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November 07, 2005

Summit of the Americas redux

The Summit of the Americas ended without any agreement on the U.S. led Free Trade Area of the Americas. Although President Bush made another speech calling for its implementation shortly thereafter, this time in Brazil, it appears as though the measure is stalled.

The left-leaning Mexican daily La Jornada gives one of the more thorough rundowns of the final proceedings of the conference. While the majority of the conference's participants were predisposed toward excising the present language of the Area de Libre Comercio de las Américas (ALCA), a plenary session at the 11th hour was called in as Panama's support for the pact suddenly increased. Apparently, both Bush and Mexican President Vincente Fox were eager to push forward something more substantial, but whatever diplomatic moves were made were futile.

In the end, the only agreement was that of concordance on a document whose language called for the end of poverty, promotion of democracy, and higher employment. This, of course, doesn't even begin to address the main contention of Latin American countries concerning farm subsidies. Moreover, ALCA, which in many ways resembles the language in NAFTA, has not exactly lifted Mexico to the upper reaches of global wealth.

The UK's Financial Times frames the summit in even more imperturbable terms, noting that the Bush Administration's drive for a massive free trade zone in Latin America has all of the rhetoric of JFK's 1961 Alliance for Progress initiative (a domestic policy) but none of the substance that would go a long way toward ensuring the economic betterment of the region.

Focusing resources on infrastructure and social spending in Latin America might still be the most effective means of rebuilding US influence in the region, however. It would also bring a much more important economic benefit: with better infrastructure and more equal societies, Latin American markets would be more effective than they are at the moment. Hemispheric free trade would be a vastly more realistic aspiration as well.

Posted November 7, 2005 01:22 AM

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