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"Free
Trade" Takes a Dive in Miami
Forced
Smiles & State Repression Can't Hide the Victory for Global
Justice
by Soren Ambrose
Reality
Check
This article covers the implications of what was decided –
and not
decided – by the trade ministers meeting in Miami to discuss
the Free Trade Areas of the Americas (FTAA) from November 17 to November
21.
It is, I
hope, well known that thousands of activists came to Miami to
express their opposition to the treaty while the FTAA talks
were taking
place. The largest single contingent was from organized labor,
although well over a thousand retirees came, as did thousands
of
dedicated direct-action protesters and representatives of
non-governmental organizations. The level of knowledge and commitment,
as usual, was amazing. Although the substance of the protests
and
accompanying teach-in events received little media coverage,
the
turnout was large and diverse, and the sophistication and dedication
of
the activists was certainly serious enough to assure anyone
that the
movement for global justice in the United States is alive and
well and
on the move.
The opposition
to the FTAA that has been so vibrant and assertive in South
America, the Caribbean, and Central America was also represented
in Miami, and, more importantly, echoed in the solidarity of
people from around the U.S. It is no exaggeration to say that
popular movements throughout the hemisphere have called their
governments to account, and have as a result largely stopped
the FTAA in its tracks. That the U.S. government is the most
recalcitrant in this regard should surprise no one, and U.S.
activists should feel no discouragement for having less obvious
success than their counterparts in the rest of the hemisphere.
The U.S. government continues to be the driving force in the
FTAA, and the U.S. activist effort remains crucial.
The cooperation
and respect that characterized the interactions of major labor
unions, radical direct action protesters, church groups, and
NGOs in Miami, hammered out over sometimes-difficult issues,
has made the U.S. movement stronger and more aware of its own
potential. The outcome of the Miami talks and the resilience
of the movement in the face of intense repression in the streets
of Miami reflect, I think, a momentum that will bring the movement
to a peak at the time of the mobilization coming together for
the IMF/World Bank spring meetings (April 23-27, 2004) in Washington,
DC.
What did
get media coverage was the over-the-top brutal response of the
South Florida law-enforcement agencies to the protests. Nothing
I have seen in North America or Europe – and I’ve
been to a few protests – matches the level of provocation,
intimidation, and hostility I saw on the streets of Miami. There
is so much to say about what happened, about the arbitrary violence
visited upon defenseless elderly people, the mass rrests, the
casual assumption of a war-like attitude against people of the
U.S. for daring to have opinions at variance with local and
national power structures, and a local media so poised to parrot
the authorities that they often outdid the police.
Much of
it is being said by others who were closer to the worst repression,
and what I have to report about the trade talks themselves is
long enough to occupy most readers. Suffice it to say that the
crimes committed against the U.S. constitution and against common
decency in Miami will not be forgotten any time soon. Legal
action is underway, and a broad range of organizations are working
together to demand that the climate of casual repression, fear,
and hate fostered by the Bush/Ashcroft Administration be exposed
and ended. While it is true that the indignities and brutalities
suffered by people on the streets of Miami still pale in comparison
to those that are all too routine in countries like Colombia,
Guatemala, Bolivia, and most recently the Dominican Republic,
a giant step toward those unenviable benchmarks was taken in
Miami, and must be rejected in the United States with as much
vigor as possible. That the repression was financed in part
by $8.5 million in federal funds contained in the most recent
Congressional appropriation to support the military occupation
of Iraq is a sad, and appropriate, reflection of what this country
has come to. The task of recovering some measure of sanity in
this all-too-flawed country is indivisible from the struggle
we wage for global justice every day.
That said,
let me offer a few reflections on the outcome of the “other”
events at the FTAA talks in Miami.
None of
the Fun of Cancún: Boring (not Boorish) and Shortened
Months of preparation were devoted to the FTAA summit in Miami,
scheduled for November 2021. Caravans of opponents organized
and traveled from across the U.S. and Canada; seminars and workshops
were planned; activists from across the hemisphere scraped for
funds to get to Miami. The 40-plus law-enforcement agencies
of South Florida charged with protecting the trade ministers
from the imagined mischief of protesters spent months building
up their stock of weapons and adrenaline. Trade lawyers and
public relations consultants bickered over both technical details
and big-picture economic philosophies.
