The Summit of the Pacific Alliance: ...Return of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)?

Pacific Alliance: Return of the FTAA?

By Anubis Galardy

THE Summit of the Pacific Alliance, comprising Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Peru, which took place May 23 in Cali, Colombia, left clear its pretension to become the new economic and development organization for Latin America and the Caribbean, within a framework of the free circulation of goods, services, capital and persons among its member states.

The idea of former Peruvian President Alan García, formalized in Chile in 2012, the implementation of this new regional mechanism has generated rejection, criticism and distrust.

Argentine political analyst Atilio Borón defined it as a political-economic maneuver on the part of Washington to retrieve its lost influence in the region, after the 2005 defeat in Mar del Plata of its grand strategic project, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

In other words, the plan is to build a kind of contra-insurgency or reactionary corridor to counterbalance the radical or moderate left in the region, Borón emphasized.

Peruvian researcher Carlos Alonso agrees with this perception. For him, the Alliance is also a resurgence of the failed FTAA, this time in an undisguised neoliberal version.

The Pacific Alliance has emerged in the face of other regional integration mechanisms such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), MERCOSUR, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).with a concrete divisive and pro-Washington mission, to facilitate the United States repositioning itself with force in the region, he noted.

The Pacific Alliance divides South America into two: a part which seeks to play a role in world politics, for which it needs to act within a framework of sovereignty, and another with clear right-wing leanings, and inclined toward Washington, Alonso continues.

In summary, it is simply a merger of the Free Trade Treaties that Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile and shortly Panama and Costa Rica (currently observer countries) have with the United States, among themselves and with other countries in the region sharing a Pacific coast, Alonso concludes.

In his opinion, all of this is pointed toward a supra-free trade area with the Asian-Pacific region (Pacific Arch) which the United States is seeking to dominate.

Meanwhile, in Colombia, which assumed the rotating presidency of the Alliance at the Summit, Eduardo Sarmiento, director of the School of Engineering’s Economic Observatory, stated, "The free interchange of goods among members of this new bloc could possibly generate cheaper products, but at the cost of sacrificing employment and the country’s growth." (Orbe weekly)

June 06, 2013

 

Granma.cu

 

Bahamas Blog International 

7 Years on from the Creation of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America’s Trade Agreement for the People (ALBA-TCP)

7 Years on from the Creation of the ALBA -TCP



By Tahina Ojeda Medina - Ciudad CSS

What initially started as an alternative aimed at stopping the advance of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) has been transformed into an alliance in favour of Latin American and Caribbean integration.  I am referring to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America’s Trade Agreement for the People (ALBA-TCP).

It is important to remember the solitary beginnings of ALBA-TCP.  The main goal of the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec was to create the FTAA, and like the majority of hemispheric meetings, the decision to implement a free trade area had already been taken prior to it being “democratically approved”.

The FTAA claimed to create a structure for free trade relations within the framework of the free market, without taking into account economic asymmetries, much less social ones.  This aforementioned structure is evident in the 6th point of discussion for business and investment in the summit’s “plan of action”: countries will “ensure that the negotiations for the FTAA conclude before January 2005 at the latest, so that the agreement might be put into effect as soon as possible, no later than December 2005...”

The only vote against the plan came from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela; although the plan was published as having been approved unanimously.

Once they had analysed the kind of injustices that the application of the FTAA would bring to Latin America and the Caribbean, Cuba and Venezuela stepped forward and agreed on a plan to put the brakes on this situation.  This is where the idea of the ALBA emerged, against the 2001 FTAA, before it was formally established in 2004 in Havana, Cuba.

The next step to stop the advance of the FTAA was taken at the Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 2005.  The final declaration of this summit read “the necessary conditions to implement a balanced and equal free trade agreement still do not exist, (conditions which ensure) the effective access to markets free of subsidies and distortive business practices, which take into account the needs and sensitivities of all business partners, including in their levels of development and the size of their economies”.  This summit represented a definitive break with the FTAA.

Furthermore, Latin America and the Caribbean’s political map had changed since the FTAA was proposed.  Cuba and Venezuela were no longer alone.  From 2004, the following countries joined the ALBA: Bolivia (2006), Nicaragua (2008), Dominica (2008), Honduras (2008-2010), Ecuador (2009), St. Vincent and the Grenadine Islands (2009) and Antigua and Barbuda (2009).  The subcontinent turned to the left, and this turn was met with various destabilisation attempts.  An attempt to create war in 2008 in Bolivia, a state coup in Honduras in 2009, a failed state coup in Ecuador in 2012, amongst other international pressures toward the rest of the region.

Whilst the South was negotiating the various political difficulties arising from setting into motion the mechanisms designed to fight for the protection of the people, the “developed world” sunk into an unprecedented economic crisis created by the “invisible hand of the market”.  These events are not isolated from the political and theoretical debate on contemporary international relations.  When a project like the ALBA-TCP is analysed at an academic level, inevitable questions emerge, such as; is it a scheme aimed at integration?  Is it aiming to construct a regional politics or an intra-regional free-trade agreement?  Is the ALBA-TCP a formula to confront the negative effects of globalisation, or is it a strategy to enter into this process but from a stronger position?

