Public
FTAA.soc/civ/118
January 7, 2004

Original: Spanish
Translation: FTAA Secretariat

FTAA - COMMITTEE OF GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVES ON THE PARTICIPATION OF
CIVIL SOCIETY

CONTRIBUTION IN RESPONSE TO THE OPEN AND ONGOING INVITATION
 

THE FTAA

Latin America is standing at a crossroads, and the road it chooses to go down now will define the continent’s future for ever. Moreover, Latin America is facing this choice at a time when its peoples are struggling through another one of the lean decades they have become used to.

For several years now, our foreign ministers and our bureaucrats have been discussing the pros and cons of the FTAA, regardless of the fact that it is the people who bear the burden of the frustration and deceit.

We lost a whole decade with the import substitution program promoted by ECLAC; the foreign debt problem has left us with our hands tied for who knows how long, and the privatization of our state enterprises in line with the “Washington Consensus” has been so disastrous that even the person who coined the phrase has acknowledged it.

So who is the United States to come and propose a fourth way for us to get out of our state of underdevelopment if everything so far has been deceit and failure? Who are they to ask us to open our markets when they subsidize their steel industries and their agriculture?

Look at Argentina, the country that most faithfully applied the Washington Consensus recipes, now, as it faces its collapsed financial system. And look at Colombia, trapped by the guerrilla. Guerrilla movements are a cancer produced by the injustices of the North.

The FTAA is an agreement for the free movement of goods and services in the Americas. In other words, it is a market game. We are underdeveloped countries, and our industries are backward if not obsolete, but we have raw materials and agricultural products, and above all, we have markets.

The countries of the North are interested in our markets and, divided and parceled up as they are now, they will soon turn them into booty. They have actually chased ahead and cut off the road that MERCOSUR and the Andean Pact were slowly and dramatically building towards the continent’s unification. They have even set us a deadline: 2005, under the “divide and rule” approach. We are already divided, and they are just waiting until 2005 to devastate our markets.

The FTAA from now on should mean first ALADI (the Latin American Integration Association) for the people of Latin America, and 2005 should be the deadline for forging Latin America into a single market: then we could start talking about the FTAA. Doing so beforehand is tantamount to suicide.

Some countries are already willing to sign the FTAA agreement, however, and would do so tomorrow if they could. They have become tired of waiting for the union of Latin America, and individually things will probably turn out well for them. These are the countries that the United States is counting on for the 2005 deadline; and thanks to them, the union of Latin America is in doubt. No longer a utopia, it is turning into a flop. That is what the countries of the North want: to divide and rule.

Fortunately, there is still time to prevent a total collapse. Not because we have a way to go until 2005, but because in Brazil, a country which carries such a huge weight in this region, that has taught us so much about how to protect markets, and which cares deeply for MERCOSUR, authorities have emerged that are going to redefine the FTAA project and address the issues at the very heart of the negotiations so that we Latin Americans once and for all take a stand against decisions on the future of Latin America being made in Washington.

There are many astute minds in Latin America; there is great support for integration; but decisions need to be made. The time has come; history awaits. The dream of our liberators lives on in our minds. Let it not fade in this dark night of Latin America’s history; when dawn breaks, let us have made that dream a reality so that we can face the globalization of the world as a rich, vigorous and united continent.

Eduardo Pérez-Albela
Caracas, December 2003