At the April Summit of the Americas meeting of government leaders, to
be held in Quebec City, Canada, the United States will seek
endorsement for the extension of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) to the rest of the capitalist countries of the
Western hemisphere. The scheme is called the Free Trade Area of the
Americas — the FTAA.

LATIN AMERICA: US to tighten
trade screws

BY EVA CHENG

At the April Summit of the Americas meeting of government leaders, to
be held in Quebec City, Canada, the United States will seek
endorsement for the extension of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) to the rest of the capitalist countries of the
Western hemisphere. The scheme is called the Free Trade Area of the
Americas — the FTAA.

The idea for the FTAA was initially raised in December 1994 during the first
Summit of the Americas in Miami, coming hard on the heels of NAFTA's
implementation in January that year. Formal negotiations were launched only
during the SoA's second summit in Santiago, Chile, in April 1998. The Quebec
City summit is to be a high point of that negotiation process, due to conclude in
2005.

The FTAA is an attempt to expand to virtually the whole of the Americas what
NAFTA is offering its three members — the US, Canada and Mexico.

NAFTA's price

Mexico has paid the dearest price for NAFTA, impoverishing many of its
people, coating much of its landscape with pollution from dirty industries and
undermining what remained of its national sovereignty.

As a condition for membership, for example, the country had to change its
constitution to allow foreign acquisitions of its land. To comply with NAFTA's
market access and anti-subsidy rules, a huge number of Mexican peasants have
been forced off their land. According to a study of the first five years of the
agreement conducted by the US activist group Public Citizen, “This has greatly
contributed to Mexico's 65% under/unemployment rate