November 23, 2004

The protests in the streets of Santiago, Chile, against President Bush should have come as no surprise.

Many Latin Americans are angry at Washington for imposing free-market policies that have created social and economic hardships for a majority of the population in Latin America.

What's more, they are angry over the attempted coup in Venezuela and the successful coup in Haiti, both taking place with the Bush administration's apparent blessing.

And many are well aware of U.S. involvement in the coup that ousted popular Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973, a history that Bush has done nothing to acknowledge, let alone atone for.

The administration has also tried strong-arming Latin American governments into signing on to its war in Iraq.

But most of the current displeasure with Washington is trade-related.

Negotiations between the United States and Latin America on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) have stalled. High-level negotiators haven't met since the February summit in Miami. There the interim agreement -- dubbed "FTAA Lite" -- did not specify what issues would be on the bargaining table or which procedures would be used to finalize an accord.

One major problem of the failed U.S.-Latin America trade talks is that the White House seems not to recognize that you have to give to get. A FTAA deal on Washington's terms will not be good for Chileans or for the rest of Latin America.

The FTAA, which has been called "NAFTA on steroids," threatens to erase small farmers from the rural landscape -- both in the United States and abroad. It favors multinational corporations at the expense of workers and small farmers. These large U.S. agribusinesses, with generous government subsidies that put them at a colossal advantage, would be able to dump cheap produce into new markets in Latin America. Too much supply causes a significant drop in farm prices -- to the dismay of family farmers here and throughout the Americas.

While Washington continues to press the line that free trade is beneficial to everyone, Latin Americans are no longer buying the hype, and they are starting to elect politicians who say they don't believe it either.

The governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Venezuela are publicly critical of FTAA clauses that undermine national sovereignty by prohibiting local environmental and labor rights legislation. Such national legislation is deemed anti-competitive and anti-trade by the FTAA because it stands in the way of profit maximization.

Instead of rolling over, Latin America is insisting that U.S., European and Japanese farm subsidies be removed so that Latin American products will have a chance of competing with otherwise subsidized northern crops.

Before Bush travels to Latin America again, he might want to change his policies.

Ana Perez is director of the Cuba Program at Global Exchange, a human-rights group based in San Francisco (www.globalexchange.org). She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.