a little over a year, by January 2005, the deadline set earlier.

Third agreement

During and even before the Miami meeting, the U.S. had already been seeking to engineer the approval of a third draft agreement that provided not only for a tariff elimination program in agriculture, but also investment policies granting "national treatment" equal to that of local investors:  "Treatment no less favorable than that it accords, in like circumstances, to its own investors with respect to the establishment, acquisition, expansion, management, conduct, operation, and sale or other disposition of investments in its territory".   Unable to secure such a policy through a Multilateral Agreement on Investment in the WTO, the U.S. has been using regional groups such as the FTAA to smuggle in this sub-agenda. 

Thousands of workers joined the anti-FTAA rally in Miami wearing "FTAA Sucks" t-shirts. 

However, in the Miami meeting, the United States has decided not to preempt its agricultural liberalization drive in the WTO, insisting that the issue of eliminating export subsidies and reducing local farm subsidies, which it has been dangling to open up third world economies to U.S. farm exports, be tackled in the WTO rather than in the FTAA.  By doing so, the U.S. likely believes that it can better sell this dubious promise in a concentrated effort at the level of the WTO.  

In opting for this negotiating tack, the United States also reduces its powers, and those of Latin American regimes, to market to the Latin American public and peasantry its agenda of full agricultural trade liberalization and tariff elimination program.

 The FTAA parallels the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as regional bodies whose role is to speed up the WTO trade agenda and timetable.  FTAA is more powerful than APEC however since its decisions are, like those of the WTO, binding, and intends to be even more all-encompassing in coverage than its counterpart China-ASEAN Free Trade Area targeted for 2010.

Formed in 1994

The FTAA was formed by 34 heads of government, led by the U.S., during the Summit of the Americas, held in December 1994 also in Miami.  In that meeting, they agreed to create a free trade agreement by 2005.  From 1994 to 1998, the 34 Trade Ministers built 12 working groups patterned after APEC and WTO.   Formal FTAA negotiations began in 1998 at the Second Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile.  Here it was agreed that the FTAA would be a comprehensive and single package consistent with the WTO.

In the fifth Ministerial meeting in Toronto in November 1999, the trade representatives instructed the negotiating groups to draft their respective chapters of the agreement.  By the sixth Ministerial meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in April 2001, the negotiating groups had drafted and submitted the first draft agreement.  The draft agreement is its third version. If signed, the agreement will take effect in December 2005. 

Since 2001, the "civil society" groups have been invited by FTAA to participate.  However, the groups’ role has been merely decorative and intended merely to project public participation.  Although the FTAA bodies receive and collect the recommendations of these groups, these recommendations do not at all enter the process of discussion and deliberation among the negotiators.

AT the head of the FTAA negotiating process is the Trade Negotiating Committee (TNC), whose acronym scarcely masks the corporate agenda behind it, as in Transnational Corporation (TNC).  This process in the American hemisphere is connected not only to APEC by the same trade liberalization philosophy, but through their common U.S. negotiator, Robert Zoellick, formerly of the notorious Enron Corporation closely associated with U.S. President George W. Bush.

Also directing the corporate thrust of the FTAA agenda are U.S. banks through the Inter-American Development Bank which heads the Tripartite Committee that helps finance and provide analytical support to the FTAA.

The U.S. hopes to eventually emerge triumphant in its full-scale Latin American trade liberalization agenda by co-chairing negotiations in this final phase.  However, this position of leadership is not as advantageous as it may seem since its co-chair is Brazil.

The police state in Miami presents a grim preview of the continuing scenario that accelerated globalization will bring to Latin America:  spiraling poverty, snowballing unrest, and rising military suppression of radical change in defense of such poverty-creation.  But the growth of grassroots anti-globalization forces, over 25,000-strong in Miami, which prompted the Bush administration into unleashing a police state of panic and siege in the city, also shows that this age of globalization is not so stable and formidable after all. Bulatlat.com

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