All these questions have answers, which are still vague and somewhat open to debate, if we analyse the process of ALBA’s creation and consolidation from the perspective of theories on new “postliberal” regionalisms in Latin America and their relationship to globalisation.  It is evident that ALBA-TCP was not conceived of as a scheme for regional integration, but rather as a political alliance to put a stop to FTAA which was progressively transformed into a collaborative mechanism which helped to strengthen real cooperation between countries in the regional South.

It is too soon to predict what a final regional integration project in South America would look like, but what we can confirm is that the ALBA has allowed for the creation of new forms of exchange and communication between countries that were once isolated; a first step in exploring a political agenda for integration.  In this sense, ALBA-TCP is a formula for resistance to the project of globalisation.  It is impossible to deny that globalisation is a concrete reality, but it doesn’t mean that countries have to throw themselves into its choppy seas without a lifejacket; the consolidation of strong regions is needed in order to confront the contradictions of the world system in which we live.

The ALBA-TCP, as Maria del Carmen Almendras Camargo defined it in the celebrations for the alliance’s 7th anniversary in Madrid, February 2012, is a “regional integration bloc made up of 8 countries with a population of 71 million inhabitants and a GDP of 498 billion dollars.  It is the second largest trading bloc in the Latin American and Caribbean region after Mercosur, which has enormous human and natural resource potential.”

As ALBA begins to consolidate independently as a definite regional integration scheme, it is mutating and fusing with other integration strategies such as UNASUR and CELAC.  On its 7th anniversary there are a whole host of reasons to celebrate; it has demonstrated that it is possible to say NO to the great global powers and design an independent and sovereign politics which can pave the way to a multi-polar world.  Like the maestro Simón Rodriguez even said himself, we invent or we err.

Tahina Ojeda Medina is a researcher at the Development and Cooperation Institute at the Complutense University in Madrid ((IUDC-UCM), graduate in International Relations and a lawyer from the Central University of Venezuela, M.S in International Cooperation, Masters in Contemporary Latin American Studies and Doctorate in Political Science at the Complutense University in Madrid.

Translated by Rachael Boothroyd for Venezuelanalysis.com

Source: Ciudad CCS

May 7th 2012

The free trade what???

By David Roberts:

So what is the Barack Obama administration's strategic plan with respect to Latin America?  It's tempting to conclude it simply doesn't have one, at least at the moment.  From a political perspective, the man who should be behind policy towards the region, Arturo Valenzuela, hasn't even taken up his post yet, nine months into the administration, as his nomination as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs has been blocked by Republican senators led by Jim DeMint in protest of Obama's stance on the Honduran coup.  The irony is, of course, that Obama doesn't really have a policy on Honduras either, being mildly critical of both elected President Manuel Zelaya and interim leader Roberto Micheletti, but clearly preferring not to get too involved.

And apart from a lot of pleasantries about there being no senior or junior partners in Washington's relationship with Latin America, so far Obama himself has shown scant interest in his southern neighbors.  He's only set foot in Latin America once since taking office - a very brief visit to Mexico in April while on his way to the fifth Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain - and has generally adopted a "let's be nice to everyone and sit on the fence" approach, even with regards to Hugo Chávez & Co.

But rather than ask what the strategic plan on Latin America is, maybe first we should ask whether the Obama government needs a plan at all?  If his policy is going to be what we've seen so far, perhaps not, but with respect to trade at least, he should have one, as the region needs it.  Yet, here again there's not much cooking.  While visiting Chile last week, Obama's commerce secretary Gary Locke made it pretty clear that we shouldn't expect much in the way of more free trade agreements with Latin American countries, let alone deals on a more regional basis.  Asked about the prospects for ratifying the FTA reached under George W Bush with Colombia, Locke declined to give any indication of whether or when it would get the nod from Capitol Hill, saying the priorities for the Obama administration in terms of passing legislation are healthcare and energy.

That's perhaps not surprising, considering the strong opposition to free trade in the US congress, mainly among Democrats like Obama (many of whom prefer protectionism), the lack of the fast track authority for ratifying deals and the current economic climate.  But what was perhaps surprising was that Locke, when asked about the topic by a reporter, obviously was not even aware of past attempts - led by US governments - to create the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which was supposed to be the free trade bloc par excellence, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego (conveniently excluding Cuba) and be in place first by 2000 (according to George Bush Sr) and then by 2005.

Indeed, the Summits of the Americas were in a sense born out of attempts to maintain the moribund process of FTAA and continental integration alive, a process that fell apart amid unseemly squabbling between free traders and Chávez's Alba bloc of nations over everything from intellectual property to US farm subsidies, with Bolivia's Evo Morales calling the FTAA "an agreement to legalize the colonization of the Americas."

October 18, 2009

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