So it felt
almost disrespectful when the office of the U.S. Trade Representative
(USTR) announced at 5:50 pm on the meeting’s first day
(of the two scheduled) that the Brazilian delegation’s
press conference scheduled for 6 pm was cancelled and would
be superceded by a 6:45 pm
press conference featuring all 34 trade ministers. Speculation
that an early agreement had been reached was confirmed by a
second announcement about 15 minutes later: this would be the
meeting’s closing press conference. After all that work,
to have the meeting stop at the halfway point, after less than
six hours of official talks!
The sense
of being cheated was probably strongest for those who had been
in Cancún for the five-day September summit of the World
Trade Organization (WTO) which set the stage for Miami, and
particularly for those with a seat in the media center, where
all sorts of maneuvering, posturing, back-stabbing, manipulation,
deceit, and bravado were on display in a dizzying series of
press conferences, corridor chats, stunts, and communiqués.
The media center in Miami was, by comparison, a complete backwater.
The U.S. government was more successful this time stage-managing
the process and keeping the surprises and excitement to a minimum.
The goal was to assure everyone that the assembled egotiators
were getting along fine and reaching measured agreements with
equanimity, and to wind it up and get home before too many questions
were asked.
The U.S.
Swallows Hard & Smiles Wanly
The closing press conference simply confirmed that the compromise
between the U.S. and Brazil, already widely reported on for
several days, was now being accepted by the larger body. The
result was a defeat for the U.S. government and its corporate
constituency. Rather than a hemisphere-wide treaty that would
lock in investment and patent rules that favor multinational
corporations, as had been promised for nine years by both the
Clinton and Bush administrations, the U.S. now had to settle
for what the Brazilians made their bottom line: an agreement,
called by some “à la carte,” where each country
could opt-in or opt-out of each provision of the treaty. The
sole U.S. accomplishment was in keeping the smorgasbord open:
the FTAA countries will be able to opt into or out of agreements
on issues in all nine technical categories it wanted (including
investment, patents, market access, dispute settlement procedures,
and anti-dumping measures).
No silver
stake has yet been nailed into the heart of the FTAA, but its
fangs are significantly dulled. The à la carte approach,
which was never even contemplated publicly until after Cancún,
appears to be a done deal, and provides the room needed for
governments to avert the coercion that would be the agreement’s
greatest danger.
But activists
will still have to guard against a Hollywood ending where the
injured monster roars back to life, its viciousness redoubled
by its rage. One of the greatest victories for the global justice
movement – the defeat in 1997 of the Multilateral Agreement
on Investment (MAI), which would have pressured governments
to give up their capacity to regulate foreign investment, provides
a lesson worth remembering. After the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) was finally persuaded to
halt discussions on the MAI, it has continued to pop up, in
different guises, at the IMF, the WTO, in bilateral trade treaties,
and at the FTAA; indeed, the U.S.’s insistence on keeping
MAI-style provisions in the FTAA was one of the key reasons
for its failure. Those silver stakes are elusive.
Making agreements
“voluntary” can only be a partial comfort: joining
the WTO, after all, is voluntary. Weak governments come to the
table out of fear -- often backed up by explicit threats --
that failure to volunteer for what the U.S. recommends will
mean being frozen out of global markets entirely. These realities
of power create the irony of meetings like Seattle and Cancún,
where the majority of WTO members work very hard to prevent
the organization from agreeing to anything substantial. They
have to be at the table to stay in the game, they think -- and
to keep the rich players from walking away with all the chips.
What the
global justice movement wants is to start a new game with a
new rulebook – and not necessarily one identical to what
governments like those in Brazil or Jamaica or Argentina would
like. Calling Cancún and Miami successes may, in that
context, seem excessive. But so decisively preventing the U.S.
