Miami Vices

The Bush administration is planning to launch another assault on foreign territory this month--and not in the Middle East. This time, the attack will be directed not just at one country, but at 34, and battle lines will stretch from Alaska to Argentina. In this invasion, the U.S. government will be armed not with tanks and cruise missiles, but with a trade agreement so secret that even members of Congress do not know its full content.

The treaty is the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a document which few people have ever heard of and even fewer have actually read. The next round of negotiations on the FTAA will take place inside the posh Hotel Inter-Continental in Miami on Nov. 19-21, while tens of thousands of protesters are expected to gather outside. If passed, the FTAA would expand the neo-liberal free-market economic policies of the North American Free Trade Agreement to every country in the Americas (minus Cuba), encompassing some 800 million people.

The cornerstone of NAFTA was the idea of "free competition" between corporations in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. But, like the U.S.'s "open door" trade policy in China in the 19th century, free trade today has little to do with freedom for ordinary people. Free competition, in fact, means freedom for big corporations, usually with powerful countries like the U.S. behind them, to dominate huge swaths of the market and the labor pool in the poorer countries of Latin America.

A quick look at NAFTA shows what this means for ordinary people's lives. An estimated 766,000 jobs have been lost in the U.S. as a result of NAFTA. In addition, Global Exchange reports that "90 percent of 400 plant closings or threatened plant closings in the U.S. in a five-year period [since the passage of NAFTA] occurred illegally in the face of a union organizing drive." Lest anyone think that Mexicans are benefiting at the expense of American workers, eight million Mexicans have slipped from middle-income brackets into poverty since the implementation of NAFTA. The FTAA would expand this race to the bottom to all of Latin America, forcing Mexican workers into competition with workers in even poorer countries like Honduras.

Free trade means freedom to exploit, and the FTAA would essentially make everything in the Western Hemisphere exploitable. One provision of the proposed treaty is what the bureaucrats call "liberalizing trade in services." Read: privatization of everything: health care, education, energy, the postal service, even water. In fact, U.S.-based Bechtel Corporation tried to do just that in Bolivia in 2000--purchasing the municipal water utility in the city of Cochabamba and raising water rates between 35 and 300 percent--until a mass protest of 100,000 people occupied the municipal water treatment plant and forced the company to cancel its contract. Undeterred, Bechtel went on to win a $680 million contract last year--from the U.S. State Department, for reconstruction in Iraq.

Free trade, after all, is part of the Bush Doctrine. The National Security Strategy of the United States opens by trumpeting "a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise." The U.S. likes open doors for its corporations; if the doors are not open, then they are battered down. In case the connection between the U.S.'s wars and corporate globalization wasn't obvious enough, the Congressional bill that provided over $87 billion for the occupation of Iraq also included $8.5 million for security at the Miami FTAA meetings.

But the rulers of the U.S. currently have a problem: in the past three years, there has been a full-scale revolt against neo-liberal free-market policies in Latin America. From the rebellion that toppled three consecutive presidents in Argentina in 2001 and the mass protests that forced the resignation of the Bolivian president last month, to the breakdown of negotiations at the World Trade Organization meetings in Cancun, neo-liberalism is under serious attack. At the FTAA summit, the Bush administration will attempt to launch a counterattack. The size and effectiveness of the demonstrations in Miami and around the world will affect how much the current rulers of the world will be able to get away with. The protesters will include such diverse groups as trade unionists like the AFL-CIO, students, immigrants' rights groups, and 26 bus-loads of retirees from the Florida Alliance for Retired Americans, but they will all have a common message: our world is not for sale.