February 21, 2003	Friday	Zul Hijjah 19, 1423

SAO PAULO: US concerns with Iraq and global terrorism may be distracting its attention from securing its southern backyard, but this is the hottest topic in Brazil and the rest of Latin America.

Washington is pushing for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) that would create an open market for 800 million people from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. It is almost ten years since what Latinos call ALCA was proposed at the first regional summit in Miami, but pressure increased after the third summit of 2001 in Quebec.

FTAA/ALCA now has a headquarters in Panama City wooing 34 nations — Cuba excluded — to abolish tariffs between 2005 and 2013. Venezuela’s longstanding resistance to the timetable is one symptom of Latin American skepticism during the preliminary negotiations due to be reviewed in July.

Obviously, ALCA would extend the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) south of Mexico, but many of the 173 million Brazilians and 258 million other Latin Americans fear its potential political and military dimensions. For instance, it could eclipse the Organisation of America States (OAS), which gave the USA regional supremacy in 1948, becoming a sort of UN of the western hemisphere.

These, mostly US ambitions, date back to the Monroe Doctrine against European interference in post-colonial Latin America, which was implemented several times between 1823 and 1898 when Cuba and Puerto Rico were abandoned by Spain. Her other ex-colonies already dreamed of unification because none was as big as burgeoning Brazil, let alone America and Canada.

Following futile efforts as late as the 1960s, there emerged the Andean Pact followed by the loosely overlapping Mercosur trade organisation, which in this case is dominated by Brazil.

But both blocks are weakened by economic crises that make it easier for ALCA to woo their ten members. There was dismay on both banks of the River Plate when Sebastian Edwards, a Chilean economist from the World Bank, advised Brazil to leave Argentina to wither in Mercosur.

Both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were attacked as tools of Yankee imperialists at the third World Social Forum in January when 8,000 activists met in Brazil’s southernmost city, Porto Alegre, a bastion of the country’s Labour Party (PT). ALCA, of course, was the top target of the delegates, mainly drawn from university campuses and environmental groups.

“I studied in Atlanta, but am against globalisation,” says Maura Viegas in Belo Horizonte where she runs the Committee against ALCA for Minas Gerais state, where it convened in 1997.

Its pamphlet claims that, as Mexico lost out from NAFTA, so too will ALCA bring lower wages, more unemployment and total privatisation, bankrupting Brazil as the IMF did Argentina. Moreover, the environment would suffer if ALCA pooled Andean gas, Amazonian water and hydro-electricity from the Iguassu area for US benefit.

The US is criticised too for demanding a military base at Alcantara in north-eastern Brazil as well as others in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. It is not only the Left, encouraged by Cuban missions all over Latin America, that opposes ALCA. Catholic clergy are also preaching against it, as I heard for myself during Mass at Itamonte below the alpine refuge in Brazil’s Serra da Mantiqueira.

Hard commercial objections to ALCA are raised in a study by the industrial confederation of Sao Paulo state (FIESP) that accounts for 35 per cent of Brazil’s production. This is also one fifth of South America’s total output and greater than the domestic product of most Latin nations, including Argentina.

FIESP consulted skeptical experts like Rio-based professor of economics Luis Carlos Prado, who demands that national boundaries be retained for governmental procuring. Osvaldo Moreira Douat of the Brazilian Business Coalition (CEB) wants ALCA to negotiate bilaterally with Mercosur.

He says: “Only half of its products are to be liberated whereas foodstuffs from Central America and the Caribbean would get far easier entry into the USA. Its tariffs and quotas for Brazil’s sugar, ethanol and orange juice are already prohibitive.”

Brazil’s representative on the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin and Caribbean nations (CEPAL), Renato Baumann, warns that significant American and Canadian barriers would remain. Even worse, Washington palms off anti-dumping complaints to the WTO.—Dawn/ The Guardian News Service.