(and in Cancún, the European Union and Japan) from winning
anything at either meeting is a solid achievement, and advances
the larger cause. It could be objected that the U.S. won something
simply by being able to say that the negotiations are moving
forward with all of the issues, including investment, still
on the table – or, to use the USTR’s metaphor, the
FTAA train has left the station with all nine boxcars attached.
But, as Deborah James of Global Exchange pointed out, those
boxcars are empty, and looking toward the next sub-ministerial
meeting, slated for Puebla, Mexico in February, “rather
than moving on track towards success, it looks more like a train
wreck ahead.” The good kind of train wreck, that is.
What
Has Been Won, and How to Preserve It
What has been won is pretty big: confirmation, after Cancún,
that developing countries will refuse to be bullied by the U.S.
and other wealthy governments; confirmation that other countries
will resist the coercive rules that would cripple their capacity
to regulate investment and provide basic services such as the
provision of water, health care and medications; and confirmation
that U.S. insistence on further stacking the deck for its agribusiness
interests will be opposed by countries whose farmers and food
security have already been devastated by U.S. policies.
The question
for civil society groups now is whether it would be better to
hope for a small-scale FTAA to be finalized and signed on schedule
– within the next year – or to hold out for a complete
collapse. It may well be that sealing a non-binding FTAA now,
even with skeletal provisions on investment and intellectual
property rights written in, would more effectively minimize
the chances for mischief down the road, so long as it would
not be possible for the U.S. to use it to bludgeon countries
into making future commitments. Better the U.S. should have
to convince the rest of the hemisphere to start an entirely
new process than to keep the FTAA process open for the U.S.
to twist in future years.
Of course
it is hard to predict what direction the talks will take in
2004, though the “lite” approach seems to be the course
for now. Regardless of what surprises may loom, the result in
Miami should be recognized as a victory for progressive political
forces North and South, a valuable extension of the victory
won in Cancún.
Mr. Zoellick
Eats Humble Pie, Discreetly
At the closing press conference, Robert Zoellick, the U.S. Trade
Representative, demonstrated a nimble capacity for painting
a happy face on what to him must have been a pretty sad piece
of merchandise. As he said several times, lessons were learnt
in Cancún. Zoellick was suggesting that his colleagues
had learned that cooperation is wiser than confrontation: only
such a line could make his post-Cancún finger-wagging
at Brazil and its “won’t do” partners in the
“Group of 21” at the WTO cohere with his renunciation
of virtually everything the U.S. had wanted to get out of the
Miami meeting on the FTAA.
The real
lessons of Cancún for Zoellick seem to have been twofold:
1) a trade meeting being branded a failure was a headline the
Administration did not want to see twice in two months, especially
with a presidential election on the horizon; and 2) the dream
of using multilateral trade treaties to win sweeping victories
for market fundamentalism is over, at least for now.
In the immediate
aftermath of the Cancún WTO talks, Zoellick spluttered
with rage. Worse perhaps than the collapse of the talks, for
Zoellick, was the confrontational approach of the developing
countries that prevented the U.S. from at least crafting a congenial
cover story to conceal the absence of agreement. He railed against
Brazil, the most visible leader of developing country opposition
in Cancún. He traveled through Central America making
hard-line declarations about the Central America Free Trade
Agreement (CAFTA), due to be signed in a few months, and he
successfully pressured most of the Latin American countries
which had allied themselves with Brazil in Cancún –
Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica – to
announce a change of heart. He made clear that the U.S. would
not settle for a reduced vision of the FTAA in Miami. But at
the end of October, something changed. A hasty pre-Miami mini-summit
was arranged for Lansdowne, Maryland in early November, and
though no great announcements were made, it would appear that
meeting sealed the U.S.’s decision to give up on its nine-year
vision of the FTAA.
The picture
Zoellick tried to portray at the closing press conference was
of a new, warm relationship with Brazil and a big-tent FTAA
that would please everyone. But the first question in English
came from Neil King, the Wall Street Journal’s trade reporter,
who punctured the myth-making quickly, if politely, by asking
Zoellick how he had moved from the threatening hard-line language
of September to the warm and fuzzy talk of “chemistry”
in November. Had he and the head of Brazil’s delegation,
Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, who is the co-chair of the FTAA
talks along with Zoellick, gone out for a very chummy dinner?
The question had the effect of laying bare just how much the
U.S. was giving up, even if King’s article the next day
was significantly muddier than his zinger question.
Zoellick
was able to spin his way around reporters’ questions pretty
well, but his main constituency – big business – was
in Miami and was clearly not buying his line. The National Association
of Manufacturers and other influential U.S. capitalists did
not try to hide their displeasure with the shape of the agreement,
going so far as to imply that no agreement would be better than
the “à la carte” approach. The only part of
Bush’s corporate constituency likely to find the outcome
in Miami wholly satisfying are the agribusiness interests, who
did not want to see their fix on the markets discussed (much
less threatened), and particularly the sugar and fruit juice
lobbies, who were most vulnerable to the sort of bargaining
the U.S. and Brazil decided against engaging in.
What
a Change a Decade Makes
As Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies, who has
been monitoring the FTAA since its beginnings in 1994, has pointed
out, the atmosphere for hemisphere-wide free trade talks is
significantly different now. Back then, the FTAA was portrayed
as the next great step for the neo-liberal “free trade”
model: the WTO was about to come into existence, the U.S. economy
was riding high under the shallow but reassuring gaze of Bill
Clinton, popular challenges to the neo-liberal model had not
yet hit the headlines, and Latin America was nearly entirely
democratic (in the U.S.’s reckoning), with most of its
leaders sufficiently tamed by the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and World Bank so they could be relied on to continue
following the neo-liberal “free trade” path.
A few months
after the 1994 meeting however, Mexico, already hit by the Zapatista
rebellion the same day NAFTA went into effect, entered its disastrous
“peso crisis.” Since then, numerous governments in
the region have lost power because of their insistence on neo-liberal
economic polices – several of them in Ecuador, but also
in Paraguay, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, and, most recently,
Bolivia. El Salvador will probably elect a leftist government
in a few months. Mass demonstrations there and in Peru and Bolivia
have reversed plans to privatize basic public services. The
week before the Miami meetings, six people were killed in demonstrations
in the Dominican Republic over new demands being made by the
IMF. Public opinion polls indicate a complete loss of faith
in the “free trade” model throughout the region.
In this
context, the Miami meeting was probably doomed long before Cancún.
Indeed, the outcome in Miami could have been more calamitous
for the U.S. and other true believers in trickle-down corporate
globalization. As it was, Zoellick’s humiliating climb-down
just confirmed the established trend in Latin America. If Zoellick
and the Administration were in denial before Cancún,
it is clear that sometime before Miami they faced the music
and started adjusting to the fact that the democracy their predecessors
hailed in the region had created more accountable governments
that would not be able to continue ignoring their populations’
rejection of the unbalanced economic policies forced on them
for the past 25 years.
The Bilateral
Blitz
Part of Zoellick’s strategy after Cancún was to
declare that the U.S., as much as it desired global agreement
on pro-corporate rules, would not wait for those who refused
to negotiate on its terms: it would create bilateral (two-country)
and regional “free trade” agreements with “can-do”
countries that would play its game. His trip to Central America
underlined this approach: the CAFTA would go forward regardless
of whether troublesome countries like Brazil would agree to
a full-scale FTAA. Zoellick’s harsh words in San José
when the Costa Rican government demurred on privatization of
its communications sector – he would just move to drop
Costa Rica from the CAFTA, he said – were part of his macho
strategy.
Although
it was clear that Zoellick had decided to make nice with Brazil
for the cameras in Miami, the day before the official opening
(and, as it turned out, closing) of the talks he was in a more
aggressive mode. He issued a barrage of statements and held
press conferences with governments which declared themselves
willing to work on bilateral or regional treaties. Panama, which
is not part of CAFTA, will begin talks with the U.S. about a
bilateral treaty. The Dominican Republic, apparently despite
the fact that activists there are willing to risk their lives
to oppose its recent IMF agreement, wants to get in on CAFTA
(why it and not Panama would be allowed to do so is not clear).
Peru and Colombia will start talks with the U.S. in the spring
of 2004; Bolivia and Ecuador would like to at some later point.
And on the day after the end of the Miami meetings, Zoellick
announced that the U.S. and Uruguay would begin negotiating
a bilateral investment treaty.
This part
of Zoellick’s strategy was more in keeping with his usual
persona: “The Godfather” is a better model for understanding
his negotiating style than his formal title of “Ambassador.”
By announcing – in the vaguest terms possible, and with
his counterparts making the most desultory supporting comments
– talks with Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, Zoellick
was in reality trying to demonstrate that the U.S. had the power
to isolate Venezuela from its Andean partners. Venezuela, of
course, is governed by Hugo Chávez, a maverick leftist
whom the U.S. is anxious to ensure no other regional governments
will consider imitating.
Negotiations
with the Dominican Republic and Panama should make clear, Zoellick
might reason, that any potential troubles with the CAFTA in
El Salvador or Costa Rica will be put to rest by the spectre
of the entire region rushing to obey the whims of Washington.
And Uruguay is perhaps the most carefully calculated of all.
There the announcement waited until after the buddy-buddy photo
opportunities with Mr. Amorim from Brazil: a gentle reminder
that the U.S. can play nice, but is also capable of peeling
off Brazil’s allies in Mercosur, the customs union of Paraguay,
Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. It is also quite possible that
the Andean gambit was partly intended for Mr. Amorim: the Andean
community (with Venezuela in this case) has in the past year
been talking about closer cooperation with Mercosur, possibly
leading to a full South American trading bloc.
Many progressive
commentators were alarmed by the “bilateral blitz.”
As well they should be: when the U.S. negotiates one-on-one,
or with a group of weak countries such as in the CAFTA, it has
much more leverage, and can generally force governments to agree
to virtually anything in exchange for the supposedly special
access to U.S. markets. For each country where such talks do
proceed, the dangers are substantial.
It is also
the case, however, that this strategy was in place before Cancún;
indeed, a bilateral agreement with Chile – in which Chile
took the very regrettable step of committing to eliminate probably
the most progressive regime of investment regulations of any
developing country – was signed just before the WTO meeting.
Many NGOs present in Miami issued statements welcoming the U.S.
climb-down on the FTAA while also highlighting their deep concern
over the focus on bilateral agreements.
The bilaterals
are dangerous, and have been for some time (the U.S. is also
negotiating, or has signed, bilateral or regional treaties with
Morocco, Jordan, Australia, South Africa, Botswana, Namibia,
Lesotho, Swaziland, and Thailand). But with the 2004 election
year upon us, it is not clear that rapid progress will be made
on new bilateral agreements. In the medium term, however, if
opposition like that seen in Cancún and Miami continues
to be successful, the bilateral and regional treaties are likely
to be where the fights over global trade policy take place.
Stop
CAFTA! Now!
For now, the next big moment in the fight against free trade
treaties is upon us: talks are scheduled for the week of December
6-12 in the Washington, DC, area to finalize the terms of the
CAFTA. This agreement would handcuff some of the poorest countries
in the world to policies they cannot afford, and to greater
and greater domination by the United States. It is a true disaster.
Opposition to it has been intense in Guatemala, Honduras, El
Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. In Washington, actions
against the meeting are being organized from within the large
Salvadoran expatriate community. We are hopeful that the final
treaty that emerges will be one a future progressive Salvadoran
government can extricate itself from – or, even more hopefully,
that the difficulties encountered by governments like Costa
Rica’s will postpone the signing of the treaty until governments
have a chance to become more accountable to their populations.
(For information
on actions in Washington, contact Dave Johnson at
<dave@share-elsalvador.org>;
for actions elsewhere and more information
see www.stopcafta.org.)
Your
reactions and ideas are encouraged.
Please email
or call (888) 728-7228 x5388.
Prepared
by Andrew Kang Bartlett
Associate for National Hunger Concerns
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